The 4 Seasons of Your Energy
What if feeling flat isn’t a problem to solve…but a season to embrace?
If you feel guilty or unproductive when you don’t feel “inspired”or intuitive, I want to offer a reframe that might help us in those slumps, while knowing exactly what to do to bring our inner juice back.
Just like the earth quiets in winter, our energy moves in cycles too. In here, I’ll share what it means to honour your energy seasons.
This is not about productivity. This is about returning to your own sacred timing.
Summer
Summer is what we yearn for when we’re feeling flat, dull and uninspired. Summer is what we picture in our heads on how we should be always. And no wonder, because summer is that golden time where your insides feel alive.
This is the season when you have a lot of energy, motivation and inspiration to get things done. Ideas and inspiration’s flowing, creating’s effortless, your intuition’s clear and on fire.
Synchronicities and opportunities are flowing from all directions. Even if you’re striving or pushing for things, there’s momentum when it comes to your projects and endeavours, like there’s wind in your sails.
Your focus and energy’s outward. You’re magnetic, expressive, extroverted, inspired. Even if you’re an introvert, you have more desire to connect, express, share and celebrate with others.
Ride the wave of this time when your energy levels are high. This is the best time to create, bring your ideas into the physical, to get projects and events going, and to express yourself and share your creations out into the world. Summer is when you’re in full bloom.
Autumn
Then, your energy starts to wane, and autumn comes.
Autumn is the time when you start feeling a nudge to slow down. When your energy starts to dip, and you’re feeling that closing of a chapter.
This is the best time to refine your projects, processes, systems or routines, and to gather the lessons from summer. To journal and process all that you’ve recently learned. To start culling what’s unnecessary and wrap things up.
I started feeling that inner autumn during my last couple of months of pregnancy. With energy dipping and the birth getting closer, I needed to wrap things up, delegate work, close down offerings and services that I couldn’t do during my newborn’s first year, and set up systems so things are still running in my work and life.
You might enter your inner autumn closer to the end of a big project or life event. Things are ending, and you’re preparing to slow down for your next energy season.
Winter
Then, there’s Winter. Our inner winter might be the most challenging, because this is the season our society conditions us to avoid.
This is when you might be feeling flat, low energy and uninspired. This is when we’re cocooned in the dark, when things come to a standstill, and we only have energy for survival.
During crisis, whether it’s societal or personal, our energy goes into winter mode. I remember during the pandemic, a lot of fellow artists and designers sharing how they struggled to create at this time. Whenever life gets harsh and hard, our energy will only have capacity for survival. The first year of my daughter’s life, as a newborn, felt like a deep and dark inner winter, even though my to-do list day to day has doubled.
This is inner season that feels the deepest and darkest. This is the best time to rest. To focus on just giving ourselves the basics: food, sleep, rest. Time to think, to feel supported and held, to breathe. This is not the time to launch a project, to force ourselves to create, or to push for intuitive answers.
Even if we still have tasks and work to do, tuning into our insides and seeing if we’re in our inner winter will help us not push ourselves to do more than we need to, or to shame ourselves for not achieving as much as our inner summer.
I noticed that when we truly embrace this really hard energy season, when we focus on giving ourselves the very basic things that we need, especially rest, the sooner we start moving out of our inner winter. But don’t rush it. I’ve found that embracing our inner winter is actually when we truly find our power.
This is the Energy Season when new boundaries and values are formed. Like the seed in the dark, we’re slowly changing, transforming, rebirthing.
Allow yourself to feel flat, to feel the sadness, anger, grief in the body. Give it voice through writing it down. Allowing it to be there helps shift the emotion, where our energy metabolises it into new wisdom.
And then soon enough, you start to feel the stirrings of lightness and inspiration again.
Spring
And then, spring comes. You’ll know when this energy season has come when you start getting intuitive hits and inspiration again. When you start getting new ideas, in your quiet walks, when you’re cooking, in conversation.
This is when your energy starts to awaken, and you notice your capacity increasing. You start to notice the beauty of things again.
This is the best time to gather your new ideas and write them down, to journal your intuitive insights. To start dreaming of new projects, travel, creations. This is the time for research, to gather the seeds and set foundations for the next season.
This is the time for organising your space, and to start new routines that will help you when you’re in the busy season of summer again.
This is a season of preparation, of gentle curiosity, of saying yes to the creative pulse returning.