When the Season Outside Doesn’t Match the Season Within
Usually, when the first signs of spring arrive, something in me wakes up.
March comes, the light shifts, the air softens, and I can feel the old spark return. I start making plans to fix up my house, create art, travel, camp, walk, wander, plant, move, and begin again. It feels almost magical, like some dormant part of me has been waiting beneath the frozen ground for permission to rise.
But this year, the spark never came.
It’s the end of June now, and instead of feeling energized by the long days of summer, I find myself craving the cool, quiet shelter of my home. I’m annoyed by the sunlight still pouring through my windows at nine o’clock at night. I want darkness, solitude, silence, and small enclosed spaces.
Even in my evening meditations, I haven’t been sitting in the middle of my meditation room with candles lit around me, the way I normally do. I’ve been sitting in the closet of my meditation room with the door closed.
At first, this worried me.
I kept thinking I should want to be outside. I should want to go on my early morning walks. I should want to sit on the deck after work, plan weekend camping trips, wander through nature, and soak up every bit of summer while it’s here.
And because I wasn’t feeling any of that, I began to wonder what was wrong with me and I began to feel disappointed in myself because I believed I was wasting my summer.
The Weight of “Should”
I tried to make myself do the summer things I usually love to do.
I tried going out for my early morning walks. I tried sitting outside after work. I tried going camping and made weekend plans and all the things that normally make summer feel alive to me. But instead of restoring me, those things exhausted me, like I was moving against something inside of me that needed nurturing.
It wasn’t that I hated doing these things. It wasn’t that I’d suddenly become a different person. It was more that something in me was asking for quiet, and I kept responding with expectations.
I kept telling myself I should want to be outside. I should want to be active. I should want to make the most of summer. I should be grateful for the long evenings, the warmth, the light, and all the things I normally look forward to.
But there’s a particular kind of suffering that happens when we need one thing and keep telling ourselves we should need another.
It creates conflict inside the body. It creates a low hum of unease, the kind that’s difficult to name because nothing obvious is wrong. You’re just living inside a tension between what’s true and what you think should be true.
And that’s where I’d been living.
I wasn’t simply tired. I was arguing with myself. I was resisting what my own soul seemed to be asking for because it didn’t match the season, my expectations, or the version of myself I thought I should be by now.
The Walk I Almost Cancelled
This morning, I almost cancelled on a walking meditation with friends.
A few of us try to gather a couple of times a month to do one of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s walking meditations together. We meet at a friend’s ranch called Indigo Grace outside of town, and then we each go our separate ways, walking the trails on her acreage for the hour-long meditation. Then we discuss our experiences afterward.
It’s a beautiful practice, and over time, I’ve learned that profound understandings often come to me during those walks. Something about the combination of movement, nature, spaciousness, and meditation seems to loosen whatever has been tangled inside me.
But I hadn’t attended any of the walks yet this summer. Between camping, my son’s high school graduation events, and the general fullness of life, I’d been away from the practice for a while. And this morning, when I felt myself wanting to cancel again, some deeper part of me knew I probably needed to go.
So I went.
And as usually happens when I stop arguing with myself long enough to listen, clarity began to emerge.
The Ease Beneath the Conflict
As I walked through the trails, I began to understand something about the ease I’d felt during the winter.
It wasn’t that everything in my life had been perfect then. It wasn’t that all uncertainty had disappeared or every part of me had been healed. The ease was there because, for a time, I’d stopped fighting myself.
I was allowing myself to feed my soul what it needed. I was caring for my body. I was honoring the things that helped me feel safe, healthy, grounded, and whole.
There wasn’t a great internal argument taking place.
And because there wasn’t an argument, there was peace.
Somewhere along the way, though, I’d started telling myself what I should be feeling. I’d started measuring my inner life against the outer season. I’d turned summer into another expectation I was failing to meet.
No wonder I felt uneasy.
The unease wasn’t coming from my need for solitude. It was coming from my resistance to that need.
That realization softened something in me almost immediately. If my soul needs solitude right now, then it needs solitude. If my body needs cool rooms, quiet evenings, and fewer demands, then that’s what it needs. If something in me is asking for shelter while deeper things are working themselves out beneath the surface, then maybe shelter isn’t avoidance.
Maybe it’s wisdom.
The Inner Seasons We Don’t Always Understand
There are seasons in life, and I don’t mean the kind marked by weather.
The body has seasons. The soul has seasons. The heart has its own quiet intelligence, and sometimes it asks for things we don’t understand until much later, if we ever understand them at all.
Sometimes a season of expansion comes easily. We feel ready to be seen, to move, to create, to travel, to open the windows and step into the light. We’re able to say yes to life without forcing it because the yes rises naturally from within us.
And sometimes the soul pulls inward.
Sometimes it asks for darkness, not because something’s wrong, but because something tender is being restored. Sometimes it asks for stillness, not because we’re failing to live fully, but because some part of us is trying to come back into relationship with itself.
