While our northern hemisphere friends are moving into their longest day, here in the southern hemisphere we are arriving at our longest night.

The Winter Solstice. The darkest point of the year.

And if you’ve been feeling it – heavier than usual, more inward, like something beneath the surface is quietly shifting – I want you to know: there’s nothing wrong with you. This is the season doing exactly what it came to do.

Long before wellness became an industry, before productivity was a virtue, before we expected ourselves to output at the same rate every day of every month of every year, human beings stopped at the solstice.

Every ancient culture has a version of it.

The Celts lit fires on the longest night to call back the light. The Norse held Yule, a twelve-day celebration of the returning sun, the burning of logs, the gathering of community around warmth and darkness together. Ancient Chinese medicine has always mapped the solstice as the peak of yin energy: the most inward, most still, most receptive point in the year’s cycle, the moment to rest deeply before the slow return of yang. The Japanese practice of tōji (winter solstice) involves warming baths with yuzu, the eating of red foods for vitality, the conscious tending of the body at its most vulnerable. Indigenous cultures across the southern hemisphere have held ceremony at this time for tens of thousands of years: honouring the dark, sitting with the earth, preparing for the return.

Not one of them said: push through it. Not one of them said: this is not a real thing, get on with your life.

They stopped. They gathered. They went inward together.

We have largely forgotten this*. And I believe it’s deeply costing us.

For a long time I dreaded winter. I dreamt of endless summer, of long light, of warmth and energy and the ease that comes with the longer days. I spent the colder months wishing myself forward, skipping right into September, past the grey mornings and the 5pm darkness, toward something better.

It took years of working with my own body, and eventually years of working with other women’s bodies and nervous systems, to understand what that wishing away was costing me.

A quarter of the year. A quarter of this life, which is not promised to any of us.

The slowing that winter asks for is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. The roots that will sustain everything you want to grow in spring and summer are grown stronger now, in the quiet, in the dark, in the season I’d been trying to skip.

It’s just that the growth that happens at the solstice is not visible. It is happening underground.

The Winter Solstice is a threshold. The word itself comes from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). The sun stands still. And in that stillness, there is an invitation.

To let what you no longer need be left behind. To consider what you are growing toward. To tend the soil before you plant the seeds.

This is not a metaphor for toxic positivity. The dark is real. The heaviness is real. Many women I work with describe this time as feeling buried, suffocating, turbulent, like everything is changing at once. Those feelings are not wrong. They are the season moving through you.

In the dark there is rich, fertile soil. What can we grow here?

This moment isn’t just a time to nourish roots, go inward, and honour the dark. It’s also a time to look to the hope of the light to come. 

Every ancient culture knew this, and the modern world has largely forgotten: the darkest point is also the turning point. After the solstice, the light begins to return. Not all at once. Slowly, incrementally, a few minutes each day. But it comes.

No matter how dark it gets, light always returns. We are never left alone in this.

From the perspective of Chinese medicine, which has mapped the body’s relationship to seasonal change for over two thousand years, the solstice is the peak of yin energy. Yin is rest. Yin is receptivity. Yin is the inward, nourishing, quiet force that makes outward expression possible.

When yin is depleted, through chronic overwork, under-rest, relentless output, the body cannot move into the next season with resilience. The burnout that arrives in spring and summer for so many women is not a spring problem. It is a winter problem. It is the consequence of not having tended the roots.

Primarily, this season is about gratitude, pausing, coming together, and celebrating. We used to come together and eat, dance the sun back to us, and acknowledge that we had survived to the deepest point of winter. From here, things begin to come alive again, and in 6 weeks the first shoots of spring would be appearing.

So we want all things slow. Acupuncture at this time of year works directly with this. Supporting the body’s yin, regulating the nervous system, addressing the sleep disruptions and mood shifts and energy crashes that so often accompany the solstice season. 

We want all things connected. Coming together over a hot tea or nourishing meal, pausing long enough for our nervous systems to actually make absorbing food available.

It is not about fixing what is wrong. It is about supporting what the body is already trying to do.

Last Sunday, June 21, was the Winter Solstice (and we’re still in the window!).

You don’t need a ritual. You don’t need a ceremony. You don’t need to do anything elaborate or perfectly.

If I’d posted this last week when I was supposed to, I’d have invited you to find any point in the day to pause. check in with yourself in the way the season is asking for, and call the light that is to come. You can still do this now.

What do I need right now? What am I ready to leave behind? What do I want to grow toward, when the light returns?

And then, tend something. A warm meal. A bath. A candle. An early night. A quiet conversation with someone who knows you. A class that brings you back to your body.

The solstice does not ask you to arrive with answers. It asks you to just arrive, and be here, now.

If you’ve been showing up to Winter Roots this season, to your mat, to the community, to the small moments of care, you are doing the work the solstice is pointing toward.

You are putting down roots in the dark. You are tending what will sustain you. You are part of something that is growing, even when the growth isn’t yet visible.

And in the oldest traditions on earth, that was medicine.

Happy Solstice. 🌿

*we practiced this widely in Europe throughout until the witch hunts and the rise of the church, when Yule was incorporated into Christmas celebrations. I believe this is part of a big ‘first’ en masse colonisation that Europeans went through. As we have moved away from the religious aspect of Christmas, we have also forgotten the ancient, medicinal roots of the practice. Living in the Southern Hemisphere but under a northern hemipshere calendar, we are even more disconnected from the traditions. I want to take a moment to honour the communities and cultures around the world that didn’t forget these origins, and which make it easier for us to reconstruct this old way. We don’t have to make a big deal of this – it’s enough for us to pause, connect with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.