Winter and the deep dive into the Water Phase

In this series of essays on the greater energetic movements that give rise to the seasons, I hope to offer a perspective and tools to help you find more resilience and joy amidst this turbulent time in history. By observing and understanding how Nature responds to the cycle of ever-changing energies over the course of a year, we gain insight into how these great forces are influencing our bodies, minds, and spirits. This knowing helps us work with these Great Movements in ways that supports us and helps us live more fully into our gifts and potential amidst the unraveling of human culture and ecosystems all around us.

The Four Seasons diagram is one of those things that is deceptively simple yet infinitely complex. It is truly describing the movement of energy behind all of creation, the movement of energy before there is form. We can relate to this concept as an essential step in any creative process. Whether it is the creation of a new business, or a piece of art, it starts with inspiration. A spark of an idea mysteriously arising in the mind. We start to work on the idea, imagining the different ways it can take shape. We have to imagine it, picture it, feel the different possibilities. It is a sense of excitement, anticipation and possibility that leads us to take the first steps to bring the inspiration to physical form. The business or art piece exists energetically, imaginally, long before it has physical form. It is this constellation of energies that will eventually give rise to the physical form. This is what the Four Season Diagram is all about. It depicts the Taoist Five Phases of energy that give rise to the myriad forms of life in Creation.

Why is this useful? Because it gives us a lens with which to witness and experience the social, political and climatic unraveling that we are living in. Five Phase Theory gives us some basic Truths about how Creation works and has been working since the beginning of time. It’s comforting to see that the normal cycle of life includes a falling apart and dying that takes place in the dark of winter/water phase, then gives rise to new life in the spring/wood phase, matures and flourishes in the summer/fire phase and declines in the fall/metal phase. The process is the same whether it is a tree losing all its leaves to become compost for next year’s growth or if it is the working structures of an entire civilization that have exceeded their useful lives and need to be re-envisioned. It helps us get a bird’s eye view of all the changes taking place and make some sense of what is happening.

This is not to ignore the deep human suffering unfolding daily at the individual and collective levels. Nor is it to ignore the deep suffering of the Earth and all the other-than-human beings. Rather, it is intended to bring enough light into our Hearts that we might be able to grow and flower as humans, bringing beauty and joy to ourselves, our families and our communities despite the cold, darkness of the times we are living in. We have the capacity to be a spark of light and warmth in the cold darkness of Winter that gives rise to a new cultural, social, ecological, and spiritual Spring for humanity and for the Earth.

Here in Maine, we have four distinct seasons. Each one is a sort of Norman Rockwell version of everyday life and Winter is no different. When working with Five Phase energetics, Winter is the seasonal expression of the Water Phase in the cycle of life. The movement of the earth around the sun over the course of the year gives rise to the seasons. It is our position relative to the sun that determines how much energy from the sun is arriving each day and thus, the season. According to Taoist teachings, each season is 36½ days on either side of the Solstice or Equinox (Position 1). The Solstices are the mid points of Winter and Summer, not the beginning. The Equinoxes are mid points of Spring and Fall. Each of the four seasons is 73 days, which totals 292 days. The remaining 73 days are divided into 4 Transitional, Earth Phases. (See blog post “Shoulder Seasons” for more on that.) Each year, you would need to count out the 36½ days on either side of the Equinox or Solstice to get the exact dates and times of each seasonal phase because they shift a little each year. Here are the approximate dates of the Energetic Phases that give rise to the seasons:

1. Summer Solstice, 2. Autumnal Equinox, 3. Winter Solstice, 4. Vernal Equinox

The energetic phases give rise to the seasons

These are not necessarily the dates we think of coinciding with the seasons because generally we are thinking about the weather. Here, we are working with the cyclical movement of the earth around the sun and the waxing and waning of the sun’s energy that gives rise to all of creation.

Why is it useful to understand a bit about the greater energetic movements behind the creation of Life? Because these are the same energies that create our lives. And because we are part of Life, part of Nature and those energies affect us as much as the plants and animals that live outdoors. It’s like getting caught out in a rain shower without a raincoat and having no clue why we are so uncomfortably wet or what to do about it. It is helpful to understand how these greater energies affect and influence our bodies, minds and spirits so we know how to respond and work with them rather than struggling against them.

you can find your copy of the Four Seasons Diagram here

Four Seasons Diagram

Winter, The Water Phase

It is not uncommon to see a chart like the one below when reading about Five Phase Theory. The chart is an attempt to help us understand how these energies behind creation manifest once they constellate into a form we can experience directly. It is giving us multiple angles with which to look at the same energetic. There is a lot of information here, but for our purposes, let’s focus on the areas highlighted in purple.

