Desire More Ease? 8 Winter Solstice Hacks 🕯️

Do you desire more ease this season?

Winter Solstice is the most yin or feminine moment of the year, carrying the potency of rebirth as we sink into the healing womb cave of winter - a magical time when the movement of the sun appears to stand still before the light returns (Sol - Stice = Sun stands still in Latin). 

We are too being asked to stand still, to slow, to listen.

Your body is nature. Despite the hustle and bustle, like winter herself, this season is actually asking you to slow down.

In yoga philosophy the moment of winter solstice could be described as shunyata -  emptiness that is pregnant with potential.

This means that you are ripe with potential at this moment in the year. Just like a seed laying dormant, building strength for her moment of glory, just like a fetus needs time to grow and gestate - it's not yet the time to rush + fill space!

In the midst of the hustle + bustle, here's a few simple ways to align to the healing power of nature…

❄️ Embrace the Darkness ~ Minimize screen time + phone time (especially when you're in the physical presence of people you love). Ditch the electric lights and opt for candles after dark as much as possible.

❄️ Get Outside ~ Walk outdoors without your phone to take in the beauty of the winter landscape (bonus if you walk after dark to admire the psychadelic stars).

❄️  Sleep More ~ Move slower + gift yourself with earlier bedtimes and naps.

❄️  Release ~ Light a fire and burn any old journals or intentions you're ready to release from this last year.

❄️ Express Gratitude ~ Tell your dear ones you love them + honor your elders by letting them know how much they mean to you. Leave a biodegradable offering by your favorite tree to express gratitude to Mother Nature for all the blessings of your life + your health.

❄️ Reflect ~ Carve out a quiet moment to look back on the year + ask yourself

• What worked well for me this year?

• What challenges did I face, and what lessons did they teach me?

• What am I ready to release to make space for new growth?

• Who do I want to be in 2025? How do I want to show up in my life - for myself & for my loved ones?

❄️ Evergreen Medicine ~ Gather + Brew Evergreen tea or place some evergreen branches in your delicious bath (make sure you're Christmas tree wasn't grown with pesticides before using it).

❄️ Ritual ~ Hold your own ceremony or host a moon circle or vision board circle with your close sisters or family to reflect on what you're cleansing and what you're calling in during this potent moment of rebirth.

The cycles of nature mirror the cycles within us. Just as the Sun begins its slow return, we too can use this time to rekindle our inner light. Whether you’re looking to embrace change, seek clarity, or simply find more balance in your life, the Winter Solstice is a beautiful reminder that even in the darkest moments, light is always on the horizon.

How does your body desire to receive

the nourishment of Winter Solstice?

I'd love to hear from you! Reply to connect + let us know what keeps you sane and grounded during the holy days. 

Reclaiming Friday the 13th

Infamous Friday the 13th… this day has been ingrained into the collective psyche as the most “unlucky” and “evil” day. 

Some airplanes still skip row 13 and many hotels, hospitals, and skyscrapers skip the 13th floor, labelling it as "12A" or "14" because of the widespread belief that the number 13 brings bad luck.

Millions of people suffer from triskaidekaphobia, the irrational fear of the number 13, avoiding significant life decisions—like signing contracts, flying, or getting married—on dates involving the number 13.

How did this happen?

Friday the 13th is the day of the Feminine. 

In astrology, Friday is the day of the Goddess, named for the powerful Norse Goddess of love, Freya, and her Roman counterpart, Venus. This is the day of the week to celebrate the feminine gifts of creation, relationships, sensuality, beauty, intuition and community.

The number 13 reflects the lunar cycle. Each of the 13 yearly moons pull the waters of our body and hormonal cycle shifting our moods and fertility. The Moon can never be separated from the blood of a women’s body that gives life. 

Innocent enough, right?

In indigenous wisdom including Hinduism, Judaism, ancient Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec and Native American spirituality 13 has always been a spiritually powerful and significant number.

Traditions and cultures that still favor some version of lunar time-keeping include Islam, Judaism, Chinese and Tibetan cultures, traditional Buddhist and Hindu cultures, and many varied Indigenous cultures around the world.

Yet, by the late 1800's, parts of Europe has begun to popularize Friday the 13th, the day of the feminine, as associated with “witchcraft.” 

