Dropping Your Leaves: Finding Grace in Life’s Downshifts

Have you ever noticed how we admire trees for shedding their leaves each autumn, yet criticize ourselves when we need to slow down? This thought-provoking mini-episode explores the parallel between nature's cycles and our own rhythms of energy and rest.

Starting with a simple self-reflection on how you're feeling right now, we journey through the various cycles that govern our lives—daily energy fluctuations, weekly patterns, monthly rhythms (especially for women), and the larger seasonal shifts that affect our mood and productivity. That afternoon slump you experience around 2-3 PM? It's not laziness—it's your cortisol naturally dropping. The desire to slow down as winter approaches mirrors what trees and plants have been doing for millennia.

Social media and hustle culture have conditioned us to push through fatigue, comparing our low moments to others' highlight reels. But what if we granted ourselves the same grace we give to nature? We don't look at dormant perennials and call them failures—we understand they're gathering strength beneath the surface. Your need for rest isn't weakness; it's wisdom.

As we enter the autumn season and approach the holidays, consider how you might honor your own natural cycles. Perhaps it's time to "drop some of your own leaves," creating space for the renewal that comes after rest. Your essential nature knows what you need to truly thrive—are you ready to listen?

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Self-Reflection
• 1:08 Understanding Personal Cycles
• 3:04 Nature's Cycles as Life Lessons
• 5:22 Honoring Your Need for Rest
• 6:42 Finding Grace in Seasonal Shifts

Transcript

Mary: 0:01

Hi and welcome to a mini episode of no Shrinking Violets. So I'm going to ask you today how are you feeling? Are you tired? Are you feeling energized? I don't know when you're listening to this. These episodes drop on Mondays.

Mary: 0:16

So if you're at the beginning of a week, what does that feel like? Think about what kind of cycle you have in your week. If you have a job, it's sort of an imposed cycle. Do you have a day that you chill out? Think about your daily cycle. How's your sleep? Do you have rituals that help you wake up? Do you have rituals that help you downshift?

Mary: 0:40

And, depending where you are right now, what is the weather like? So here it's starting to get cooler, which is energizing. For me, spring is my favorite season, but fall is my second favorite, so it's fall here. The leaves are starting to come down and we're heading into holiday season and I'm hosting my family this year, so there's a little bit different preparation and we're going to travel before that. So a lot of things to take into account.

Mary: 1:08

But think about to your cycle of the year, and if you celebrate holidays near the end of the year, what does that feel like? Does it feel energizing? Do you feel sad, do you feel wistful or nostalgic? Do you dread it? Do you love it? Is it exciting? What are the things that wear you out?

Mary: 1:33

Being intentional about what our cycles are is really important because I will talk for Western society it's that hustle culture where we need to push through. And now that we can compare ourselves to everyone else on social media, we can be extra hard on ourselves because we often see someone doing the fun things or looking energized I mean that might be changing a little bit now because I think the tone of social media is changing. But especially women, I think, compare themselves. So, depending also where you are in this season of your life, are you raising children? Are your children kind of launched? Are they in college, because that's a whole new season for you. Are they out of the house? Is someone getting married?

Mary: 2:26

Thinking in terms of cycles, because nature is made to run in a cycle. So there is the day cycle, which some flowers open during the day, some open at night. There's a reason that we have the light and dark that is supposed to inform our sleep. That's a topic for another day. But we have our weekly cycle, we have our day, I mean our daily cycle during the day too. I don't want to forget that. So if you are like me and this happened when I was working for somebody else this would be more difficult because now I can manage it a little more, now that I'm working for myself. But I would hit that low energy point between 2 and 3 pm and that is when our cortisol starts to drop off.

Mary: 3:16

But being aware of what are the things that you want to do at certain times of the day, so maybe you want to think about when do you want to exercise? Because if you tell yourself I'm going to exercise at this time of day but you rarely do, then let's shift that. Do it in the morning if that's what you. I love that feeling of having my walk in the morning, even though I would rather sit and drink my coffee and read a book. But looking at what is your cycle during the day and trying to build things into that cycle at the times that it will work for you. Same thing for your week, like maybe you want to have your own time to go to a bookstore or take a walk, or build that into your week ahead of time. And then, if you look at your yearly cycle that now, of course, for women, the monthly cycle, if you're still menstruating, that's a whole thing, because that's definitely a cycle.

Mary: 4:15

But also look at your yearly cycle, because now everything is downshifting where I live in the eastern United States and the leaves are falling and it's actually beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful times to take a drive and look at the oranges and yellows and reds and russets and all the different colors in the hills around here. But it also is a time where literally the plants and trees are deciding it's time to rest. So when we see a plant stop growing. So now my perennial garden, my plants that come back every year the stems are black. My echinacea, my coneflower, they're just seed heads. I leave them there for the birds. The finches love them. But it looks bad, it doesn't look great, it looks dead. But I know it's not dead, it's just resting and the leaves falling off the trees. They've just decided it's time. And it's not even cold here yet. It's really when the light shifts. So again, all of these things are tied into the sun and the nighttime cycle, but the trees just know it's time to shift our sort of our chemistry. We need to shift our moisture because we don't want damage from when things freeze. So we're going to drop our leaves, we're going to shift some things, we're going to sleep.

Mary: 5:38

We don't ever look at nature, trees, plants and say, my God, they've just stopped trying. I can't believe they're not going to put new leaves out until spring. They're going to stand there with bare branches for five months. It sounds funny to say that. Or to look at our plants that are going through this cycle and say I can't believe they're done blooming already. They're so lazy.

Mary: 6:04

But yet we don't acknowledge that we have a cycle too, and when you feel the need for rest, that is your body telling you something. Sometimes our mind experiences at first, or our emotions if we have something that happens emotionally, we forget that that still means we need to rest our body because we're one full being. So as at least here in the United States, as we head into fall, into autumn, start to think about what that looks like, that we accept that beautiful shift in the nature around us. We accept it, we see it, we understand that the plants and even the animals are doing these things because that is their cycle. So having that same grace for yourself is really important, especially as we're heading into a time of year that has a myriad of emotions tied to it. If you celebrate the holidays, so maybe take some time to drop some of your own leaves, take some time to downshift, to start to look at what your needs are and honor what you need and, until next time, listen to your essential nature and find what you need to thrive.