Season: Winter

Looking at the chart, you will find the season of Winter corresponds to the Water Phase. Here in Maine, we have a lot of experience with the movement of the seasons because they are quite distinct. For instance, in Winter, we are drawn to cozy up at home resting in front of the woodstove with a mug of tea and a book, eat slow-cooked stews, and go to bed early. In Summer, we are on the go, drawn out into the world, socializing, putting time and energy into our passions, recreating outdoors, eating light raw meals, and staying out later. A walk on Portland’s Eastern Prom in winter is a whole different experience than it is in the summer. It isn’t just the weather that influences that experience. Even looking at these photos, imagine yourself in them. Notice what happens in your body if you imagine yourself in the summertime image. Notice how your body relaxes a little, there is a feeling of ease. Contrast that to what happens in your body when you shift your imagination to being in the winter photo. There is a contracted, tense feeling and you haven’t moved. It isn’t that we can’t enjoy being out in the winter weather, but it takes much more forethought, preparation and caution to be out in the cold comfortably and safely. In the summer, recreating outdoors just takes way less effort.

*The same spot on Portland’s Eastern Prom by Corey Templeton*

Energy Direction: Down and In

In the Water Phase, the energy direction is down and in. You just experienced that in your body imagining yourself in a summer day versus winter day. In the summer day experience, our bodies relax and expand outward. In the winter day experience, our bodies contract inward. The outward expansion of Summer/Fire is balanced by the inward contraction of Winter/Water. This is seen everywhere in Nature as well. The trees, for example, start moving their energy down and in from the leaves in the summer to the roots in winter. This movement is especially obvious in hibernating animals. In the summer they are out in the world, busy reproducing and getting fattened up to be ready to go down underground and sleep through the winter.

The human version of this movement is seen in our behavior, too. The summer energy supports us to get out, be active, and socialize. The winter energy supports us in quieter, more restorative activities, more sleep, and time at home cozied up by the fire.

Challenge/Opportunity: Storage, rest, dormancy, gathering potential

The essential work of the Water Phase is storing, resting, dormancy, and gathering potential. In nature, the landscape looks barren at this time of year. All the energy has gone down and below ground, away from our awareness. The trees’ energy has gone from the tips of the leaves down to the roots below the frost line. Daffodil bulbs are hunkered down gathering some special kind of winter magic necessary to bloom in the spring. The plants and animals of our local landscapes are especially good teachers of the necessity of resting and gathering in a dormant period so we can thrive and flourish.

Humans need this cool, dark, resting time to gather the potential energy to carry us through the next phase as well. In modern times though, with electric lights and central heating, we are much more able to override that natural pull. It may be easier to relate to when we think about a 24-hour period rather than a year. A day in our lives passes through the same phases. The summer solstice is Noon and the winter solstice is midnight. In the evening, Water time, we wind down, rest, sleep, and dream. In the morning, the Wood, springtime of the day, we are refreshed and ready to go. We all know what it feels like when we sleep poorly, and our bodies can’t rest. We don’t have the energy to do productive work, connect with people in meaningful ways, do anything creative, and are generally miserable. The rest and restoration of the Winter/Water seasonal cycle is just as important as a good night’s sleep in a daily cycle.

Ironically, in our consumer-driven culture, we celebrate the biggest blow out holiday of the year in winter. Just at the time when Nature is calling us to rest and conserve our resources, the Black Friday sales start and the rapid loss of life force energy in the form of money begins. This is why it is so stressful. Every cell in your body is telling you to rest, gather, and store energy and resources while our culture is urging us to overspend in every way right at the Winter Solstice.

For most of human history, this would have been unthinkable. It was a survival issue to be conservative with your resources through the winter when food and warmth were scarce. Starvation, freezing, and succumbing to illness that arise in those conditions were ever-present realities. This is why fear arises as the unbalanced emotion of the Water Phase. It is this ancient fear of survival that gets triggered this time of year when the resources are going out faster than they can be restored. Today, many Mainers with seasonal jobs still experience the fear of “will we make it through the winter”?

We can recognize fear being triggered when we start feeling stressed, over-extended, and anxious with all the business and excessive overindulgence of the Holiday Season. Those feelings are road signs, pointing us toward adjusting our financial and social commitments to a level that feels nourishing and not taxing. Protecting the restoration offered in the Water Phase is as critical for our health and well-being as a good night’s sleep.

*Brunswick Dam on the Adroscoggin River Photo by Paul VanDerWerf*

Central Issue: Willpower

The central issue of the Water Phase is Willpower. In balance, we are talking about willpower not so much as our ability to resist the temptation of a chocolate chip cookie, but more in the broader sense of the ability to wisely manage and utilize available resources to help us reach our highest potential, our life’s purpose, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Will here is the will to live one’s life fully, and the Power here is the authentic power and energy needed to manifest it. Willpower is the focused energy needed to stay true to the highest version of ourselves over time and not be distracted by things that take energy away from that goal. Willpower is the force that prudently guides the expenditure of our life force energy so that we can live long enough to fulfill our highest purpose.

