How to Beat the Midwinter Blues

Six signposts to being in sync with the energy of the season

It’s 5.25 p.m. on the first Saturday afternoon in December and it’s raining.  ‘Here’s to you, Merry Christmas’ is blaring out of every loud speaker system in every shop in the entire street.  Three heavily laden shopping bags make your right hand feel as if it’s about to drop off while, with your left, you endeavour to perform the conjuring trick of extracting your debit card from your wallet without dropping the whole lot on the floor.

You’ve done it again.

Every year you swear you won’t even think about Christmas until say, two weeks before, yet every year you get hooked into the Christmas hype.  These days Christmas is synonymous with excess. It’s the time of year when we overstuff everything, from the turkey and the stockings to ourselves; when everything is bigger or better or brasher than the year before and the only thing that is white is the colour of our faces when we open our credit card bills in January.

1. Remember what really makes us happy

In our rush to make sure we are happy over this time we seem to have forgotten what actually makes us happy.  Maybe we have forgotten – or perhaps we never knew – that beneath all this frivolity, beneath even the Christian festival itself, is a much deeper tradition: a tradition which is much more fundamental, not just to our happiness, but to our survival – a celebration to ensure the return of the sun at the winter solstice.

These celebrations, so important to our ancient forbears, were overlaid by the Christian Church’s ‘Christ’s mass’.  And at the heart of both traditions there is an important belief – that a son/sun would be born and would restore them to the Light. Both traditions emphasis the stillness and simplicity which surround the birth and both traditions celebrate the renewal of hope and life which follows.

2. Savour the stillness

In the midst of all this festive cheer it is sometimes difficult to appreciate this moment of stillness which occurs every year around the solstice: that time between the 21^st and 24^th of December when the sun appears to stand still (sol steit – sun stands still from the Latin).  But it is a moment which we have all experienced at least once in our lifetimes.  It is a moment of silence, of peace, of reflection and of hope.  It promises a wiping clean of the past and offers a new blank surface.  This stillness can hush crowds and silence great cities.  It lends a breathless expectancy to Christmas Eve night and breathes magic and mystery into our lives.

As Max Ehrmann in his poem Desiderata advises us,

‘Go placidly amongst the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence.’

3. Listen to your energy and be brave enough to go underground

Some of us are happy to party our way through Christmas but if we are feeling a sense of alienation, of fatigue, despondency, or emotional exhaustion it may well be that the high energy that Christmas demands of us is at odds with the energy of the midwinter season.

Midwinter is the time for us, like nature, to withdraw, to go underground, to dig down into our roots and build a stable base from which, in the spring, we can grow tall and strong.

So, if we listen to our energy and the stillness around us, we can be brave enough to dig down deep to discover where we came from and who we are as well as what we might become.

4. Use the time to write

One way to do this is to use a form of free, intuitive writing: that is writing without thinking too much about it. In this way we can access the subconscious mind rather than the conscious mind which can filter out our true feelings.  Nalita Devi in her Brainz article Mind over Matter tells us that … ’the subconscious mind is also where our deep-seated beliefs and fears reside, often dictating our automatic responses and reflexes to situations. It’s a reservoir of emotions and feelings that have been built over a lifetime.’

Writing, especially when linking events and feelings promotes a congruency between left and right brain activity because it integrates language and emotion. It also helps us to give expression through thinking and feeling, to begin to look at life as coherent rather than chaotic and to organise our thoughts so that we can formulate positive plans for the future.

The eminent psychologist James Pennebaker, whose carefully controlled clinical research showed how writing about your problems can improve your health, says that, ‘The degree to which writing or talking about basic thoughts and feelings can produce such profound physical and psychological changes is nothing short of amazing’. (Pennebaker 1990, p. 89).

5. Find out who you are not

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) the season of winter is associated with the element of water and the emotion of fear. Learn more about this, and the process of free intuitive writing in my book Writing in Rhythm, available on my website. www.pennyannmcfarlane.com

It takes courage to venture out into the cold as it does to dig down deep inside ourselves to find out what makes us tick.  A good place to start is to discover who we are not.

Fear can make us behave in a way that is really not us.

When threatened in some way we are inclined to adopt one of the following defensive modes of behaviour. We may

• become abusive, belligerent or intimidating
• act the victim
• simply absent ourselves from a situation.

Our pattern of reaction will normally be the same in similar situations and may involve more than one of the above behaviour strategies: for example, beginning with the victim, and, if this does not work, becoming the intimidator. All of the reactions are instigated by fear: fear for our own survival; not for our physical survival, but for that of the ego.

Use your free intuitive writing to…

• Think of a situation in which you felt threatened and to which you feel you reacted excessively.
• Describe the situation giving as many details as possible. Write about how you felt at the time and how you reacted to this.
• Now do the same with another two situations and note whether the feelings and reactions followed one of the patterns above.
• Finish by writing about how you would have liked to react.

6. Find out where you come from

This article focuses on the positive elements within our relationship with our parents or primary care givers; for example, what each had to offer us and how we could develop and continue these qualities in ourselves.

• Write a short description of each of your parents in terms of their positive qualities. If this is hard think about what positive trait was nurtured in you because of how they were. For example, if your parents were critical, could this have given you the opportunity to become more self-valuing?
• If your parents had a positive message for you about what they had learnt from life, what would it be?

Congratulations!

You’ve made an important first step in building your stable base.  My next article at Imbolc (beginning February) is when we start visioning the future we wish for.

References

Devi, N. (2023) Mind over Matter, Achieving Health and Harmony through NPL, CBT and Self Hypnosis. BRAINZ magazine, November 26^th.

Ehrmann, M. (1933) Desiderata. Michigan Tradesman magazine.

Pennebaker,J. (1990) Opening up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. The Guildford Press: New York.

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