Embrace Your Season

Something about the change of seasons always makes me pay attention. 

The light shifts. The air feels different. We start putting away one set of clothes and reaching for another. Nature seems to understand something that we sometimes struggle to accept: change is inevitable. And there can be beauty in it, even when we aren't quite ready for it.

Recently, I have started to use the phrase Embrace Your Season in my yoga teaching and in my work. These words came to me when I started to go through a new season of my own. Last year, I entered a season I knew was coming but wasn't prepared for… my only child left for college. I really struggled with the change; I was lost.

For more than 20 years, being a mom has been the role around which so much of my life has revolved. Yes, I continued to teach yoga. I led teacher trainings, hosted retreats, built community, and continued growing professionally. But motherhood and parenting were always my first priority, and it still is. So when that role changed almost overnight, even though I knew it was coming, I felt like I got hit by a freight train. 

For a few months, I found myself in a pretty dark place. I missed the rhythm of our family life. I missed being needed in the same way. And I wasn't entirely sure who I was supposed to be in this new version of my life. I don't think, as parents, we talk about that part of change enough. We are often so quick to put a positive spin on a new chapter that we forget we are allowed to grieve the chapter that just ended. 

Embracing your season doesn't mean you have to love every part of it.

Sometimes it means allowing yourself to feel the loss before you can begin to see what might be waiting on the other side. And eventually, I did. On a trip in late November of last year, something began to shift. 

I started moving out of the darkness I had been in and into a lighter space. For the first time, I began to see the space opening up in my life not simply as something left behind, but as an opportunity to rediscover parts of myself that had been waiting for my attention. There are ideas, dreams, and professional goals that I have quietly put on a shelf over the past 20 years, not because they weren't important, but because being present for my son was more important at the time. That was the season I was in.

Now I'm reimagining my business. I'm growing Intentional Journeys and dreaming about the places I want to take people. I'm thinking differently about teaching, trainings, and how I can share what I've learned beyond the walls of a yoga studio. I co-created and published a podcast. I'm writing more. Creating more. Traveling more. Saying yes to ideas that have lived in the back of my mind for years. 

In some ways, I'm reinventing myself. In others, I think I'm simply making room for parts of me that have always been there. 

And maybe that is what Embrace Your Season really means. There is a season for raising a family as well as one for building a career. A season for putting certain dreams on hold because something, or someone, needs you more. A season for creating, for resting, and for letting go. None of those seasons are more valuable than another. And they don't always arrive neatly or on our timeline. Sometimes they come in like a freight train.

As we move into a new season this week, I'm thinking about that more than ever. Fall asks us to slow down as we prepare for winter's hibernation season. In spring, we start to wake up, dust off the cobwebs, and prepare our body and soul for the longer, active days of summer. Maybe we can give ourselves permission to do the same.

Whatever season you're in—motherhood, career, transition, growth, grief, reinvention, uncertainty, adventure—I hope you don't rush through it trying to get to the next one.

I know, I KNOW, it's easier said than done. But try to be where you are. Take what this season has to teach you. And when you feel the shift beginning, stay curious about what might be waiting on the other side.

You don't have to have it all figured out. I'm certainly still figuring it out myself. But I'm beginning to understand that a changing season isn't only an ending. Sometimes, it's an invitation.

Embrace Your Season.

- Kate