I had the best of intentions. I’ve always been great at pushing myself – I knew how to override my body and find seemingly superhuman-level energy to juggle multiple plates all at the same time, for months on end. 

And then the crash would come. Often fairly dramatically too, in the form of flare ups from my multiple chronic illnesses, or mental health struggles, or catastrophic injuries. 

I could never work out why. “You need to do more self care,” people would tell me, and so I’d set some goals, make a heap of changes, start feeling better…until it all started to unravel again. Motivation would evaporate, energy would drop, I’d let one habit go and suddenly it was all over. 

I’d feel internally ashamed, tell myself I needed to be stronger, ‘if I could just be more consistent’, but couldn’t seem to start again. 

It took years of working with my own body, going back to what I call the ‘Old Ways’, returning to ancient practices of wellbeing that our ancestors used to be well, and eventually training in somatic psychotherapy, to understand what was actually happening.

My body wasn’t failing me. It was doing exactly what a woman’s body is designed to do.

It was cycling.

The wellness industry has been (unsurprisingly) slow to say this out loud, but (in bold for those at the back) women are not small men.

Our bodies don’t operate on a 24-hour cycle the way men’s do. We move through hormonal rhythms that shift across the month, across the season, across our lifespan. Oestrogen, progesterone, cortisol, oxytocin: these hormones are not background noise, they actively shape our energy, our capacity, our mood, our need for rest and connection and intensity. They ask different things of us at different times.

And winter is one of those times.

When the light drops and the temperature falls, there are predictable and necessary shifts in the body. Energy naturally draws inward. The drive to push, produce and perform slows. Not because we’re lazy, not because we’re ‘in a mood’ or have seasonal affect disorder, but because our nervous system responds intelligently to a seasonal cue that has been guiding women’s bodies for thousands of years.

The problem is not that your body slows down in winter.

The problem is that most of us have been taught to treat that slowing as something to override.

The pattern I see most often in the women who come to Soma goes something like this.

She’s been going hard. She’s managed it well, by most external measures. She’s functioning. She’s capable. She’s reliable. She’s showing up for everyone who needs her. But underneath that, she’s depleted in a way she isn’t sure how to articulate because there isn’t always a dramatic event to point to. It’s more like a slow erosion. A gradual drift from herself.

At some point the body draws a line. Illness. Exhaustion. A flat numbness which doesn’t consistently respond to mood stabilisers. So she pulls back from the things that nourish her, often because those are the first things that feel optional. And tries to keep going.

Spring comes and she feels the seasonal energy lift, and tries to rebuild. She finds ways to go hard again. And the cycle continues.

I know this pattern intimately, because I lived it for years.

What changed for me wasn’t finding more discipline. It was learning to work with my body’s rhythms instead of against them. Learning that winter isn’t a test of whether I can keep going. It’s an invitation to go deep instead of wide. To tend roots instead of reach for growth that isn’t seasonally possible.

When I stopped trying to override winter (and my bleed, and dark moons, and ends of chapters), everything changed. My nervous system settled. My health stabilised. The boom-bust cycle I had been living through for years began to resolve, not because I worked harder, but because I finally stopped treating rest as a reward for exhaustion and started treating it as part of the work.

There’s a reason winter feels different in your body, and it isn’t just the cold.

Biologically, our nervous system is wired to respond to light, temperature, and seasonal cues. In shorter days, melatonin production increases and serotonin naturally dips. Your body is preparing for slower metabolic activity, deeper rest, conservation of energy. This is not dysfunction. 

This is a design that historically allowed us to conserve while food sources were low.

For women navigating perimenopause or postmenopause, these seasonal shifts can feel amplified. Hormonal changes in this life stage make the nervous system more sensitive to disruption, more reliant on rhythm, more responsive to the absence of regulation practices that support it. The answer is not to push harder. The answer is to become more attuned.

Nervous system regulation is not something you do once and maintain through sheer willpower. It is something you return to, consistently, in practices and rhythms that become part of how you live.

