Is This a Hard Time for You? Winter Solstice, Seasonal Depression, and the Return of Light

The lights go up earlier each year, it seems. Storefronts blaze with cheer, carols loop endlessly, and everyone asks about your plans. Yet for many of us, this season—the stretch from late November through the new year—feels less like celebration and more like survival. Do you feel it? The burden of being cheerful? Do you feel out of step with the season everyone else is celebrating?

If you're struggling right now, if the darkness feels heavier than it should, if you can't quite muster the joy everyone expects: you're not alone.

(..to skip right to practical tips for the winter blues click here..)

The Weight of Winter

There's a reason this time of year is difficult. As the days grow shorter and the sun retreats, our bodies and psyches respond to something ancient. Seasonal affective depression is real and measurable, affecting millions as melatonin production increases and serotonin dips in the reduced light. But beyond the biochemistry lies something deeper—a fundamental challenge to how we've been taught to live.

(..For more on the multilayered nature of seasonal affective disorder click here..)

Our Western culture doesn't know how to be still. We're trained to produce, to achieve, to keep moving forward regardless of the season. Yet nature here in the Northern Hemisphere is telling us something different. The trees have dropped their leaves. The earth has grown cold. The light is withdrawing. Everything in the natural world is turning inward, slowing down, preparing for dormancy. And here we are, stringing lights and rushing between parties, refusing the invitation to rest that winter extends.

The Return of the Light: Winter Solstice in Chinese Medicine

In Chinese medicine, the winter solstice is not just another day on the calendar—it marks a profound turning point in the energetics of nature and our own bodies. This sacred moment is governed by the Gallbladder organ network, and it represents the return of Yang.

The I Ching offers us Hexagram 24, called Fù—The Return, or The Return of the Light. Its image is striking: one bright unbroken yang line emerges at the base, beneath five dark broken yin lines above. This tidal hexagram corresponds to the Gallbladder's energy at this precise moment—maximum darkness holding within it the first spark of returning light. Following the solstice, life begins stirring back into nature, almost imperceptibly at first. Each day stretches a bit longer.

This is not a call for sudden action. Perhaps we could call it the moment for strategic risk assessment. The northern hemisphere remains locked in cold. Our task is to protect the yang that's beginning to kindle within us, to move carefully and avoid depleting our reserves. The warming and movement are just beginning their work beneath the surface.

In classical Chinese medical texts, the Gallbladder bears an extraordinary designation: the Officer of Zhongzheng. This term encompasses the idea of uprightness and clarity arising from one's center. The Daoist text Guanzi tells us that Zhongzheng forms the foundation of all healing and restoration. What this points to is our inherent ability to find our way back—to reconnect with balance, health, and what feels right in body, mind, heart, and spirit. This capacity has been called humanity's central virtue.

(credit to my teacher Heiner Fruehauf for elucidating this in the Introduction to The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Transmission of​ Acupuncture by Yang Zhenhai and Liu Lihong)

This is the gift of the winter solstice moment. Not forced positivity or manufactured cheer, but the capacity to return—to find our way back to what is true and right within us. To be discerning and make choices that align with our deepest nature. To trust the stirring of yang underneath the stillness.

The Unity We've Forgotten

We exist within an interconnected web—the human realm inseparable from heaven above and earth below. Yet our contemporary world operates on a different assumption. We've been taught to see ourselves as apart from nature rather than part of it. In our economic systems, the natural world becomes simply raw material awaiting extraction, and we ourselves become units of productivity expected to perform identically whether it's the depths of December or the height of June.

But we are still creatures of this earth, still responsive to the tilt of the planet and the arc of the sun. The same forces that pull the sap down into the roots of trees are working in us. The same darkness that sends animals into hibernation touches our nervous systems. We feel the solstice in our bodies, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The Pause at the Horizon

There's a remarkable astronomical phenomenon that happens around the winter solstice. Orion's Belt—those three bright stars that cultures around the world have noticed and named—appears to pause at the horizon. The ancient Egyptians called them the Three Kings. Christians later associated them with the Magi traveling to witness a birth. But the observation is older than any particular tradition: for several days, these stars seem to stand still before beginning their ascent again.

This pause is mirrored in the sun itself. Solstice comes from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). For three days around December 21st, the sun appears to stop its southward journey across the sky. It hovers at its lowest point. The darkness reaches its maximum. And then, imperceptibly at first, the light begins to return.