The instructions for living into the highest version of ourselves is hidden in the depths of our beings and is an aspect of the Water Phase. Within every acorn is contained a blueprint, all the information needed to grow an entire oak tree, branch by branch. All that is needed are the right conditions of sun, rain, soil, and a few hundred years and the Oak will have lived its full potential and fulfilled its Oak purpose. The Oak Tree never has to “think” about how to become itself, it is following a deep knowing that is stored in the blueprint.

All of nature works this way including humans. Each of us is born with a unique “blueprint”, a soul, that is stored in the depths of our beings, which corresponds to the Water Phase. The blueprint includes natural gifts as well as challenges, and given the right conditions and resources, we have the opportunity to follow that original blueprint to its fullest.

We are naturally drawn down and in during the Water Phase. Winter is a great time to slow down, read books you have been meaning to get to, engage in creative projects, recommit to the down and in movement of a meditation, making art, journaling practice, sleeping, cooking. All these practices that quiet the busy mind are tools to connect with your blueprint.

We are all familiar with the special talents that come easily and bring us joy that we can share with others. We are also familiar with the handful of challenging issues that seem to come up for us over and over again. These are all baked into our blueprint along with hair and eye color. The combined gifts of the Water Phase include the wisdom, confidence, self-reflection, focused use of available resources, courage to overcome challenges, and deep reserves of energy needed live fully into your highest potential. This is what is meant by Willpower. So, when faced with a choice about a chocolate chip cookie, the real question is, “will this cookie help me reach my highest potential”?

It must be acknowledged that not everyone has the “right conditions and resources" to enable them to live fully into their highest potential. Trauma, abuse, poverty, discrimination, dysfunctional families and social systems, lack of education, and lack of resources are examples of the types of roadblocks to full potential that are far too common. When these damaging effects are part of our lives, sometimes, if we are lucky, we have the Will, a spark of something extraordinary from deep within ourselves, to overcome these events, and sometimes we don’t. In my experience, it seems to depend on whether enough of that “spark” was part of the original blueprint compared to the size and intensity of the adversity.

While an Oak tree never gets confused about how to use willpower to live its greatest Oaky self, human beings are not so fortunate. We can see examples of distorted power all around us in political figures that are quite frightening. Certain individuals have lost the thread and have disconnected from their individual original blueprints and the greater web of life as a result of their personal traumas and lack of mental health. Collectively, we are in the Water Phase of our era and therefore the blueprint for a new civilization is still gestating and not fully formed. Societal structures that historically would have held these individuals in check are simply not there. The old structures are dying and the new structures have yet to be born. This is the Water Phase. The liminal time of moving through death to rebirth and carries with it the fear that we might not make it. Water also brings wisdom and gives us the calm serenity to balance the fear.

Virtue: Wisdom

We generally associate wisdom with older people because it requires several components that just take time to acquire. Old age is the Water Phase of life. Wisdom is made up of the knowledge and experience that comes with having lived a while, the ability to dive deep in examination of oneself, and to approach life with compassion for yourself and others.

When we live from Wisdom, decision making is a slow, deliberate process in which all the angles are considered. You don’t have to be old to live from wisdom, you have to have the capacity to dive deep, and get quiet enough to connect with your blueprint, your soul, to know the way forward toward your highest potential. Wisdom arises from the place in us that is calm, serene, and confident. There is a quality of dropping down and in to reflect, finding something of value to be brought back up and shared.

Emotions: Calm, serene, confidence vs. fearful, anxious, insecure

The balanced and unbalanced emotions of the phases are often more easily understood in contrast to one another. The Fear of the Water Phase is the fear of survival. It is the question, “Do we have the resources to make it through the winter”? This is the literal winter of cold weather and living off what you have been able to store from last year’s growing season, and it is also the energetic Winter that is the natural ending of a life cycle. In modern times, we don’t always realize that what we experience as anxiety is actually this very fundamental question of survival upon deeper introspection.

In the big picture, just as we can look at the cycle of phases as a 24-hour day, we can also look at the life cycle of a civilization through this lens. It is easy to see that the old structures and ways of doing things are just no longer functional in our society. Just like the leaves’ function as solar collectors for plants, they are structures that serve their useful purpose and then fall away to become compost for the next generation of growth. Looking around the world, we can see the polarization, conflicts, and climate destruction that are the result of the structures of our current era having lived their useful lives and are now crumbling. We are seeing this lack of productive functioning play out in big and small ways at every level of life. Much of the violent, aggressive, destructive behavior we are witnessing we can identify as arising out of fight, flight, or freeze that is the unconscious response to the fear of survival. As a result, we are all anxious, fearful, and insecure at some level.

