Wintering and death cycles

Lucy Newport • December 18, 2023

Reading time: 3 mins


How are you at resting?


I don’t mean the scrolling on your phone / watching TV type of “resting” (which is usually stimulating and distracts you from yourself).


I mean resting where you’re doing nothing, or at least very little. Maybe that’s watching the sunset, doing a little yin yoga, relaxing in the bath or watching the birds do their thing from your window. 


Most of us aren’t great at resting for a couple of reasons:

  • We’re so jacked up on stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, that it’s hard (but all the more essential) to slow down. 
  • When we stop doing and rest, we’re often faced with the things within us that we’ve been avoiding. 


Rest, the thing many of us are craving, just feels really uncomfortable. And maybe at this time of year, when the days are at their shortest and darkest and much of the natural world is wintering, your being is calling out to slow down too. 

A couple of weeks ago I set the background on my phone to an Instagram image from @moon_body which reads “Resisting death cycles blocks growth”. When I first read this it struck such a strong cord of truth for me. 


Death cycles are those periods in your life where you are asked to stop and let go. They often follow times of busyness or change when you need to rest, tend to your energy and recalibrate. 


And they are, as the quote reminds us, essential for growth. 


I put these words on my phone’s background because I knew that I was avoiding a death cycle (I’m as human as anyone else). I knew because I was feeling stagnant, resistant to what was showing up for me in my life, and using the word “should” with myself a lot.   


I LOVE this time of year. I love Christmas, cold winter days, gazing at the Christmas tree, and seeing my family. I love the sense of magic and peace that I feel when I do pause to absorb it all. But I also find it a lot, especially when my body is asking for me to slow down but there are things to do and people to see!


Each December I seem to get a bad cold. It’s kinda become a joke with myself. And this year I decided that it wasn’t going to happen. I told myself that it’s not possible for me to catch a cold (if there is anything I’ve learnt in recent years, it’s the power of what we tell ourselves), took an echinacea tincture regularly and ran the “Defense” program on my Healy from time to time. 


And you know what? Last week I got that cold! In the thick of it, I realised that I will continue to get a cold every December until I actually allow myself to rest, properly rest, during the month. My body experiencing a cold currently serves too much of a purpose; it forces me into a place where I have to surrender to rest. 


Just like that, as I came out the other side of the cold after resting I had such clarity. I received messages (or perhaps they arose within me) about what to focus on next in my life and where to put my attention in my work. I feel like I can and I want to do things. I’ve even written three articles in three days (this being one of them) when before I had nothing to say or no energy to say it. No forcing inspiration, no mustering energy. Just flow. 


Why am I talking about all of this? What does any of this have to do with binge eating recovery? 


Because again, “Resisting death cycles blocks growth”.


And I want to ask you, how does this play into your relationships with food and your body?


How do you use food when you’re in that place of resistance?


What growth around your binge eating recovery might you be blocking?





Also inspired by the audiobook of Wintering by Katherine May, which I’ve listened to throughout this December. 


Title image is Winter Moon at Toyamagahara by Hasui Kawase.