002 - Late Winter Wisdom + Spring Equinox Circle Announcement

In this episode, we reflect on living in connection with seasonal rhythms as a framework for personal growth, noting how modern life can disconnect humans from nature and contribute to burnout, hormonal chaos, emotional overwhelm, and feeling untethered. Sarah also discusses women’s layered seasonality—yearly seasons, menstrual and lunar rhythms, and life phases (maiden, mother, maga, crone).

The episode focuses on late winter and Imbolc as a transition marked by rest, introspection, the fertile void, and quiet creative potential, with “start/stop” energy that invites nourishment and capacity-building before spring. 

She shares practical ways to align with this season—mindful rest, following curiosity and creativity, deep nourishment, spring cleaning/decluttering, and time in nature—plus journal prompts about aliveness, devotion, support, readiness for action, and what needs releasing. 

Sarah announces a virtual Spring Equinox circle, “From the Wellspring,” on Sunday, March 22 at 2:00 PM Eastern, which will be interwoven with ritual, including a release practice, a guided journey into one’s inner wellspring, and creating a nature mandala.

🖤 Sign up for "From the Wellspring" here!

🖤 Connect with me on Instagram @sarah.schott & @thewildreturnpodcast or email at rootandrise.life@gmail.com

🖤 Download your free Everyday Rituals guide to transform your daily life and bring the sacred into the everyday moments and alchemize your routines into acts of devotion to your one wild beautiful life. 

🖤Visit my website to explore the ways we might work together 

PS -- about this gorgeous music: it's the song: “What My Heart is Looking For” by Bonner Black from Soundstripe.com

