Journey To The Soul

A Season of Wintering: How Slowing Down Transformed My Life

• Jacenda Villa

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Have you ever felt the world spinning just a bit too fast, leaving you struggling to keep up? Join me, as we explore the life-changing realization that slowing down can lead to profound self-discovery. In our latest episode of Journey to the Soul, I share my personal experience with "wintering," a period where life’s challenges forced me to retreat and find stillness. This time of introspection allowed me to rediscover my true values, find peace, and embrace a sense of purpose that I had almost lost in the hustle. Together, let's challenge the societal norm of constant busyness and appreciate the transformative power of rest and reflection.

Discover the joy of living intentionally and relishing each moment as it comes. I invite you to reflect on your own relationship with speed and motion in your life. By resisting the urge to be perpetually active, we open up a space to connect with our inner selves and savor the small joys that often go unnoticed. This episode encourages you to appreciate life's fleeting moments and explore how slowing down can enhance your overall experience. Share your stories with me on Instagram, and let's continue this journey of embracing slowness together. Remember to subscribe and spread the message with those who might need a gentle reminder to pause and breathe.

Instagram: @jacendamarie


Speaker 1:

Hi, loves, welcome to the Journey to the Soul podcast. I am your host, jacinda Villa, a spiritual life coach and holistic health coach. Every week, we will be diving deep into all things purpose, wellness, spirituality and creating the life that you dream of. This space is meant to be safe and transformative for you to dive into the deepest parts of yourself. I will share what I have learned from my journey along this path years of research and mentors along the way. Having spent many years living life out of alignment and afraid to go after my dreams, I know firsthand what it means to take the first step down, living a life authentic to you. We are on this road of self-discovery together. It is time for you to live the life you imagined. Hello, my loves, welcome to this week's episode.

Speaker 1:

I hope you are tuning into this, maybe with a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, as we go into this week's episode together. I am sorry if you hear a little noise in the background. They are actually doing construction across the street and I did check the audio as well before I recorded this, but I'm hoping that it sounds okay. So if you do hear something, that's probably what it is. But I hope you are all enjoying your first weeks of January since we last talked. As I'm recording this, it's the third week of January and I think we're all finally dipping our toes into the year slowly. And if you listened to my last episode, we were talking about slow intentions and how you can take a more grounded approach to setting goals, resolutions, intentions, whatever you like to call it for the new year. So if you didn't listen to that, I would highly suggest that you listen to that and on this episode today.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to just expand on something that I touched on in that episode, which was how I embraced a slower pace of life last year and how that really allowed me to align more fully with my values, with what's important to me in life, so that I could live a life that is more intentional and worthwhile for myself. So I want to talk about that and how that came to be, because it didn't just happen. It was something that happened when I just allowed myself to be last year, and that's really what we're going to talk about today is my personal story on how I came to embrace a slow life and how, by slowing down, I was able to overcome probably one of the hardest seasons of my life so far. It really helped me tune in and rediscover my joy, my intention for life and my path to healing. So that is what we're going to talk about today.

Speaker 1:

I really want to share about finding peace and purpose in life through slowing down, because we live in a culture where we are constantly going and going and going, where we constantly feel the need to perform, and that is great and dandy, but that's not something that is self-sustaining for many of us, and there are moments in our life where we are forced to slow down, where something in life has us take a step back, and I call this wintering and this is there's a book written on it too but it's a state. It's a season of your life where we go through very transformative periods, and what we tend to do during those seasons of our life is we take a step back from our life and we do that as a form of self-preservation, because it can be such an intense moment in life where what we really need to do is focus on ourselves. So it's a time for us to regroup, to reflect and to really transform, and it can be hard for us to accept these seasons when they show up because our culture does not embrace or value slowing down, especially a slowing down that is necessary in a season of life like wintering. This is a deep slowing down. It's where we really step away from everything in our life. But, just like summer and how things grow and blossom and come into fruition, there needs to be time for wintering and it's that time for us to step back and be more than do and to reflect more than anything. And we need to embrace this season of life just as much as a season of doing. And we need to acknowledge as well that one cannot exist without the other. You know, winter comes before spring. Summer and fall, they all coincide and there is a reason for that all coincide and there is a reason for that.

Speaker 1:

Last year, like I mentioned, was a very transformative time in my life. It was definitely a wintering. I could still say, maybe, that I am still going through that wintering a bit, coming out of it now, but still a bit. I'm slowly going into spring and it was not easy. It was a very hard year for so many different reasons. But in these moments of our life is really where we can alchemize darkness into light, our deep and personal challenges that we constantly go through is a catalyst for change and growth and I feel like that is one of the biggest things that I think is what I love about a season like this is that it is a catalyst for us to evolve as humans. It is a catalyst for us to heal, for us to become something better than we were. We are always evolving, we are always growing and if you've listened to other podcast episodes of mine, I feel like that is one of the greatest gifts is that we can start again and we can be better than we were yesterday, that we can learn from everything that life is bringing into our attention right now and grow from that and, you know, continue to get stronger.

