Weary winter.

Winter’s really thrown me for a loop this year.

And it’s only December.

For the last 6 months, I’ve been incorporating somatic therapy and practice into my life and it’s turned my inner world upside down. How emotion and thought and intuition express themselves as sensations in the body is a language I’m still learning, but it’s already had profound effects.

As someone who’s lived primarily from the head—disregarding emotion in favor of a logic-based perspective—I always struggled to feel present with loved ones, understand what I’m feeling, and harness the ability to articulate what I wanted and why. I had the inkling for years that there was more to life that I wasn’t fully experiencing.

I was right.

As I’ve been practicing this simple work of grounding myself in my physical moment, I’ve never felt more embodied, emotionally aware, and empowered to continue to grow more in touch with what’s happening within me. We’re all made up of mind, body, and spirit, and reconnecting to my body has been like switching on an entire third of myself for the first time ever.

With that heightened sensitivity, however, I find myself for the first winter of my life annoyed by the slowing I’m naturally wanting to do.

I have things to get done and winter’s 4 pm sunsets aren’t helping. There are expectations I’ve laid on myself and let others lay on me that I typically let run the show all year round. But this year it’s a lot harder to comply, put my head down, and miserably work through it.

While the pressure to do, do, do is to thank for my work ethic and productivity, it’s simultaneously to blame for my chronic burnout and workaholism. I’m still learning how to balance achieving the former without slipping into the latter.

I didn’t anticipate this somatic work to infringe on something I systematically use to protect my sense of self-worth, but it is.

And, it’s probably a good thing.