I wrote recently about allowing, but this morning I saw another layer of that lesson.
It’s funny how lessons come back around again and again. We think we’ve learned them, and in some ways, we have. But then life brings the lesson into another room of the house, another corner of the psyche, another place where we didn’t realize we were still resisting.
Maybe this is the lesson of this inner season for me. A deeper experience of allowing. A deeper softening around what I think I should want. A deeper willingness to stop building walls between myself and what I actually need.
The Walls We Build Against Ourselves
I’ve written before about resistance, too, and about how many of the walls between us and the life that’s calling are walls we unknowingly build ourselves.
This morning, I saw how I’d done that again.
I’d created my own inner conflict by judging myself for not wanting what I thought I should want. I’d turned my need for solitude into a problem to solve instead of a truth to honor. I’d made myself wrong for needing shelter during a season when I thought I was supposed to crave sunlight.
That’s often how the wall gets built. Not always through some enormous act of self-sabotage, but through one small judgment at a time. One “I should be different” at a time. One refusal to trust the quiet truth of our own inner season.
And the painful thing is, we often do this while believing we’re helping ourselves.
We think we’re encouraging ourselves to live more fully. We think we’re pushing ourselves toward joy, health, expansion, or growth. But encouragement and force don’t feel the same in the body.
Encouragement has love in it.
Force has judgment in it.
And I could feel the difference this morning. Going to the walking meditation felt like gentle encouragement. Beating myself up for wanting solitude felt like force.
One opened something in me. The other had been closing me down.
Self-Avoidance in Disguise
This realization also helped me see something else more clearly.
In the past, I’ve struggled with habits I used to think of as self-medicating tendencies. But maybe they were more accurately self-avoidance tendencies. If I could numb my unease with wine, books, shopping, scrolling, or anything else that helped me step away from the discomfort, I often did.
Last week, I drank more wine than I wanted to.
And, of course, I beat myself up about that too.
But judgment rarely opens the door to understanding. It usually just locks us more tightly inside the very pattern we’re trying to leave. The better question wasn’t, “What’s wrong with me?” The better question was, “What am I trying not to feel?”
And the answer was simple.
I was trying not to feel the unease I’d created by fighting myself. I was trying not to feel the tension of needing solitude while telling myself solitude was wrong. I was trying not to feel the exhaustion that came from performing a version of summer my soul wasn’t asking for.
Once I saw that, the pattern made more sense.
The wine wasn’t the real problem. The urge to disappear into books or distractions wasn’t the real problem. Those things were signals, pointing me back toward the inner conflict I hadn’t been willing to name.
And when I gave myself permission to need what I needed, the unease began to soften.
Not because everything was suddenly back to normal and I became bright and energized and ready to fill my calendar with summer plans. It softened because the conflict within me faded with that permission.
And once the conflict softened, peace was there beneath it.
Honoring the Seasons of the Soul
After 50, I’m beginning to understand that the soul doesn’t always move according to the calendar.
It doesn’t care that it’s June. It doesn’t care that the evenings are long or that other people seem to be out in the brightness, drinking from the season with both hands. The soul knows what it knows, and sometimes, even in summer, the soul needs shelter.
Maybe this is one of the quiet gifts of growing older. We begin to notice the difference between what life expects of us and what our own inner wisdom is asking for. We begin to see how often we’ve abandoned ourselves in the name of being cheerful, productive, social, seasonal, appropriate, or fine, a subject I wrote more about in My Journey to Self-Love.
And if we’re willing, we can learn to stop that self-abandonment.
We stop forcing ourselves to want what we don’t want. We stop treating our needs as problems to solve. We stop assuming that every inward turn is a failure to live fully.
This doesn’t mean we never gently encourage ourselves to step outside, join the walk, meet the friend, move the body, or enter the world. Sometimes that’s exactly what we need, and this morning was one of those times for me.
But encouragement is different from self-betrayal.
There’s a way to lovingly guide ourselves toward what restores us, and there’s a way to shove ourselves toward what we think we should want. One honors the soul. The other overrides it.
Today reminded me that allowing isn’t a lesson we learn once and then carry perfectly forever. It’s a practice we return to again and again, each time with more honesty, more humility, and more compassion for the places in us that are still afraid to let go.
Maybe the lesson isn’t to become someone who never resists, never avoids, never numbs, and never forgets. Maybe the lesson is to notice more quickly when we’ve left ourselves, and to return with less punishment than before.
So for now, I’m trusting and surrendering to the process of my own healing. I’m letting this be my summer.
A quieter summer. A sheltered summer. A summer with more shade than sunlight, more stillness than movement, more listening than doing.
Not because I’ve given up on joy, but because I’m learning, again, that joy doesn’t always arrive through expansion.
Sometimes it returns after 50 when we finally stop fighting the season we’re in and start welcoming the lessons within.
