Here in the North, winter is not a metaphor.
It is a season you can feel in your bones: the short days, the long nights, the kind of cold that makes you catch your breath when you step outside. And at the same time, it is a metaphor for the dark, heavy energies that move through our lives, our relationships, our collective psyche.
In different medicine wheels I work with, this season belongs to the North: the direction of winter, deep night, and deep dream.
- – The East is sunrise and spring: beginnings, inspiration, first light.
- – The South is noon and summer: growth, fullness, activity.
- – The West is dusk and autumn: endings, grief, harvest, letting go.
- – The North is winter: the long dark, the honest cold, the struggle that reveals who we really are.
You can see that wheel in the sky, in the seasons, in the day. But you can also feel it inside your own body, in every breath:
- – The inhale is East – the first spark of life.
- – The full, held breath is South – the peak of energy.
- – The exhale is West – release and letting go.
- – The pause after the exhale – the still, empty, waiting space – is North.
Most of us spend our lives racing from inhale to exhale, from doing to doing, trying very hard not to notice that empty space.
But North can be where the deepest medicine is.
Winter as the Teacher We Did Not Ask For
Many spiritual traditions say some version of this: discomfort is one of our finest teachers.
The ego, understandably, would love a life built mostly of comfort. Warm houses, smooth conversations, predictable days, spiritual insights that feel good and do not disrupt anything important.
But that is not usually how we grow.
In the Gnostic tradition, there is a saying attributed to Jesus that goes something like this: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring it forth, what stays buried is what harms you.”
That is the North in a sentence.
In Dine’ (Navajo) stories, there are tales of monsters that once roamed the earth, many of which were defeated, yet some were intentionally left alive because they became our teachers. The cold stayed, so we would learn how to care for ourselves and each other. Mistakes stayed, so we would actually learn, not just pretend to be wise.
In some streams of Christianity, people have said we are “learning theology in the devil’s classroom” – meaning: we come to understand compassion, courage, and integrity not in ideal circumstances, but in a world where real harm, temptation, confusion, and fear exist.
Across cultures, we see versions of this:
- – In Celtic myth, the people of the Earth Goddess Danu battle chaotic beings like the Fomorians – embodiments of greed, hunger, and raw power. Yet even these monstrous forces carry the seeds of fertility, knowledge of the land, and farming.
- – In Hindu traditions, fierce deities like Kali or Durga embody both destruction and protection – cutting through illusion so something truer can live.
- – In some Northern Indigenous traditions, the long winter is understood not just as hardship but as a time to deepen story, kinship, and ceremony – to remember that community and creativity are forms of survival.
Winter in the North is not gentle: It is honest. It shows us what we lean on, and what we avoid.
The North Inside Our Lives
The North is the direction that refuses to lie to us.
It acknowledges a simple, unromantic truth: To be human is to struggle.
Not every struggle is a trauma.
Not every hardship is a sign that we are broken.
But life will ask things of us: to endure, to adapt, to forgive, to protect, to grieve, to let go.
From the perspective of the North, external battles are often reflections of unaddressed internal conflicts. What we do not face within us has a way of leaking out into our relationships – in the form of control, withdrawal, reactivity, resentment, or endless busyness.
The medicine of the North is not punishment: It is training.
It cultivates:
- – Endurance – the ability to stay present even when things are hard.
- – Fierceness – not aggression, but the willingness to draw a line, to say no, to protect what matters.
- – Patience and discipline – the slow, steady work of showing up again and again.
- – Piercing clarity – seeing what is actually happening instead of what we wish were happening.
- – Trust in life – not naïve positivity, but a grounded sense that meaning can be made even in the dark.
The North reminds us that all new life begins in darkness: the seed in the soil, the child in the womb, the idea in the night before it has words.
Creation rarely begins in a well-lit, tidy room. It begins in not-knowing.
How Winter Changes the Way We Pray
When I speak of prayer, I do not mean only formal words to a specific deity. I mean that deep, quiet act of turning toward something larger than our individual ego: life, Spirit, ancestors, the land, the mystery.
“I cannot do this alone. Help me see. Help me endure. Help me change.”
The North is, for me, the birthplace of this kind of prayer.
Not the kind of prayer that begs the universe to make everything comfortable again.
But the kind that says, with humility:
- – “Please show me what this struggle is trying to teach me.”
- – “Give me courage to face what I do not want to see.”
- – “Give me softness where I have become hard, and strength where I have been collapsing.”
In that sense, winter prayer is less about escaping discomfort and more about receiving clarity, power, and wisdom to navigate it.
How This Shows Up in Therapy Together
When people come to work with me, they are often in a kind of winter.
Something has ended or needs to end.
Something is not working the way it used to.
An identity, a relationship, a way of coping, a belief system – all of it feels like a house that no longer fits.
Therapy when looking in the direction of North is about being honest enough to notice:
- – Where we are freezing inside even while we look “fine” on the outside.
- – Where we keep walking into the same blizzard of patterns: shame, people-pleasing, self-abandonment, addiction, spiritual bypassing.
- – Where we secretly hope someone else will change so we do not have to.
Working together, we bring these truths into the light: into the gentle lantern-glow of the winter North.
My role is to sit with you in that dark season and help you:
- – Name what hurts, without pathologizing your humanity.
- – Notice the “monsters” that are actually teachers: the critic, the fear, the numbness, the rage.
- – Differentiate between necessary struggle that grows you and unnecessary suffering that comes from old patterns.
- – Build inner and outer resources: nervous system regulation, supportive relationships, spiritual practices that are actually grounded.
We are not trying to collect wounds like trophies and we are also not trying to skip ahead to spring.
We are learning how to be a true human: someone who can feel deeply, act with integrity, and stay in relationship with themselves and others even when life is not easy.
Some Practices for Walking With the North
If you want to work with the North in your own life this winter, you might begin with small, intentional practices like:
- – Step outside into the cold on purpose. Feel your breath tighten, then slowly lengthen it. Notice what happens when you stay for one more minute than you want to. Ask yourself quietly: What am I usually running from inside?
- – Light a single candle at night. Turn off other lights. Let your nervous system feel darkness that is safe, not threatening. Use that time to journal about the “monsters” you are currently fighting: anxiety, loneliness, overwork, numbing. Ask: What might this be trying to teach me?
- – Bring your struggle to the North. In your mind’s eye, imagine a vast snowfield, a night sky, maybe an old cedar tree or a mountain. Speak your struggle out loud. Then ask directly: What medicine do I need right now? Endurance? Fierceness? Clear boundaries? The ability to let go? Be open to subtle answers.
And if you feel called, you can bring all of this into our work together. Therapy then becomes a kind of winter lodge, a place where your stories, symptoms, and questions can thaw just enough to be shaped into something new.
The Quiet Invitation of Winter
Winter in the North will keep arriving, year after year, whether we are ready or not.
We can treat it as a problem to get through, OR……we can treat it as a teacher: one of the oldest, simplest, least sentimental teachers we have.
The North says:
- – “You are stronger than you think and softer than you allow.”
- – “You cannot avoid endings and still expect new beginnings.”
- – “What you are willing to face in the dark will shape who you become in the light.”
If you are entering a winter season externally, internally, or both, you do not have to walk it alone.
This is the work I love: to sit with people in this cold and realness, and find together the quiet seeds of the life that wants to come next.
