12/19/2025
Winter invites a different kind of listening as we approach the new year. When we slow down, we’re better able to discover — not force — what wants to emerge.
Last year, on December 20, we moved into our new cozy (small) home with two cats, two dogs, and two home offices. I believe my intention then was to do less and experience more. Ha! What followed in 2025, however, was an all-action year.
So as winter settles in again, I feel a familiar longing to slow down — to listen more closely rather than rush toward answers. I’m eager to disappear into my winter garment of snow (weather gods permitting), with holiday festivities, quiet woods walks, rest, and reflection.
It’s been quite a challenging year for many of us. This darker, quieter season offers a different rhythm — one where attention matters more than action.
Winter can be a season of composting — the quiet, unseen work that happens before new life emerges. A time to turn down the volume on our rational minds and let them rest alongside journals, a roaring fire, loving conversations with family and friends, walks in nature, or sunrise with coffee — all in service of attuning more carefully to the body and our intuition.
Because while the mind is a powerful tool, it’s not meant to lead the pack.
In coaching, we call this somatic wisdom — the body’s inherent intelligence and capacity for guidance and resilience. It shows up as a felt sense: a tightening, an ease, a pull, a knowing — information that often arrives before the mind explains.
When we stay with this process, it’s remarkable how much wisdom we already hold about our next steps and path forward.
This is how I now approach my New Year intentions.
Intentions aren’t about making wishes or setting targets to hit. I don’t experience them as guarantees or formulas for outcomes. Instead, intentions help me notice the themes and patterns I want to live into — a way of aligning my behavior, step by step, with my values and what truly matters.
Winter also reminds me that this kind of clarity often doesn’t come from knowing what’s next, but from being willing to remain unclear — staying with the mystery long enough to listen for what’s emerging.
Here, the body becomes a guide.
Not by giving us answers, but by offering signals — subtle cues of ease, tension, expansion, or contraction. These sensations aren’t instructions to act, but information to notice. When we slow down enough to listen, the body often knows what the mind is still trying to figure out.
When we pay attention in this way, simple questions begin to surface.
What feels right?
What feels heavy or constricted?
What brings a sense of ease or vitality?
Again, you don’t need to have answers — simply noticing is enough (and it can take some courage, too!).
Here’s a quiet pause you might try:
Place a hand on your chest or belly.
Take one slow breath.
Ask gently: What’s asking for my attention right now?
Notice sensations — not answers.
Then go on with your day.
No urgency.
No forcing.
Listening — asking first, acting later — becomes a gentle way into greater alignment.
If some surprising no’s emerge along the way, hold them lightly. Stay curious about what they’re telling you. When I journal, I encourage myself to write as if I were incapable of telling a lie—no whitewashing.
Attention before action.
Intention before goals.
Trusting that clarity will arrive in its own time.
My wish for you this holiday and January season:
the space to slow down,
to notice what’s alive in you right now,
and to listen for what’s waiting to emerge.
Because this is how what matters is given the time and space to grow. ❄️