Speaker 1:

I didn't embrace that initially when I went through my deep wintering last year, but I was essentially and it was my body forcing me to slow down after years of not honoring it and its needs. I know I've talked about different things that I've overcome with my health and my eating disorder and things like that in other episodes and this was kind of just an accumulation of all of that and I had tried taking a step back and slowing down and all of those things, but it was really not as much as I needed to. I didn't really want to slow down. I didn't really want to stop and truly listen. I did it just enough to continue to get by. But when 2024 came around, my body truly forced me to slow down and I couldn't fight that. I did fight it for a couple of months, though. I just continued to try to push through it. Every day I would try to continue to carry on with my life as I had up until that time and to try to test my limits of what I could and couldn't do, and every day I was more and more disappointed to realize where I was. It was the first time in my life that this was happening in this way, and for months I truly just fought it. I did not want to accept what was in front of me. I really had to honor that. My body was speaking to me and I truly needed to listen to it. I needed to not just listen enough to get by, but actually stop and truly listen to what it had to say. There came a moment in this time where, after resisting where I was and trying to fight it and wanting it to be something different than it was, I had to acknowledge that I needed to rest and nourish myself and take care of my body. It took me a while to get there, but I finally acknowledged that and accepted that.

Speaker 1:

And for someone who has always thrived and prided herself in being in motion and constantly going, this was a very difficult thing for me. I was ingrained with the incessant go go go of hustle culture at a very young age and this is the only way that I really moved through life. I didn't think that slowing down had really any place in life, unless it was once I had a certain amount of success, a certain amount of money. I was at a certain age where I could just relax. But because of those deep roots in hustle culture that I've had for most of my life, slowing down was one of the most difficult things for me to do.

Speaker 1:

In my mind and with the best intentions, I had tried slowing down in smaller ways up until this point, thinking that it would be enough for my body and for it to heal, because I have been on a physical, mental, emotional healing journey for the last couple of years and I thought that what I was doing was enough. But it clearly wasn't and I decided to just embrace the slowness. I decided to embrace where I was. I decided to just allow myself to be in that state of not fighting, of letting the quiet be there and hearing everything that my body, my soul, wanted to tell me. And at first, when I started playing with this, my day-to-day life, it felt so indulgent.

Speaker 1:

I had really bad associations with slowing down. You know personal lies that I kept telling myself and I know this is more generational trauma that I've carried into this lifetime and it's that if I slow down, then I'm lazy, then I won't amount to anything, then I will basically not achieve anything in this life. I will fall to the wayside. I never really thought that there was a way for me to continue working towards my goals in a way that was also supportive of rest. Right, rest is integral to our being. But that has always been something that I've believed is that if I stop, I'm lazy, if I stop, I'm not working towards what I really want to achieve in this life. And I have always been so ambitious and so driven, and it's been sometimes to my detriment because it has gotten me to these positions. But these are all learning experiences, right, and this is still something that I struggle with is that belief that I can slow down and that the world isn't going to fall apart because of it, and it's a very hard thing to shift. I know that I'm not the only one that struggles with something like that.

Speaker 1:

In a culture where we are constantly told that we need to perform and reach and achieve, and how it looks from the outside in it's tiring, it's not sustainable. So I just allowed myself to enjoy being here now. It was honestly the first time in my life that I ever slowed down in this way. Looking back, I know that this was so necessary because I had never allowed myself to slow down. I have been going since I was 14 years old. I have been in a state of survival most of my life, but I have been going and working and hustling since I was 14 years old, filling my time with work, working countless of hours, driving myself to the floor, you know, slowly deteriorating myself. So from that perspective, I'm like deteriorating myself. So from that perspective, I'm like I've never done this. And it's true, I probably do need it.

Speaker 1:

But that didn't make it any easier to accept, and this space, this quiet, really allowed so much to come up. Like I mentioned, those whispers that my body, that my soul, had been giving me for years, that I didn't want to listen to, that I constantly ignored. Those are the parts of myself that I really had to confront, because it quieted the relentless noise and I leaned into the discomfort of everything, truly listening to these uncomfortable and vulnerable parts of myself. Because you need to acknowledge all of it, you need to honor all of it. You can't move to the next thing without facing what is in front of you.

Speaker 1:

It was very uncomfortable to sit in my feelings and my emotions of everything that this brought up at first and feeling my physical limitations every single day, every day I was plagued with anxiety. Every day I was plagued with anxiety. I woke up immediately, anxious, and I would feel the immediate discomfort in my body and all my mind could hold on to, initially, from the moment that I woke up, was the discomfort in my body. And if I had some kind of discomfort, then it would be a quote bad day. And if it was a bad day, I was writing the whole day off as rubbish. Basically, and most days were bad days because most days I had some kind of discomfort in my body.