Looking back in history we see that the word “witch” was a crafty invention to bolster and secure the growing wealth and political power of the Catholic Church. 

The unique and unprecedented mythology of “one male God” was entirely contrary to the indigenous religions known on all continents of planet Earth since the beginning of human religion 100,000 years ago. 

In order to accomplish a murderous mass political coup cloaked as “the will of God,” something had to be done….

The modern invention of the word “witch” was the incredible (and morbid) genius at the center of a massively successful rebrand perhaps unparalleled in history - a gargantuan feat of mass hypnosis that would make the Apple marketing team jealous.  

“Witch” became a label for powerful, land owning women leaders who were deeply influential in their community as healers, mothers, teachers, oracles. Accusation of witchcraft allowed the political opportunists of the Church to seize women’s land and assets.

This rebrand, like all marketing, depended on shifting the meaning of certain concepts….

• This rebrand depended on a demonization of the cycles of Nature

… as women are innately cyclical creatures who have a special relationship with darkness - the dark of the moon, the dark of the womb, the dark of blood shed at menstruation and childbirth to bring life, the generative powers of fertile soil. 

• The feminine had to be recast as the enemy of orderly human rationality and logic

… as women reflected the fluid, dynamic, sensual and liberating intelligence of the body and Mother Earth.  

• This rebrand depended upon the proliferation of a new mythical land called “Hell.”
  

… Ironically, the word Hell originated from the Norse Goddess of Death, Hel. However, far from the torturous Christian concept of “Hell,” this Goddess embodies death as an organic process of karmic healing, a portal to spiritual union with God/Goddess, the pathway to awakening divine love and Truth, a natural step to the renewal and rebirth of Spring after the darkness of Winter.

In the Tarot, the 13th card of the Major Arcana is the often misunderstood Death card. Instead of signifying actual death, the card signals the transformation that comes from releasing limiting ideas of who we are.

The result of this rebrand was a hyper masculine, yang-dominant & solar-oriented culture rooted in fear and judgement , a culture that inevitably fears and disrespects the cyclical intelligence of Earth, of woman, of the soul’s journey of shadow and revelation. 

Through this rebrand, we were sold a lie... 

Sex is sinful.

Our blood is shameful.

Rest is lazy.

Your feelings are too much.

The Dark Feminine teaches us:

Sex is sacred.

Your blood is powerful.

Rest brings rebirth.

Your feelings are messengers.

The result of these top down marketing efforts resulted in the largest holocaust in history called the Witch Trials.

While the history has been forgotten, it’s wounds fester on in the unconscious psyche of both men and women.

We’ve survived by unconsciously and often consciously shunning our own feminine nature, disconnecting from the universal wisdom of our bodies, unconsciously making ourselves smaller and smaller at treacherous cost to our wellbeing, the health of the Earth and human civilizations.

What else could we have done to live and raise our children, to love our partners, to share our gifts, to survive?

While our ancestors honored and, in fact, worshipped the mysterious darkness of night, winter, the new moon and the mysterious cave of the sacred Womb + Yoni, as the source from which new life arises, we’ve become a people afraid of the dark, encouraged to shy away from all which dwells in the shadows.

Because our mass mythology doesn’t support us to embrace our own shadows for healing, we project our natural darkness onto others. Herein lies the root of all personal and collective violence.

As we reclaim the ancient mythology of the Goddess, the healing power of the dark feminine is where we find a power & wisdom so profound, it threatens the very fabric of the modern world. 

So, reclaiming Friday the 13th is kind of a BIG deal. 

The comeback of Friday the 13th gets bigger every single year. I’ve witnessed it grow and grow with my own eyes since I began on the path of feminine awakening 16 years ago. 

As more women remember their inner power and wisdom, this day is being reclaimed as a call to return to your body, your intuition and feminine magic.

Does any of this trigger you?

The dark Goddess reminds us that our triggers are our gurus. When we are triggered, it’s a sign that our shadow is near - a part of us that we’ve unconsciously sacrificed to feel safe, to be accepted, is calling our attention.

This is the path to remembering our wholeness and holiness.

We cannot reclaim our own feminine gifts and superpowers - our intuition, magic, sensuality, sexuality, our body, our devotion to global community rooted in unity versus separation, without reclaiming the dark, the cycles of the Earth, the moon and our bodies.