Can you imagine our ancestors watching this moment with held breath? What if the sun didn't turn back? What if the darkness continued? Every winter solstice was a crisis point, a death that required faith in resurrection.

The Birth of Light Across Cultures

This is why nearly every culture in the northern hemisphere has a winter solstice celebration centered on the return of light and the birth of hope. The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia and Dies Natalis Solis Invicti—the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. The Persians marked Yalda, the triumph of light over darkness. Scandinavian peoples lit bonfires for Yule, burning logs through the longest night to coax the sun's return. The Hopi observe Soyal, a ceremony to welcome the sun back from its winter house. In China, the Dongzhi Festival celebrates the return of longer days and the balance of yin beginning to shift toward yang.

These aren't just quaint folk customs. They are sophisticated spiritual technologies for navigating the psychological terrain of winter. They acknowledge the death—the real loss of light, warmth, and growth.

Christianity placed Jesus's birth at this time not by historical accident but by deep wisdom. The story of a child born in the darkest time, in the humblest circumstances, carrying the light of divine consciousness—this is the perennial human story. It's the story of hope emerging from despair, life from death, meaning from suffering. It's the promise that even in our darkest night, something new is gestating.

Birthing New Consciousness

Incubation. This is the real work of winter. The seed underground is undergoing a transformation that will allow it to burst forth when conditions are right. The bear in the cave is gestating cubs, her body performing miracles while she sleeps.

What if your difficulty right now isn't a problem to be solved but a process to be honored? What if the struggle to find joy, the desire to withdraw, the feeling that you can't keep up with everything—what if these are your body's wisdom speaking? What if you're in that moment represented by Hexagram 24, where the yang is returning underneath, but the outer conditions still call for conservation and stillness?

The Gallbladder's gift—that capacity to return to rightness, to evaluate and make the right choice—is about recognizing what is true right now and choosing to align with it. Maybe the right choice is to do less. To rest more. To honor the season your body is in, even if the culture around you is racing forward.

This doesn't mean clinical depression should go untreated, or that suffering should be romanticized. Light therapy helps. Vitamin D helps. Sometimes medication helps. And there are ancient, practical ways to support this tender time: warm, cooked foods like congee and slow cooked stews that don't tax your digestive fire. Keeping your lower back and neck covered to protect the Gallbladder and Kidney energy. Gentle movement like Qi Gong rather than intense exercise that depletes your reserves. These are simple acts of care for something fragile and precious that's trying to be born. (For more practical tips for the winter blues click here).

Because that newborn yang energy is vulnerable. It's like the first green shoot pushing through frozen ground, or a candle flame cupped in your hands against the wind. It can be extinguished if we're careless. This is why our ancestors didn't face this passage alone—they gathered, lit fires together, sang the sun back in collective witness. The isolation so many feel during this season runs counter to what this moment actually asks of us: to hold each other through the turning, to be warmed by more than our own small flame.

Making Space for Stillness

What would it mean to honor winter? To let yourself do less, want less, shine less brightly for a few months? To safeguard your yang as you would protect a small flame in the wind? To go to bed earlier. To say no to obligations that drain you. To sit by a fire, drink something warm, and let your mind wander without purpose. To stop pretending you're fine when you're not.

Could we sit in the darkness without pretending it isn't dark?

There's no socially sanctioned space for dormancy, no collective acknowledgment that this is the season for withdrawal. You'll have to claim it for yourself, probably imperfectly, perhaps just in small moments snatched from the demands of life.

But even a little makes a difference. Even the recognition—this is supposed to be hard, I'm not failing, I'm responding to the natural world—can ease the secondary suffering we create by judging our struggle.

Right now, the work is to be with what is: the darkness, the cold, the slowness. The grief, too—for those not at the table this year, for the dreams that didn't take root, for the losses this ending year has brought. Winter's depth is where we store such things, not to be rid of them but to let them settle into the soil of who we're becoming. It's the honest acknowledgment that every turning requires us to let something die before something new can live.

You are in winter. And winter has its own wisdom, its own timing, its own necessary darkness.

If this is a hard time for you, I want you to know: you're responding appropriately to the season. The fear that the light won't return, the weariness of carrying on in darkness, the strange sorrow that comes when the world goes still.

And what we can trust: the light always returns.

You carry within you the capacity to return. Trust the darkness. Trust the slow stirring underneath. Trust that what feels dormant in you is not dead but preparing. The right way of being lives inside of you, and winter is teaching you how to find your way back to it.

We're in this together,

Kelly