Winter Wellness Rituals That Are Keeping Me Sane
Cheap daily practices for surviving, and softening, tested in the wilds of Idaho.
I’m not a wellness influencer - I am just a highly influenceable creature. If a very polished and fit girl has tried it on her YouTube channel, I’ve tried it right after.
And as I wax poetically, longingly about here often: yes, I am still struggling with this weather. We are currently in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. A small lake town mostly for tourists near the Washington border. I find the downtown area, where we live, pretty normal in terms of Idahoan folklore. It’s cute and quaint and there’s a celebrity sighting about once a week.
It’s also cold, and dark, and grey, and very wet. As a California girl through and though, this is dampening not just the well-worn sweats that have become my uniform, but my spirit. Small little glimmers of hope - and light - peek through the clouds just before sunset at times, which we watch from our front window facing the lake. But otherwise, it feels so very dreary.
My body has entered hibernation mode. The warmest, heaviest foods call to me. The couch is my second office. I am watching more TV, and wanting to sleep longer than I ever would in any other season.
So these wellness rituals began as a way to not lose my health, my progress nor my sanity through the long, dark cold that befalls us every year. They turned, instead, to what keeps me warm, on a creative as well as spiritual level. They keep the muscles of my imagination thawed, so as not to become so cold and brittle they shut down and eventually break. These rituals aren’t just to emerge in spring feeling (and, if I’m honest, looking), well…
They are to keep me in balance with this darkness. Dancing barefoot with the mild sadness, the depression that presses us against the grown and covers us in the quiet of snow. It’s to feel both the dark and the light at the same time. To feel fluid, in motion, in the small safe cave of hibernation. They are to honor that it is, in fact, winter, while not giving in completely and slipping into a lonely, cold, and dark, dark place.
But enough about me! Here we go:
