Learn how to weather difficult times in your life.
When Katherine May published her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times in 2020, the timing felt prescient — eerie even. There the world was, collectively isolated, in an unprecedented era of pandemic quarantine. Unsurprisingly, May’s book became an immediate New York Times bestseller.
Times have changed since 2020, but May’s notion of winter — and weathering it — remains as powerful as ever.
May sees winter as a dark period but also an opportunity to discover profound parts of yourself as you face adversity. A personal winter is typically marked by loss — the loss of a loved one, a divorce, or even the loss of a job. (It’s telling that people often refer to these periods as “dark times” in their lives, not unlike the dark days of winter.) It can feel tempting to push through these winters at breakneck speed, ideally with eyes closed. However, May argues for doing the exact opposite.
“[Since childhood] we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there,” she writes. “As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”
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Wintering is an invitation to turn inward and to slow down enough to process your life’s difficult seasons, no matter how large or small, so that you don’t wake up one day and find that dwelling in your sadness has prevented you from living.
“When you start tuning in to winter, you realize that we live through a thousand winters in our lives — some big, some small,” writes May. “Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.”
Like most essential skills, wintering is a simple concept but not easy. How do you face difficult, painful times without losing yourself in them?
EQX+ spoke with Michael Gervais, Head of Yoga, Meditation, and Talent at Equinox, about how to use mindfulness practices to connect more deeply with yourself, regardless of whether you’re currently in a period of loss or grief or you’d like to improve how you’ll face a winter in the future.
The Seasonal Pendulum
For Gervais (and May), wintering well calls for a regular meditation practice that will support you through whatever life throws your way — bad, good, and everything else. And, he says, the more you meditate when it feels like life is going well, the more you build resilience for when it feels like it's not.
“So much of meditation is about getting comfortable with the particular is-ness of whatever is happening right now,” Gervais says. “But what is is also constantly in flux. Life goes as planned, life doesn’t go as planned, and so forth. There are the summers on one side — happiness, success, love — and winters on the other — things not working the way they were ‘supposed’ to, loss, grief — and the seasons are constantly changing. Meditation is a radical acceptance of that.”
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Gervais often likes to use the visual of a pendulum swinging to help new practitioners grasp how meditation can help improve our well-being over time.
“When we think about this pendulum, many people find themselves at the very bottom where the swing between seasons is biggest. That might feel great during the ‘good’ periods — the summers, if you will. But what we often forget is that also means you’re swinging into the darkest points of winter,” he says.
Essentially, you’re hitting the highest highs but also the lowest lows over and over again rather than accepting the inevitable seasonality of life — and the effect is painful, to say the least. “To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time,” writes May. “We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.”
Or, as Gervais puts it, “The pendulum always swings back.”
This is where mindfulness comes in. Meditation helps you move toward the fulcrum point, a technical term for the pendulum’s anchor or center.
“If you can stay centered and practice centering, which is the act of meditation, you’ll feel less of the extremes,” Gervais says. “You’ll find you have a sense of balance, even when the is-ness of your situation becomes difficult.”
The closer you are to center, the less jarring the winters of your life will feel.
Weathering Through Gentleness
Throughout Wintering, May makes the distinction between hibernating and dying off. While we often describe things as “dead” in the winter, in reality, most are passing the season by hibernating in some form.
Consider May’s example of a tree. A tree may lose its leaves come winter, but there’s much more happening than meets the eye.
“The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms…It is far from dead. It is, in fact, the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly,” she writes.
You can apply this notion of hibernation to processing your own winters. The more you can support and nourish yourself through these difficult moments, the more you can get out of them.
There are the summers on one side — happiness, success, love — and winters on the other — things not working the way they were ‘supposed’ to, loss, grief — and the seasons are constantly changing. Meditation is a radical acceptance of that.
“If we want to take the metaphor a little further, we can think of two ways of facing winter,” Gervais says. “Getting into winter does not have to mean taking off your clothes, sitting in the cold, and getting hypothermia. It could, certainly, if we’re determined to choose the most painful approach. But if you’re someone who instead wants to get into winter in a more balanced way, you prepare yourself. You put on a cozy jacket, sit near a fireplace, drink warm drinks. You support yourself in the ways you can, so you can move through winter without losing yourself to it.”
For wintering through loss, grief, and pain, that means creating a toolkit that you can access when you need it most. Your toolkit might include meditation, friendships that buoy you, therapy, regular exercise, and time in nature (yes, even when it’s cold outside). It also includes giving yourself permission to hibernate and heal.
If you’re unclear about what your toolkit contains, a simple approach is to write down three to five things you do when you need to recharge emotionally — then refer back to this list whenever complicated feelings arise.
Breathe Your Way Through
Every season will feel different — every winter will feel different, in fact — so wintering calls for getting familiar with the feelings in your body at any given time.
“Anytime that you're dealing with difficult emotions, whether it's loss, anger, frustration, grief, or sadness, the more that you can sense those feelings in your body — not just as an emotion, but as a physical sensation in your body — the better you will process them,” says Gervais. “We do this a lot in Headstrong meditations. The idea is that you try to detach from the label of what the emotion is, let’s say loneliness, and you just feel it physically. Ask yourself, ‘Where is this in my body? Where am I feeling it?’ Maybe it’s in the chest, the throat, the stomach, wherever. Once you start to feel it, this concentration of energy, you can begin to breathe into it.”
Gervais says that you can tie this process into a particular breathing exercise (there are many available through the EQX+ app), but it can also be as simple as deep breaths with your eyes closed. “Visualize yourself moving that concentration of energy through the body, breaking it up with each breath,” he says. You can’t move past unreleased feelings — when it comes to wintering, the only way out is through. And it all starts with the breath.
With time, you can emerge from even the darkest periods of your life. Wintering allows you an opportunity to find new wisdom and perspective — tools that will help you better weather the unexpected in the future.
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones,” May writes. “Given time, they grow again.”