Cocoon Season: Igniting Renewal

Depending on which hemisphere you live in, winter is upon many of us. Winter is a time of still. It’s leaning into Danish hygge and climbing under blankets and sipping hot beverages to keep warm and cozy. We spin cocoons around ourselves and curl up in our dens. We go internal to assess, reconfigure, reimagine and prepare for what’s next, our new reality ahead.

Everyone is flipping their calendars to a new year. We’re closing 2023 and ringing in 2024. Companies and entrepreneurs are focusing internally on planning, restructuring, and preparing to bring their next big idea, product or service into the world. For many, this is a time to reset mentally and physically. Some create goals for areas they want to improve or focus more energy and attention on. Some use January as a month to shed toxic habits, creating a clean slate to make space for new healthy habits, behaviors, and approaches. 

Everywhere there is a sense of buffered quiet, like when fresh snow falls. It’s a pause on the eve of renewal and an invitation to look within. Refocusing from external to internal can have an overwhelming intensity that can feel claustrophobic, constricting, messy and uncomfortable. As what we’ve done, experienced and accomplished over the last year begins to dance with our dreams, desires, and foreseen changes, heat builds, preparing us to shed whatever is needed to move into an evolved and renewed state. The opportunity is to engage in the dance between the past present and future. What do we notice needs attention, requires a reframe, needs to be eliminated, is missing? 

We can choose to rip open our cocoon and go running into the cold, aimlessly searching for what’s next and grasping at what feels good without awareness or direction. Alternately, choosing to stay with the intensity and bravely acknowledging what there is to see brings us face-to-face with the outcomes of our behaviors and actions. We can bring ourselves calm by observing without judging. It’s then that we decide to shed what isn’t serving us and incorporate what will better serve us. The seed of our vision is planted.

From here, we naturally melt the layers between us and the renewed physical reality ahead. Taking those insights from our cozy cocoon state and turning them into intentional actions is how we begin to move our internal still quiet state into the external reality as a fresh and evolved human.