When Life Turns – The Emotional Cycles of Our Inner Seasons
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 4
- 11 min read
Updated: Dec 8
Written by Johnna Key, Spiritual Guide & Teacher
Johnna Key is known for her calming and serene voice when guiding meditations. She is the author of the newly published book, Making Space to Breathe, and YouTube channel, Journeys with Johnna.
If there’s one consistency that life will offer us, it’s that life is very inconsistent. The inconsistency and surprises bring up many emotions along the way as energy moves through the body. As the energy moves through the body, it creates the emotions that arise to the surface. These emotional responses can be a part of who we are, consistently responding in a similar fashion, or a part of an individual response to the present circumstance. We aren’t raised with a lot of emotional awareness or maturity, which can leave us feeling lost or alone, without a lot of clarity. Emotional responses can be affected by the state of the nervous system or vice versa, as well as by learned behaviour.
It’s liberating to get to know yourself and your emotional responses, as this helps you to keep your nervous system regulated, as well as having a sense of sovereignty. Developing emotional maturity and intelligence is a lost art. I love encouraging people to do what’s not expected.
Working with your inner seasons will take years, a lifetime even, to understand certain responses. Developing the inner understanding that while you may aim to respond in one way, it’s likely you respond in another way entirely. Over the years, it may feel like an onion, peeling back one layer at a time, and making a shift after each experience over time slowly changes how you show up with your emotions.
The seasons or phases of life will swirl around each one of us, it’ll depend on how you show up in that season that will shape the next one. Referring to them by our beloved four seasons' name, here are some ways to shift through life’s seasons.
Regardless of where you’re living in the world, each region has its own seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, we have four seasons – Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Regardless of where you live, a way to take some time to get to know your emotional body is by identifying how you feel during those external seasons. Take those emotions and the awareness, then begin to apply them to life’s changes. I.e., a new job, meeting new people, going through a break-up, grieving, creativity, etc, are all life changes that affect one’s day-to-day experience.
Life will always be life. Get to know your emotional body so that you can go with the flow.
Summer
When we think of summer, we can almost feel the heat of the sun, swimming in cool water, lounging on every surface to rest from the heat, cliff dives, boat rides, festivals, friends, family, longer days, and all the lounging ways. I adore the summer months! It can be a time of unexpected adventures and summer loves.
In life, the summer months bring about significant life changes that affect emotions, evoking reactions such as exhilaration, while also inducing nervousness, excitement, and the thrill of adventure, as well as the great unknown. These are the moments of unexpected opportunity or unexpected person, move, job, or trip. You weren’t planning for it, it happened, and it’s better than expected. These are the times when you tend to have more energy, gumption, and passion to go after your heart's desire.
The summer is also a time to pace yourself. You have the energy to go fast, but it doesn’t always need to be fast. Going slow in the “summer” allows you to savour the moment and create long-lasting memories or long-lasting change. This season promotes the vitality and excitement that come from living and experiencing.
One area where we can trip ourselves up is getting into our own heads. Attempting to logically “overthink it” or plan it out. Just like during the heat of the summer, the heat goes to our heads and makes us react more impulsively than we otherwise might if the “heat wasn’t on”.
We can often stop or prevent ourselves from receiving or going for something unplanned because it’s unplanned, it’s unknown. A huge majority of people are petrified of the unknown because their nervous systems aren’t ready for a new vibration. The body will do what it can to keep you safe, and sometimes that means encouraging you to pass up amazing opportunities because they're unknown.
How to detach from this fear of the unknown and let the nervous system feel safe is by leaving the overthinking mind, dropping into the body (another aspect we hyper focus on during the seasonal summer), and intuit what you need to help you receive or move forward with the unknown. Your body always knows the answer to what you need, you just need to create the space to listen.
Autumn
In Texas, we have the silly saying, “It’s fall, y’all!” In the States, we are autumn-obsessed. We love the changes in the trees, the beautiful foliage as the shift from green to vibrant oranges, reds, and golds.
As a global society, we can really struggle to change in life as gracefully as the leaves. We struggle to find the acceptance needed to allow the seasonal shift and change, resisting the inevitable, often resulting in acute or chronic illness.
When we resist the natural changes of life, we resist ourselves, we resist the entire concept of living.