How will you ritually reclaim this day for yourself?

I invite you to spend time in nature or dance while listening to the transmission of my “Wake the Witch” playlist by clicking here.

Through our induvidual communion with the moon and our bodies, we honor our indigenous ancestors and all the women persecuted over the past thousand years and still to this day in Europe and around the Globe by reclaiming their reverence for the Goddess in all of her forms and standing for devotion to compassion and the interconnection of humans with all of life.

How you’re holding yourself with compassion around your own triggers during this moment of mass awakening of the feminine on Planet Earth?

Please let us know below.

With the endless love of the Light and the Dark,

Hayley

P.S. Let’s spread the word…. 🙈

Faces of Feminine Awakening ~ The Healer

Happy New Moon in Virgo ~

She is the Healer Within You

Your life is your medicine,

This exact moment is your medicine,

Even your pain is the pathway back to healing.

Woman, it’s all medicine.

When you remember this, you become the medicine our world so desperately needs,

Enjoy these new moon affirmations, journal prompts and let us know what's coming up for you around the awakening of your own inner healer.

As a grounded Earth sign, Virgo within is the keeper of our sacred tasks. She’s a practical, reliable and grounded earth energy that analyzes, prioritizes, categorizes and processes information to put it into action in our 3D reality.

This is the archetype epitomized by acupuncturists and herbalists who train for a lifetime in the study of plants so they know which herbs heal a stomachache and which heal a broken heart. Virgo within is excellent at identifying and addressing challenges with the perfect tool in her plentiful toolkit.

Unfortunately, when Virgo within is disconnected from her wholeness she can be overly critical and judgmental. The world, everything and everyone in it, becomes a problem to be solved, something to be fixed.

Because virgo energy is highly mental, she can keep herself overly busy and turn her eagle eye for detail and perfection back on herself as violent self criticism resulting in perfectionism and even eating disorders and physical or emotional masochism.

When our view is too zoomed in and myopic, we get stressed out and see only through the shadow colored glasses of our limited ego colored by our past experiences and wounds. The places within us that need healing manifests in our outward life as misalignment or chaos.

This and all of our shadows are an invitation to uplevel, a task for the Healer within who knows that "we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” - A. Einstein

The medicine for out of balance Virgo within us is to anchor into the feminine - take a deep breath, reclaim gratitude for the miracle of life and accept this moment exactly as it is versus fighting it.

Fighting the reality of the moment, as imperfect as it might seem and as much as we might want to change it, is not a war we can win. Because no one ever wins in war.

The illusion of perfection is a construction of the ego that is desperate to control this life that is, ultimately, uncontrollable. This illusion of control is a tenant of the patriarchy that keeps us scared of expressing our true selves, that maintains a consumer society and hierarchy, that can endlessly sell products to women by implying that they aren’t pretty enough, young enough or ___ (fill in the blank) enough.

We all need to be regularly reminded to not ‘should’ on ourselves.

When my inner critic or perfectionist shows up I reach into my yogic toolkit and pull out the mantras below.  If you're less of the touchy-feely type you might even write a short love letter to hang on your fridge -

---

Dear Perfection, External Conditioning around Beauty

and Capitalist Models of Self Worth Predicated on Productivity ~

Fuck off.  (And blessings on your way!)

XO Love,

Me

---

Enjoy these new moon affirmations, journal prompts and let us know what's coming up for you around the awakening of your own inner healer.

Affirmations

♍ The greatest gift I can offer the world is my own healing

♍ The greatest healing I can offer another human is my full presence

♍ I accept this moment exactly as it is

♍ I accept myself exactly as I am

♍ I accept my body exactly as it is

♍ I am in tune with my body, and I respect its needs and desires

♍ I release past wounds and welcome healing into my life

Virgo Journal Prompts

♍  What is one area of your life where you feel called to heal? What support do you need to embark on this healing journey?

♍  Healed and whole is your original and organicstate. We heal by simply removing blocks impeding the natural flow of this river of vitality and grace. What is something you desire to let go of with this new moon—whether it’s an old belief, a habit, or a relationship — that no longer serves you?

New Moon Rituals to Cultivate Your Inner Healer + Move from Chaos to Order

♍ Bury Old Grievances ♍

Virgo is ruled by the Earth element. The soil herself is always eager to compost our burdens. It’s her superpower is to alchemize our (sh)it into fresh lifeforce for both us and the world.