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to the Wild Return, a podcast where we explore womanhood as power, motherhood as alchemy, and the journey of remembering who we really are. I'm your host, Sarah Schott, a mother, Matrescence essence coach, womb guide, somatic educator, doula, and circle facilitator. I've spent much of my life on my own Rewilding journey back to my body, intuition, truth and purpose. And it's all culminated to this work right now of both mothering my babies in these times and supporting other women as they journey back home to themselves too. In this space, we gather to reconnect with how our womb and body motherhood, journeys, and nature are all gateways to our soul, healing and power so that we can live fulfilling lives, show up as the mother our kids really need and step into our unique role in creating planetary change. Because I believe that what the world needs now is wildly, deeply rooted mothers who remember exactly who they are and the power, clarity, courage, creativity, and joy that they hold and wield when they do so that we can do our part to birth the world. We already feel in our hearts, our building in our homes, and wish to see for all of us. Let's walk together. Hi, welcome back to the Wild Return Podcast. This is the second episode. Thank you all so much. If you've listened to the first episode for listening to that and coming back, I've received some really wonderful feedback on the first episode and receiving your messages about how you related to pieces of my journey or felt calm and soothed and seen from what I spoke about was really heartwarming to receive, so thank you so much. Today we're gonna talk about the late winter season that we're currently in right now here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I also have a little announcement at the end for an event that I'm going to be hosting coming up here next month. So stay tuned for that if you are interested. But first, before we get started into everything today, I just invite you, if you're able to take a pause, maybe stop what you're doing if you're able to, if you're not driving, and just take a breath. Really notice the inhale, how that feels coming into your body, into your lungs, filling you up with newness and letting it out with a sigh or a sound on the exhale and doing that just a few more times. However many feels good to you. Inhaling in some fresh oxygen and letting something go on the exhale. Perhaps you might place a hand or two over your heart, noticing your heartbeat within your chest. Feeling how your body feels to have the weight of your hand on your chest, and also feeling how your hand feels being met by the beat of your heart and the warmth of your chest. Remembering to breathe here and maybe just saying something kind to yourself. Maybe I love you, maybe I'm here. Whatever feels good. And then if you have your hand on your chest, maybe rubbing a few spirals over your heart space before, gently arriving back here year and noticing how you feel and maybe if something shifted since we started just three minutes ago. So we are currently in the late winter season, and I love following the seasons and using them as guideposts in my life. Marking the different seasonal shifts in a way that I am honoring them and celebrating them. Our family celebrates the Wheel of the Year. We've been doing that since Evelyn was about six months old, and it's become one of our favorite family traditions. And I absolutely love like planning them, planning the different things we'll be doing, and especially watching my girls grow up with these nature rooted traditions. It's been so special and the reason why I like doing this is because the seasons can really serve as a guidance system, as a framework for our lives and for our personal growth. So often I feel like it's easy to forget in the modern lives that we live where we're wearing shoes all the time, so we're not really connected to the earth below us. We are in our temperature controlled homes. We have artificial lights, we have all these modern conveniences, including a global food supply chain. So we aren't really in direct contact with the seasons around us. Through much of our lives, and these conveniences, don't get me wrong, have so many benefits. I love having berries in the wintertime, for example, and heat in my home and light bulbs. But at the same time, this really disconnects us from the fact that we are actually mammals and that our human bodies are a part of nature. We're not separate. We are made of the earth. The earth is our home, and we are guided by the fluctuations in light throughout the year. There's a natural rise and fall in our energy levels, in our emotions, in our physiology. I mean things like even our gut bacteria makeup changes over the course of the year, based on the seasons, we are designed to live in conversation with them, to let the seasons really influence our pace, how we move, how we eat, how we rest, and how we create. In today's world old, we're often expected to be in this constant summer mode. Always very externally focused, action oriented, always doing, doing, doing, producing, achieving. And there's really no phase in the society that we live in for rest. Maybe the week between Christmas and New Year's maybe, but that's about it. And this can have some massive pitfalls, and I feel like we're seeing that a lot. I know I've seen it personally in my own health, and I feel like we're seeing it on a collective scale. Things like exhaustion and burnout, chaos with our hormones, emotional overwhelm, just general tension in our body and our immune systems aren't able to keep up. And even just a general sense of disconnect or feeling off or like we're untethered, lacking meaning. These can all be signs of how we aren't really aligning ourselves with the natural rhythms and patterns of the earth. All humans are seasonal beings. And women have additional layers of seasonality, of cycles, of spirals in our life. In addition to the seasons around us and the personal seasons in our lives within us, we go through our own infra radian system. So in addition to the circadian rhythm, which is the 24 hour cycle, women also have this lunar rhythm too, which we see in our menstrual cycle, how the seasons of the year relate to the phases of the menstrual cycle. And we also see this in our phases of womanhood over our lifespan: how menarche, childbirth or birthing other creations into the world, menopause, retirement, all relate to the seasons of the earth around us. Maiden mother, Maga crone. These are our phases of womanhood. Relate to spring, summer, fall, winter, and even during my matrescence studies, I've learned about the seasons of motherhood and the seasons of matrescence and how these relate to the earth seasons as well. I go into a lot of these different seasons and how they all intertwine and are interwoven with each other in a class that I ran. I guess it was almost a year and a half ago now called Sacred Cycles that I plan on bringing back later this year. And we go into depth about the menstrual cycle and how this relates to all the other different cycles of