The question of survival is very real around the globe today, with wars, gun violence, ecological crisis, and crumbling political and social structures. Whether or not you are personally affected at this very moment, we all are living with the sense of anxiety that we might be directly impacted at any time. The pervasive and collective feeling of fear, insecurity, and anxiety that arises out of the question of survival is how we can know we are living in the Water Phase of an era in history. A hundred years from now, historians will look back and clearly see that this period is the end of an old way of life on earth, a dark time before the dawning of a new era. This is the Water Phase.

The Water Phase includes within it the stirrings of new beginnings. In Winter, a lot is happening underground, away from conscious perception. It’s the gathering of potential energy needed to spring forward into something new come spring. Just as all of Nature retreats down and in, underground, to restore and gather the energy needed for a new cycle of life, we can know that this is also happening at the level of humanity because this is simply how life on Earth works. We know that although we can’t see what is happening, in the same way that daffodils are gathering a certain magic to be able to bloom in spring, a new era of human civilization is also gathering energy for a future bloom. In this way we can understand that the Water Phase is about death and rebirth simultaneously. We can remember this and take heart.

Five Phase theory teaches us how to balance Fear, Insecurity, and Anxiety. It instructs us to cultivate Calmness, Serenity and Confidence. We also know where to look. The energy direction is down and in. The challenge and opportunity are Storage, Dormancy, Rest and Gathering Potential. The Central Issue is Willpower. In human beings, these hints lead us to using our willpower, to develop and commit to spending time each day in a quiet restful state of inner reflection. This could take the form of meditation, contemplation, prayer, dreamwork, shamanic journeying… any practice that takes us down and in to the deepest, soul level parts of ourselves. These practices put us in daily connection with our blueprint, our authenticity, and the wisdom that we were endowed with. In this deepest place, we connect with the deep knowing that we are part of Creation. We cultivate the wisdom to follow the threads that lead us to living into the highest version of ourselves that is a spark of light that the World so desperately needs right now. This benefits us individually, sure, but perhaps more importantly, it ripples out into the greater world, both human and more than human. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this wisdom and connection that we can bring forth because, as Nature tells us, this is the very magic that daffodils must gather every winter to bloom come spring.

Tools for gathering the deep magic of the Water Phase

· Build resources: Build the energy resources to fuel the next cycle of the year: sleep more, stay warm, consume slow-cooked foods and warm beverages. Soups and stews made with bone broth are ideal. Use warming spices like ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg. We are looking for ways to nourish ourselves without expending a lot of energy at this time of year. We want to make deposits in our deep energy bank accounts this time of year.

· Dive deep: cultivate serenity and confidence with daily contemplative practice (e.g., meditation, prayer, dream work, left hand journaling, shamanic journeying, making art without judgment… anything that lets you work with the unconscious). Contemplative practices are deposits in your energy bank account.

· Rest: engage in quiet, perhaps dreamy activities. Putter, engage in creative projects without judgment, cook, invite a friend for tea. Rest is a deposit in your energy bank account.

· Stay warm: Keep your head, neck and ankles covered, especially outdoors or in drafty places. Wind, cold and draft rob you of your protective qi and make you more susceptible to illness. Wind makes your body have to work harder to maintain enough energy (heat) for the body to function with ease. It is like running the furnace but leaving the windows open. Cold and Wind are thieves to your energy bank account.

· Take a break from screens: looking at screens, whether scrolling on your phone, or staring at a screen all day at work, raise cortisol that induce a stress response that ranges from chronic to acute flight or fight. This is the unbalanced emotion of the Water Phase, Fear, and is to be avoided. It is the opposite of calm serenity. Give yourself an hour in the morning to let your brain ease into the day before you pick up your phone or get on the computer. It is a great time for gentle exercise, stretching, meditating… Stress response on any level is a thief to your energy bank account.

· Drink warm tea: Warm tea, broth, or water with meals and between. Never iced! Warm beverages are a deposit in your energy bank account.

o New Year’s Resolutions: Use Water time to plan and gather the resources you will need to be successful with your resolutions. Wait until mid-February to put them into action. Part of the reason so many New Year’s Resolutions fall by the wayside is that we are attempting to birth something new at the Winter Solstice. That is definitely sailing against the tide. Making change is hard enough, let the force of Nature come to bear on the changes you wish to make and give you a big boost with the up and out energy of spring.

The button below is a link to a blog on why New Year Resolutions will be better supported in February

When is New Year Anyway?

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Resources:

Rhythms of Change: Reclaiming your Health Using Ancient Wisdom and Your Own Common Sense, by Mary Saunders

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