When we hang on to old hurts or patterns that are no longer serving us, we block our energetic rivers (nadis), we don’t feel as vibrant and this will eventually manifest as dis-ease. Heal yourself now by making a new moon date to bury an old grievances or an old pattern that is ready to go.

Locate a quiet, peaceful outdoor location where you feel connected to nature. If you can’t be outdoors, create a small altar indoors with natural elements (like plants, stones, or flowers).

Ground Yourself ~ Stand barefoot on the earth, take a few deep breaths, and visualize roots growing from your feet into the ground. Feel the connection to the earth’s energy.

Light a Candle (Optional ~ make sure it’s safe if you’re outdoors). As the flame burns, focus on its warmth and light, symbolizing your intention to release and transform old emotions.

Reflect or Journal What emotional baggage, limiting beliefs, or past experiences are you ready to let go of?

Dig a Small Hole ~ As you dig, feel and visualize the earth willingly opening up to receive your burdens.

Speak into the Hole whatever it is your re letting go of then try this statement “I release these burdens to the earth. I let go of what no longer serves me. I trust the earth to transform this energy for my highest good.”

Make an Offering ~ Place a grounding crystal or small offering on top of the burial site to further anchor your intention.

Water the Earth ~ Pour a little water over the burial site, symbolizing cleansing and purification. As you do, visualize the water washing away the old energy and seeding new growth and opportunities.

Close the Ritual with Gratitude ~ by thanking the Earth and Moon: Express gratitude to the earth and the moon for their support in your release and transformation.

Blow Out Your Candle: As you extinguish the candle, take a deep breath, and feel a sense of completion and lightness.

Reflect and Integrate ~  Consider journalling after the ritual about how you feel, any insights you gained, or any changes you notice in the coming days. Engage in any delicious, healing self-care activities like a warm bath, meditation, or a nature walk to nurture yourself as you integrate the energy of the ritual.

♍  Commit to Seeing Beauty ♍ 

Deactivate the perfectionist “fixer” virgo shadow by committing to noticing first what is beautiful when you look in the mirror. When we practice this consciously many times/day we start to effortlessly bring this practice into our work, our partnerships, our family and all areas of our life more often, anchoring into gratitude and thereby creating more of what we appreciate.

While striving for perfection may just seem like high standards, it’s actually an ineffective technique to cope with the deep-seated fear of not being enough, seeking validation and approval through flawless performance rather than embracing your own inherent worth.

Write a note on your mirror(s) with something like “Gratitude first.” Each time you see it, look yourself in the eyes, call out a specific thing you appreciate about your appearance and give yourself a simple (extra credit if you wink).

Practice accepting your body and this moment as it is - 'don't should on yourself.’

How can you apply this same ritual to your partnership, your relationship with your kids, your yoga practice, your employees, your home, etc? Post stickies in as many places as you need and get to practicing.

The benefits are abundant and immediate.

♍  Compassionately Streamline Your To - Do list ♍ 

Virgo creates grounded, sustainable systems so that we live from our center and clarifying our priorities is potent Virgo.

Do you cultivate your to-do list practice as a sacred space or as a dumping ground replete with overwhelm? With this process the creation of your list can become a spiritual practice of shedding perfection and overdoing and prioritizing spaciousness. Awaken your magical power to create more time for yourself by shrinking your list and receiving more support.

Take inventory of what areas of your life could use your loving attention. What are area of your life has been feeling chaotic or out of control? You can create a to - do list for that area specifically but you can also apply this process to your general to - do lists.

Once you have your to -do list ask yourself these questions inspired by Kate Northrup for each item…

Does this need to be done? If not, just let it go. Feels so good.

Does this need to be done by me? If there’s anyway you can outsource it - DO! Reach out now.

Does this need to be done right now? Your intuition will tell you if this has been put off long enough.

Is there anyway that I can receive support around this? Maybe from a mentor, coach, therapist or by sharing your feelings with your women’s circle or a trusted friend. If this is a chaotic area of your life, chances are that your first order of business is to talk it through with another wise woman.

If the item on your list passes the test and wants to be addressed this week or month, schedule it in your calendar now, even if you schedule it as a span of several days.