I remember having that perspective living in Bali, where there are no seasons, it’s either hot and sunny or hot and rainy. The foliage doesn’t change colour, it stays the same all year round. It was pointed out to me that while living there, though the seasons around me didn’t change, my internal seasons changed, and my external world looked vastly different from my Western upbringing.
I remember resisting the Eastern world around me when I first arrived. I wasn’t confident in driving a scooter, I wasn’t able to walk anywhere, and there were no parks. I wasn’t able to get reliable Wi-Fi or even a consistent place to live for almost one year. I remember being so angry and basically crying out, “Why can’t 'here' be like ‘there’??!!”
The answer that followed was, “If you wanted ‘there’, you should’ve stayed. This is ‘here', allow it to change your colours.”
I did just that. It wasn’t easy, but it was inevitable. I was resisting for almost a year to the changes that this season of my life was initiating for me. I had left the Western world to live on an island in Asia, on the literal opposite side of the world, so of course, things would be different.
Slowly but surely, I allowed the shifts. First was the scooter, learning to drive one and being brave enough to drive myself around in traffic on the opposite side of the road was incredible. I was so afraid for months, so my first two months on the scooter, I would go for night drives with no one out. Get used to the bike, the road, the ways of turning, the concept of no red lights or stop signs, and honking to announce your approach to the intersection. It was all so, so different. Within a few months, my spirit felt liberated on that scooter!
Over time, my colours shifted, they changed and ebbed in various shades of what ultimately made me, me.
My encouragement through the Autumn seasons of life, allow your colours to shift. Visualize yourself ebbing and flowing through the hues and shades that resonate with you, let your leaves reshape themselves.
Allow the acceptance of the season to come through.
Accept the change. Accept the flow. Trust the process of the shift in perspectives. It’s okay to change your mind, learn something new, grow into or out of something you never thought you would. Accept the change.
Winter
Look out for that snowball! When I first began working on watching my emotions and how they moved as energy through me, I noticed I was a “snowballer”. One small problem would arise, a tiny snowflake, and within minutes, I would’ve created enough anxiety or fear to have a snowball. To move out of this pattern to be able to enjoy the proverbial snowflakes as they fall, I needed to become self-reflective to locate my “why”. Asking myself, “Why do I take a snowflake and quickly create an emotional snowball?
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, winter can sometimes evoke more fear in the body. Winter governs water, which is the kidney meridian that holds the emotion of fear.
Going by this philosophy, during the winter months, it's easier for emotions to take on a snowball effect and grow bigger and bigger when the individual leans more into fear-based thinking.
The winter season of life is just like the winter season of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a time to bundle up, get cozy, and get reflective. Sit with yourself more often to welcome in spaces of solitude for you to be able to self-reflect. When you’re surrounded by people, places, events, and expectations of others, it becomes muddled with your energy and confuses you about what you want and need.
Sometimes we commit ourselves to something that once we get there, we realize, “this isn’t for me, like I thought it would be.” This is the time to hibernate for winter, pull back from the commitments, observe what’s going on around you rather than absorbing it all, see how the observation makes you feel, and this will start to tell you which move is right for you.
Winter seasons of life are about developing a deep understanding of listening to your body and your intuition, letting those thoughts settle there, taking time to feel what it feels like to commit to XYZ, without the actual commitment. You’d be dating an idea or trying it on. Winter gives you time to reflect before action is needed, reducing more impulsive responses.
Societal programming has us very busy, too busy during the winter months, distracting us from the intention of this season, learning how to work with it, and learning how to apply those learnings to the emotional side of life.
If you decided to take more time this winter for fewer distractions, whatever that means for you, and began incorporating more solitude for rest and self-reflection, a lot will come up. As soon as the physical body and mind slow down, that’s always the time when the spirit or subconscious will take to speak up. We are taking on so much from the outside world, with the vast majority of us oblivious as to what we’re holding on to. When you slow down, and those unexpected emotions arise, it can feel overwhelming and scary. That’s when you take the time to seek out the help that’s needed, whether that’s a therapist, guide, teacher, or friend. We are all here to help guide one another through the process.
Put down the snowball. Watch the snowflake fall. Be present with your emotions and aware of the emotion or stories, just be aware.
