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Winter might be the hardest season for people to understand and align with. For Winter is dark, yet the light is growing. Winter is restful, yet there’s a deeply creative process happening inside. There’s an inner alignment with our dreams and intentions for the year to come. As the light grows, we get to fortify ourselves and become the containers for these seeds to express come Spring.

Welcome to the land of the New Year. While this terrain may seem familiar, be it known that it is wildly different. Because you are different. Because something was laid to rest during the Autumn season, and a new seed of life was reborn at Winter Solstice. Because you learned and grew and shapeshifted this past year. Even if it doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes the most subtle shifts are the most impactful and long-lasting.

True magic is recognizing and partnering with the consciousness of life, the unseen realms, and working with that consciousness to impact change in the physical reality. This is called many things in many traditions. But it’s not something extra-terrestrial. It’s our quantum nature. It’s energy alchemy. It’s honing the power of the mind. It’s recognizing and working with energy patterning. It’s acknowledging the inherent wisdom and power of the body.

You see, the sacred cauldron of possibility is here. The expansive potentiality of the darkness, with undetermined timelines swirling, the dreamscape weaving itself into a shapes yet unknown. This is the time between death and birth. A sometimes uncomfortable time, when the old has died and the new is yet to be born, we get the privilege of sitting with the unknown. Feeling. Sensing. Listening. Opening to what might be, but not grasping or knowing the next action quite yet.

Are you taking time to tune into yourself during these dark and tender weeks? How about we take a pause together right now?

The darkness is here. Samhain has officially opened, and we have been claimed. Claimed by the dark mother who wraps us in her cloak of love, inviting us to rest. Inviting us to dream. Inviting us to take refuge from the blaring light of striving, and rest in the descent. Surrender into the unraveling. Surrender into the death of the year.

Although Samhain officially lands on November 6th this year, marking the official halfway point between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Samhain is not just a day but a season of time that opens us up to the thinning of veils between physical and energetic, the material and spiritual. Can you feel it upon us already?

Back in 2009, when I first moved to Portland and first began to put myself out there as a fledgling massage therapist, I started to develop some right upper leg and hip pain. I didn’t think a lot of it, and it would come and go over the years, sometimes screaming at me loudly and other times quiet and in the background. It was pretty silent for a few years and then started up again maybe 8 years ago, so loudly that I was concerned.

Right now, so many folks are feeling that calling from within to meet this moment, but aren’t sure how to live it in the world. So many of you feel that spell dissolving, but it’s being met with lifetimes of protective mechanisms stored in your body, built to keep you safe. And keep you small. This is the Witch Wound.

Regardless of how something is broken, forgotten, or separated, the process of healing is almost always a slow and intentional one. Stitch by stitch, we mend something back together. Breath by breath, we remember to come back into relationship with a part of us we’ve discarded. And through this process of repair, what has been broken or separated weaves itself back to wholeness again. Remembers its true form.