Coldest Days Ahead
Winter practices, warming recipes, and cozy self-care routines.
Hello friends!
I hope you enjoyed the holidays and are ready to embark on seasonal pulsing practices in the year 2025. January marks the second half of the Winter season, or the waning Moon cycle of winter. Notice on your calendar, this season includes Lesser Cold (Xiaohan) and Greater Cold (Dahan); and as such indicate that (traditionally) we are about to experience the coldest days of the year.
Here are some of the highlights of practices and considerations for this time of year:
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Make and drink winter wines. There are a variety of wonderful recipes for mulled wines with cinnamon, cloves, orange peel and other warming spices; or use these unique recipes here. If you have a delicious recipe to share, let me know and we'll post it on Notion!
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Practice this Qi Gong: Gathering the Qi of Nature. This 5 minute Daoist practice will put you in the winter flow, so include it into your morning or evening routine at this time of year.
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Prepare a burdock root recipe, it’s so delicious and nutritious. Here are a couple ideas to get you started, but be creative with it.
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Breathe, rest, and practice Yoga Nidra. Use these resources for this restful, restorative practice, perfect for the deep cold time of January. If you have other breathwork, such as alternate nose breathing, sensuous breathing, natural or reverse breathing or many others that you may be familiar with, this is a perfect time to incorporate those into your daily routine.
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Create a collage or movement practice, drawings, photographs or sounds that represent ‘water’ for you. How to be water is a fun creative practice that you can either consider during and work with during Lesser and Greater cold seasons. You can also collect poems or inspirations that remind you of water for 9 days, or find various sources and manifestations of water in your environments. Any way you work with it let this inquiry of being like water occupy you in January.
And for more advanced pulsing practitioners, here is a fun resource and practice: First find out how to calculate the 9 coldest days of the year using the 9 nine method, and then how to apply Sanjiu heavenly moxa.
- First count the 9 nines in the winter (shujiu). This practice instructs one to begin counting sets of 9 days, starting on the second day after the Winter Solstice. So this year, the solstice fell on 12/21/24, and we began counting on 12/23/24 as day 1, 12/24/24 as day 2 and so on. After we reach the first set of 9, we start again (1/1/25 as day 1, 1/2/25 as day 2 and so on); when you reach the third set of 9 days (1/10/25 - 1/18/25) you have reached the coldest days of the year!
- I love counting this by drawing one stroke for each of these (nine-stroke) Chinese characters, in order. So the top right character (meaning courtyard) is the first nine days, below that is a character(meaning front or before) that is the second nine days and the lower right character (meaning hang down or let fall) represents those coldest days.
- Next, if you are interested, apply Sanjiu heavenly moxa on the first three days of the first three 9 day periods. So this year, it would be 12/23/24 - 12/25/24; then three days of the next 9 day period 1/1/25 - 1/3/25 and finally three days during the third 9 day period 1/10/25-1/12/23. Apply moxa on the following regions: GV14 Dazhui, B13 Lung Shu both sides, B14 Jueyin both sides, B23 Kidney Shu both sides (that is 7 in total). This practice will prepare your body for the warming seasons to come.
That’s all I have for January.
Stay warm!