Classes at Soma are built around this. Not just movement, but regulation. Not just exercise, but embodied presence. The grounding ritual at the start of every class is not incidental; it is the point.

This is the part that often surprises women when they first hear it.

All mammalian bodies are physiologically wired for community. In fact, we have a neurobiological imperative to be regulated by and regulate others. And for women, this is even more true.

Oestrogen and progesterone are prosocial hormones. They don’t just influence reproduction and mood, but actively promote connection-seeking behaviour. Oxytocin, which is released through safe touch, eye contact, shared experience and community, further amplifies this. For women, oxytocin has a more pronounced calming effect on the nervous system than it does for men. Research in social neuroscience increasingly shows that for women, connection isn’t a nice-to-have alongside wellness, rather it’s one of the primary mechanisms through which wellbeing is created and sustained.

This means that turning up to a solo gym session and grinding through it while looking in a mirror is, neurologically speaking, not particularly well-matched to how a woman’s body finds regulation.

What actually works? Moving alongside other women. Being witnessed without judgment. Knowing someone in the room is carrying something too. Feeling the particular kind of ease that comes from being in a space where you don’t have to perform.

This is not soft. This is physiology.

Longevity, for women, is not primarily a story about what we do individually. It is a story about how we regulate together.

If you have been feeling like you are carrying too much lately, like something beneath the surface is heavy even when life looks objectively fine, like you keep meaning to come back to yourself and then the day fills up and you don’t…I want to tell you that this is not a personal failing.

It’s just a woman whose nervous system has been asked to do a lot without much support.

Winter is not the season to override that.

Winter is the season to plant roots.

This is a time when most outward growth in nature stalls. Deciduous trees have lost their leaves, most bushes aren’t flowering, and local animals are slower and less visible. All plants, deciduous or not, are focussing their energy on growing stronger root systems, which protects them from colder temperatures, strong winds, and ice. Come spring, strong root systems allow for outward growth that is faster, more sustainable, and more vibrant.

This is our design too –  winter is a time to nourish our roots, tend to the soil that is growing those roots, and find an internal connection to sustain us for the year to come. 

Roots don’t grow by pushing up toward light. They grow downward, in the quiet, in the dark, in the slow accumulation of what will sustain everything that comes after. You cannot build a strong spring from an overworked winter. You can only build it from one where something was genuinely tended.

This is what Winter Roots is about.

Not a challenge. Not a hustle program. Not a push to do more before the year is out.

It’s an 8-week invitation to stay connected to yourself through the colder months. To move, consistently, in a space that is safe and regulated and held by other women. To let the community carry some of what you’ve been holding alone. To plant small seeds of care, for yourself and for others, and watch what quietly grows.

Winter Roots runs from June 8 to August 2, eight weeks of classes, community moments, and small acts of collective care.

Every class you attend plants a seed into your own wellbeing. Soma will also donate $1 for every class attended toward supporting women experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity.

Because caring for ourselves and caring for one another were never meant to be separate things.

Along the way, there will be gentle community missions, moments of nourishment, rest, ritual and connection that you can share with the community, each planting an additional “community” seed.

And for every 100 community seeds, we donate another dollar.

The mission is simple: when you give to yourself at Soma, we collectively give back, and together create a stronger foundation of wellbeing for this next solar cycle.

Attend 16 classes and reach “Roots Planted”: you’ll receive a Ritual Gift of your choice: a Soma tea blend, a guided meditation bundle, or an essential oil roller. Plus Soma will donate an additional $5 in your name.

Attend 24 classes and reach “Roots Nourished”: you’ll be invited to our exclusive Soma Winter Restore Evening: candlelit restorative yoga, sound healing, tea, nervous system practice, and a connection circle. Plus an additional $10 donation in your name.

This winter, you don’t have to disappear. You don’t have to override yourself to keep going. You don’t have to do it alone.

Your mat is here. Your community is here. And winter, tended well, is where the roots grow deepest.