The Season of Rest: Honoring Hibernation as Renewal

Reclaiming Spaciousness in a World That Never Pauses

Ancient civilizations and Indigenous traditions suggest that the true new year begins not in January, but with the arrival of the spring equinox in March (read more about it here). This year, I decided to take that to heart. Instead of forcing myself into resolutions and productivity right after the holidays, I allowed myself to hibernate—from December through the end of February. I made a conscious decision to take the first quarter of the year to rest, reflect, and renew my inner life, to step back and look at the bigger picture of my existence.

The frenetic pace of New York City no longer felt sustainable to me, yet it took my family and my community pointing out that I was running on fumes for me to finally see it clearly. I was constantly “at capacity,” stretched thin, caught in the loop of doing.

Initially, it felt unsettling to pause. If you know me, you know how hard slowing down is for me. It brought up all my fears: What happens if I stop—will everything I’ve worked for unravel? If I’m not constantly moving forward, am I falling behind? What if rest isn’t productive enough? What if I let go and there’s nothing to catch me?

For so long, I’ve equated productivity with self-worth, moving at a relentless pace to prove—to myself, to the world—that I am doing enough, being enough. But something in me had reached its limit. It dawned on me that I hadn’t truly stepped back in years.

As I moved through this period of rest, I felt an old, familiar scarcity mindset creeping back in. It had been a while since I sat with that feeling—that quiet but persistent worry that I wasn’t doing enough, that I wasn’t enough. And yet, without realizing it, I kept making choices that deepened that very fear. I said yes to too many things, stretched myself too thin, and filled my time in ways that only drained me further.

I’ve come to realize that urgency can be deceptive. It tricks us into believing that time is slipping away when, in truth, time softens and expands when we stop chasing it. The more I resisted the impulse to rush, the more I saw how much I had been missing. Slowing down wasn’t just an act of rest—it was an act of reclaiming spaciousness in my life. Even as the world pressed forward at full speed, I could choose to move differently.

The goodness we feel is lacking in the world is often a reflection of the love within us that has yet to be fully expressed. And so, allowing myself to hibernate, to step out of the race long enough to catch my breath, has been my effort to nurture that love—to make space for it to grow.

I needed to create a space of healing for myself—to step into my own rhythm again and find belonging in my own presence. To recenter.

Nature has always held the answers to questions I struggle with. Most trees conserve energy in the winter, letting go of their most vulnerable parts—shedding their leaves to avoid breakage in the extreme winds and cold. (Evergreens, of course, have their own unique adaptation.) Winter, in its quiet severity, asks us to let go in order to endure. I’ve been thinking a lot about seasons—how nature moves with them, and how we, too, need to honor times of harvest and times of rest.

Maybe the world’s urgency isn’t a reflection of what you need to be doing, but of what you need to resist.

Lately, The Nap Ministry’s beautiful Rest Deck has been helping me integrate this practice into my daily life as I prepare to step into this energetic new year. I also came across a reflection from Manoj Dias on Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s concept of the seven types of rest, which sparked my curiosity about the different ways we experience depletion at various points in our lives. It’s a reminder that rest isn’t one-dimensional—it’s not just physical, but mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social, and spiritual.

So I’ll leave you with the question that has quietly guided me over the past few months:

What would happen if you let yourself rest?

Con cariño,

Sue