women and how it relates to the natural world around us. It's one of my favorite classes. I created this whole map image of all of it together and. It's, oh, I just love it. So anyway why would we wanna connect to these seasons? Besides for what I already mentioned. For me personally, it's helped me really understand myself better. It's helped me come to a place of greater acceptance and greater self-compassion for myself where I really have come to honor and respect my own natural timing and really appreciate each inner season that I go through because each of them have different medicine, energies, gifts, lessons for me to learn as do the outer seasons. And I've found it to give me a greater sense of connection and belonging- seeing myself, my own body and my own life as a woman reflected in the earth around me and the cycles that the earth goes through. The cycles are everywhere. We see them in the cycle lifecycle of a butterfly, of the lifecycle of a rose, for example. And this really helps me feel greater connection with all living things and the world around me and really feel like my interwoven ness with life itself. And it's beautiful to see ourselves reflected in nature and to see the beauty of nature and the beauty within us reflected within each other. This really helped me create like a greater, I feel, like a greater depth to life. I feel more alive as well as have a deeper reverence and care for the planet around me because I see myself in it and I see it in me. This also has helped me greater connect to my personal power and my creativity. It's helped me feel much more creative and like I can co-create with life around me. And by honoring the different seasons and phases of the creative cycle, I have found myself come alive in a way I haven't experienced since childhood. So let's talk about late winter. Winter is the season of rest. It's the season of stillness, of quiet, of introspection and reflection, as well as integration. When it gets cold and dark and the nights are long, it really helps us connect inside to our intuition, to the deeper truths about what needs to be seen in our lives and in ourselves, and also helps us connect to the inner flame within us that sustains us. Winter is also the time of a fertile void. It's the womb space. It's the liminal where we connect to possibility and imagination, dreams and our creativity. This is the place where we dream. Before we plant any seeds, we dream about them. One of the greatest medicines I have felt from winter is knowing that death is not the end. Darkness is not empty, that there is so much happening within it. This is where transformation happens: in the dark, in the womb, underground. We may not see it doing much there aren't new plants growing or blooming or anything like that, but there is so much happening down under the ground. This is where new life really starts. Winter isn't the end, but a bridge to new life that comes with with spring. So we've been working with this since winter solstice, since right before Christmas, and in the beginning of February, just a couple weeks ago, we passed through in Imbolc, which is midwinter. This is when we're halfway, we start to feel the light returning. The days are getting longer and things are beginning to stir under the surface within the earth as well as within us. You may have noticed that your sense of like withdrawal from the world, your need for just deep rest has maybe subsided a little bit and you're starting to become more curious. You're starting to maybe have some more energy. In Imbolc is this ancient threshold for creative potential. It's when we feel the promise of spring, but we're still in that winter phase where we need to really tend our home and tend our hearts and honor what's forming within us, but is still formless and needs our patience, protection and care. In Imbolc teaches us that new beginnings are often quiet and slow and often invisible. This time of year also has this start and stop energy, like pushing on the gas and then pushing on the break, gas and break. We see this outside in the world around us where it snows and then it melts a little bit, and then it snows again, and then it melts a little bit where have warm days and cold days, and warm days and cold days. And this is part of the lesson and the medicine of this time of year. It's really showing us how we are really in this transition period, and this start and stop energy is really telling us that now is the time to focus on fortifying ourselves and building our capacity so that when the energy does shift, come spring, we can move with a stable foundation into the more active, externally focused, and new beginnings time of year that spring will ask of us. So this is a great time to focus on really nourishing yourself, figuring out what kind of support you need in order to act on any of the dream seeds and curiosities that you want to continue working with for the rest of the year. This is the gestation part of the wheel of the year, the pregnancy, the chrysalis energy, where we're still in like a pause. We're preparing, we have to be patient., This is also a great time to look inside of ourselves and see if there's anything that is holding us back, are there any patterns that need releasing, boundaries that need to be placed? Relationship agreements that need to be reevaluated. Are there any things that just need to be organized and planned for? How can you create a more solid foundation for yourself so that when spring arrives and the energy starts to really increase and shift outward, that you have a stable foundation from which to rely on and move from? This time of year we're also astrologically in Pisces season, and that is the end of the Zodiac cycle where we're really focused on integration and preparing for a new cycle of growth. It's the time of year where we are invited to connect into our intuition, into our imagination, into our empathy, into our spiritual nature, and really recognizing our universal oneness. And I think it's perfect that this happens right at the end of winter. It's like a gift to us to really focus on what is complete and what is my inner wisdom telling me. What am I imagining I want to create for the new year, and how does that relate to collective care and creating the world that we wish to see? The last thing I wanna talk about is some practical ways to really connect deeper with ourselves and this time of year. I have a few different things as well as some journal prompts to share with you. The first is mindful rest. Really embrace your sleep. Embrace naps, sitting down and just reading a book because you want to and letting your to-do list go. Embrace slower days and without guilt. These things help you build up your energy reserves and just your level of care for yourself and making your own wellbeing a priority. The second is feed your curiosity and your creativity. What is sparking your attention right now? What's peaking your curiosity? What's been brewing this winter that feels alive for you right now, and following that, maybe you're not really taking action on it right now, that's perfectly okay, but just noticing what's here