12/21/2025
🌿 Getting Through the Holidays — An Ancestral, Trauma-Informed Lens
Winter was never meant to be loud.
Across many ancestral traditions, this season was a time to slow the body, conserve energy, and tend to what aches beneath the surface. Modern holidays often demand the opposite — speed, brightness, performance.
If this season feels heavy, here are a few gentle ways to move through it without abandoning yourself:
1. Let winter be winter
You are not meant to operate at summer speed right now.
Fatigue, grief, and inwardness are not failures — they are biological and ancestral signals to rest.
2. Release the idea that healing means feeling better
Sometimes healing looks like feeling what is already there, without rushing it away.
Ancestral grief often moves slowly and quietly.
3. Tend the nervous system before the story
Before analyzing family dynamics or old wounds, help the body feel safe: • warmth
• breath
• steady rhythm
• gentle movement
Safety comes before insight.
4. Boundaries are forms of protection, not punishment
Many ancestors survived by knowing when to step back, not by over-giving.
You don’t owe access to your body, time, or energy because it’s a holiday.
5. Grief may surface — even if you “should be fine”
The body remembers what the mind has learned to carry silently.
Tears, numbness, irritation, or withdrawal can all be forms of wisdom.
6. Create small rituals instead of big expectations
A candle.
A warm drink.
A moment of quiet before bed.
Ritual does not need witnesses to be real.
7. You are not broken for struggling this time of year
You are responding to history, memory, and nervous-system patterning.
That is not weakness — it is context.
Move gently.
The body knows the way through winter.