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In the state of “awareness”, you’re observing, not taking action of building, observing.
Spring
Spring is a welcome time of the year. Physically, we are ready for the winter chill and heavy emotions to be over. We’re ready for something new, new beginnings, new activities, new, new, fresh, fresh.
In the Western world, while we follow the Gregorian Calendar on paper, our bodies still follow the Julian calendar, whose use was diminished in the 1500s when the Gregorian calendar took control, under the English Monarchy. Upon learning this a few years ago, I began living my emotional and physical body off the Julian calendar.
According to the forgotten Julian calendar, the new year is in the spring season, it’s when the winter frost is leaving, and the grass is sprouting.
Adopting this perspective for myself has enabled me to more easily approach new opportunities with excitement and hope rather than fear.
As a society, the vast majority of us are afraid of something new, not open to a new routine, or moving to a new city, or leaving a toxic relationship for a new singleness. Winter months keep our mind, body, spirit in the comfort zone, afraid to expand for fear of bursting, while spring invites us to bloom into that expansion of the warmer environment.
One important factor for blooming and growing is releasing the old. Letting go, detaching from the person you used to be, that version of you was “so last season”.
A way to bloom and grow without overwhelming the nervous system is to allow it to happen slowly and naturally. Resisting the urge to worry about the outcome or control how and when things happen, giving the space and time to let the growth happen on its own time. There might be several seasons of spring that you’ll move through for just one healing process.
We will always need to grow and expand into a higher or different version of ourselves, the growth of every natural organism is inevitable. Making space for growth is where the beauty can be.
The season's giving
Each season gives you something that you didn’t have before, a deeper understanding, clarity, stronger love, trust in the process, anger to move through, stages of grief, and the giving is endless.
Depending on the season, on occasion, the emotional process can become overwhelming when it does detach. Detach from devices, limit time with social media, and use Wi-Fi in general.
Detach from people or places that drain your energy or leave you feeling depleted and bamboozled.
In the process of detaching through tougher seasons, the intention isn’t to stop living or to scroll on the phone, it is instead an opportunity to get to know yourself better. An opportunity to process stored emotions for them to leave the system, welcoming in more ease into the body, mind, and spirit.
There are many seasons where it feels like no progress is being made or where it feels like you’re taking “two steps forward and one step back”. This too shall pass. It sounds so unbelievably cliché, but it will. Life will always be life, and the emotions will always stir. The sooner we learn to get to know HOW our emotions process and how to detach from the thick of the story, letting it remain a series of manageable snowflakes, the nervous system will thank you.
In the time of letting the energy of the emotion move through the body and mind, you can begin to allow the spirit to shift you within minutes. The same heightened emotional response or fear of the unknown slips away little by little until one day you realize you haven’t responded in the “old way” that you used to.
Feeling safe in the body through yoga nidra
In the practice of Yoga Nidra, it assists in carving new pathways in the brain and calming the nervous system. It’s a powerful tool for any season that you’re living in, assisting in emotional regulation and introducing the practitioner to the emotions in a safe way. Once we learn that our emotions are not scary places, we can more easily process them and move to the other side of that lesson or trigger.
If you’re working through trauma, then that will be a different story, requiring some additional time and attention in gentle ways. Yoga Nidra can assist in this way, giving the practitioner a space to begin cultivating and feeling a sense of safety in the body. A much-deserving sense of safety.
Please find Yoga Nidras for emotional support on my YouTube channel, Journeys with Johnna.
Read more from Johnna Key
Johnna Key, Spiritual Guide & Teacher
Johnna Key is a certified Yoga, Meditation guide, & Spiritual Teacher, leading others to calibrate their nervous system and ease overwhelm within the mind. Derived from her experience in the Western medicine system as a child and divorce from a narcissistic relationship as an adult, Johnna has learned and implemented tools to heal the mind, body, & spirit from traumatic experiences to exit karmic loops and generational patterns. Her passion is teaching others to find self-acceptance for their experiences and the emotions or perspectives that can surface. It's her passion to help others calm a busy mind, ease the tension in the body, and learn to meditate to find joy and self-worth in the journey we call life.
Resources:
TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) – The Web that Has No Weaver