for you, what feels alive. Three is nourish yourself deeply. I know we all eat, and move and care for our bodies in different ways, so what does that mean for you? What would really nourish you in these last few weeks of winter, this time of deep replenishment? What do you need? Four is spring cleaning. Where do you need to declutter? Clear out, make space. Maybe this is in your home. Maybe it's just a corner of your home. Maybe it's the whole thing. Maybe it's also energetically what needs cleared out. This is the perfect time of year to do that so that you have space for the new energy and dreams and desires to take root and begin to grow. It's amazing how much cleaning out our physical space can affect us energetically. Have you ever noticed that? It's absolutely incredible. There's been many times where I feel like energetically and emotionally constipated, for lack of a better word, and then I noticed my home is extremely cluttered and there's stuff everywhere, and once I start going through it and moving it out and creating space in the physical around me, I notice how so much clears up within me too. Five is time in nature. When you can get yourself outside and let the winter air clear and clarify. You let the cold air come in, feel it on your skin, feel it in your lungs, and imagine it just releasing all that you no longer need and creating space for yourself to become more clear on what it is this winter has been teaching you. Tune into the changes in the light. Have you noticed the days getting longer? Have you noticed the shift in the color and tone of light or where the sun is in the sky? Notice the changes on the earth. We're going into mud season now here where the snow is beginning to melt. Notice the changes in the air. Does it smell different? Does it feel different? What's shifting? Noticing the changes outside of us can help us notice what's changing inside of us. And finally, I have some reflection questions for you, so feel free to just let these play and contemplate them as they come. Oftentimes what arises within us naturally once we hear a question, is incredibly true and can be enough. Or take time to pause this podcast as we go through them and write your answers or come back to this at any time. First, what is sparking my aliveness? What am I curious about? What is sparking my creativity right now? Another way to ask this is what wants to grow? Number two is similar, but asked a different way. What do I want to be devoted to for the next few months or perhaps the next year, and what wants my devotion? Three: how can I support myself to meet what's stirring within me? Four, can my life support what I want to take action on this year? And who and what can I call on for support to help me build the fertile soil from which I am going to grow my dreams and desires this year? Five, what might need releasing, let go of, and tended to in order to take action this spring? Really allowing yourself to sit with those questions in whatever way feels right for you. Noticing what answers, sensations and feelings naturally arise within you as you allow yourself to receive them. And remembering that our transformation and our growth happens one day at a time, one choice at a time. I hope you have a nourishing, restful, and curious last few weeks of winter in a way that feels supportive for you, so that you feel ready for your emergence come spring. And that brings me to my announcement! I'm going to be holding a spring Equinox circle called From the Wellspring! It'll be on Sunday, March 22nd at 2:00 PM Eastern, and it'll be virtual. So you can join me from the comfort of your home or anywhere really. Maybe it'll even be nice enough you can join me from outside. How lovely would that be? This will be a circle rooted in ritual. I love using ritual to feel more present in my body. To be in touch with my inner guidance, and really let my deep wisdom and inner truth and soul lead the way in my life. And I love doing this on a seasonal basis to really allow my soul and the seasons to really commune with one another and see what wants to come forward. So we will be doing a release ritual to let go of anything that we no longer want to carry with us into the new season. We'll be doing a guided journey meditation into our own inner wellspring and see what's waiting there for us. And we will also be creating a nature mandala, so we'll be doing like a creative kind of art piece this time, and I'm really excited about doing that. I called this from the Wellspring because this is gonna be really about tapping into our own inner wisdom, our intuition and creative well, to reclaim our inner natural essence, and remember that we have the power to create new beginnings right here within us, and it's ready to flow. An inner wellspring also brings to mind this image of a healing holy well that has the capacity to really hold space for us. And this energy of nurturance, of support of the source of life. I really feel this energy within my body come springtime and i'm really excited to take us on a journey to meet that place and feel what it feels like and see what it looks like within us, and use that place as our home base, as our own creative source, to connect with our life force and see what we really want to seed, what dreams we want to plant this spring, this year. I am really looking forward to this. I cannot wait to join with you for the spring equinox. I held a circle similar to this called Wintering Woman for the Winter Solstice, and I had a blast. We came together and did ritual, shared our hearts with one another and witnessed each other in our own processes, and it was just a beautiful experience. There is something so uniquely powerful about gathering together with other women, especially in a sacred place where you are really doing some of the deep work to bring your soul forward, to connect with your inner truth, your inner guidance system, and allow that part of you to take up some more space, to lead the way in you creating the life that you are really here for and the life that you truly desire. And that's some of the work that we'll be doing on the spring equinox together. So if you'd like to join me, I will pop the link in the show notes. It'll be in my Instagram bio as well as on my website. So you can also find the links to that in the show notes. I would absolutely love to have you, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. Again, it's on March 22nd at 2:00 PM Eastern time. So that is it for today. Thank you for joining me. If you have any reflections from this episode or want to share some of the answers to your journal prompts, I would love to witness you in them and just send you love and support through these last few weeks of winter. Thank you so much. I hope you have a great day, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Wild Return Podcast. If today's message spoke to you, be sure to subscribe. Leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who might want to tune into. Come find me over on Instagram at Sarah shot and check the show notes for ways we might work together. I'm sending you so much love. I'll see you next time.