Speaker 1:

And the way that I started moving through this is I woke up every single day and when I felt that anxiety come in, I decided to just sit with it and focus on the small things that brought me comfort. I would wake up, breathe, feel the breath coming in and out of my nose with the promise of a new day. I could hear the birds singing in the background. I could see the light coming in from the window, the beautiful morning light. I would feel my partner next to me reveling in the relationship that we have, the love that we share. I would think about all the things that I would get to do that day that would bring me joy reading a book, cozying up with a book, cooking a meal that nourishes my body and this was what started to shift my perspective.

Speaker 1:

Gradually, it helped bring more peace into my life by doing this every day, and it took time for me to not let the anxiety or the fear take over me and allow it to determine what kind of day I was going to have, based off of how my body was that day. But it was a constant devotion to myself To focus on the good, to focus on all the wonderful things that I still was going to experience, because wherever there is discomfort, there is comfort to be found. Wherever there is darkness, there is lightness to be found. And as I continued to slow down more and more and finally, and hear to all these whispers that my body and my soul had been sending to me, it really allowed me to free myself from old habits, thoughts and ways of being that no longer served me and ways of being that no longer served me. A lot of these things that I let go of mentally and emotionally, were things that were of my life and just made my path on this earth that much heavier. It was a wonderful opportunity to really refocus my heart on what truly matters. That is the most incredible gift that this past year gave me.

Speaker 1:

As much as I fought, as much as I resisted, it was something that was so necessary in my life, and that's how some of the hardest lessons are learned, right Is? We fight so hard for it to be something that it is. But what happens if we learn to just be where we are, to just embrace this chapter of life? Because in every chapter of life there is something that we can learn and take away and experience. You are never going to be in this place again. Wherever you are in your life. You are never going to be in this exact place again, having these experiences, the version of you that is there and that makes it that much more richer, because this moment is not ever going to replicate itself. In one year it will be something totally different, and one of the biggest lessons that I learned was that simply being was enough. And every day there was a war going in with myself, between the part of me that wanted to be in action and the part of me that was learning to be, and I constantly felt like I wasn't doing enough, like this wasn't right. But simply being is enough you being where you are, wherever you are on your journey in life, even if you are not where you want to be or you feel like you are far away from the life that you want. Right now, in the life that you are living, you are exactly where you are meant to be, and it is all divinely timed. There is so much goodness that only this season of life could bring you, because it will never come again. Why not just let yourself enjoy it?

Speaker 1:

I was really able to connect to my inner compass again, and because I had the gift of time time, since my body would only allow me to do so much in a day I was able to reconnect to activities that I had loved to do but had not made a priority to do. But these are things that I found joy in doing, and it was reading, just to read. You know reading to get lost in books, like I used to when I was younger, slowing down my senses and tuning into everything by baking something, connecting with my partner more deeply. It was really a moment for major realignment and it allowed me to reconnect to my body, which I had been so disconnected from for so long. And now I know exactly what it means, what it sounds like. It allowed me to reconnect with journey and I continue to learn, and every day, to live more with intention and to soften to my life even more, and it's a constant practice.

Speaker 1:

And it's a constant practice because our life today is not conducive to living in this way. It's not something that is valued. So it can be hard to want to live life more in this way, but living in our modern day and age, so we can teeter-totter between living with intention and coming back to the hustle and bustle of life. It's not a linear path, and there are still days when I fight against it. Honestly, most days, I still fight against it to some degree, and that's why I am so dedicated to it for myself, because I know what it has brought into my life and I know that, because I still resist it, it is something that is so necessary for me.

Speaker 1:

I would love you to think about what your relationship with slowness is. When you think about that word, what comes to mind? Is it a positive feeling or is it a negative feeling? What would happen if you allowed yourself to slow down and to embrace the present moment more fully? I think life would get more and more richer, because all of those moments make up our life, our big, whole life that we get to live every single day, every single day. I would love if you reflect on the small things that bring you joy in your everyday life, because those are the things that are going to your experience. They are just as important as everything else. I am excited to discuss this topic more with you as the year goes on, as I continue to go on my adventure with it. I know that there are many other things that I want to share with you about how to put this into practice more into your life, and why it's so necessary now more than ever.

Speaker 1:

I would love to hear your thoughts on embracing the present moment more and what your relationship with slowing down is, because I feel like a lot of us do struggle with that aspect of life is just accepting that there are seasons where we're not meant to be going all the time. So please share with me your stories of slowing down and living with intention. You could send me a message on Instagram. I would love to read it and I will talk to you all in my next episode. Until then, stay warm wherever you are in the world. I am sending you so much love and so much light. Until then. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this message with any friends and family. So you never miss an episode, and share this message with any friends and family. I'd love to hear your takeaways, so share them with me by leaving a comment below or heading over to my Instagram at jacendamarie. I am sending you all so much love.