Embracing the Season of Dying

It’s December. You step out for a walk and immediately sense something different from the busy world you left behind. The quiet. The stillness. Your nervous system settles. You realize this peace comes from the simple fact that nearly everything is dead. You are walking through a temporary graveyard, a landscape in the midst of necessary dying.

When we allow what is happening in nature to influence our bodies and spirits, we learn to move in accordance with our inner rhythm. This time period, this threshold, is an invitation to embrace the season of dying. Winter strips everything down to its essentials, revealing what we have avoided seeing in ourselves. To live in seasonal attunement we must welcome death.

Embracing the Season of Dying

Death has been given a bad reputation. We are taught to fear it, and yet it is one of the few universal experiences we share as humans. Death is not only a physical ending but also the process of releasing, shedding, and composting old material to allow room for growth. Death can mean allowing what is not meant for us to fall away, even when the space it opens to the unknown feels frightening.

This seasonal act of turning inward is also echoed in Jewish ancestral time. The Jewish calendar guides us toward inner alignment through attunement with the cycles of nature. The month of Tevet begins after  the final new moon of 2025. Spiritually, Tevet invites us to descend into the quiet, into the shadows. In Jewish mystical teachings, Tevet is a time to practice bittul, the softening of the self so inner wisdom can emerge. This ritual shedding of ego can only happen when the world is at its most quiet, when we finally have the capacity to listen.

 Ritual death can help reawaken our somatic voice. 

From this calm and quiet place, ritual naturally emerges. Death meditations have existed for thousands of years across many spiritual lineages, especially within Tibetan Buddhism. In these teachings, practitioners contemplate their own mortality to loosen attachment and deepen compassion. Others meditate on death as a path toward clarity and liberation. Together, these practices remind us that turning toward death has always been a doorway into truth. I embrace the idea of bittul through a ritual developed by Emily Cross of Steady Waves Center called A Living Funeral Ceremony. This ritual is an immersive meditative experience that encourages participants to face their own mortality. Emily crafted this many years ago, inspired by living funerals first conducted in South Korea. Moving myself through this ritual signals to my body and soul that I am safe to release what is not meant for me.

A ritual death increases mortality awareness because it reframes the fear of letting go and invites realignment from within. From this place of awareness, a person who carries a deep knowing they will die someday is far more likely to make choices honoring an inner truth. When we create this inner space, the grief we have carried can emerge.

The Grief We Carry

Grief moves far beyond physical death, and this time of year is when unnamed grief tends to rise to the surface. We tend to think of grief as something reserved for death and dying, but in truth grief is far more layered than that. Many of us carry the burden of unwitnessed grief, and there is little space for people moving through these layers of loss. These losses accumulate quietly over time, and when we do not make room for processing, it eventually finds its way to body through illness, unease, or sensation.

There is a somatic cost to avoiding stillness during this time. When we stay tethered to productivity and participation in capitalism, we disconnect from nature and from our own natural rhythms. Refusing stillness while the world around us grows quiet creates strain in the body and spirit.

 A ritual death offers a chance to listen to nature and to your inner voice. 

In this disconnection, the body begins to speak through somatic markers of misalignment such as chest tightness, nausea, or a sense of internal agitation. Over time, this misalignment can lead to burnout, disconnection, and stagnation. We are taught to override this wisdom, but ritual death can help reawaken our somatic voice.

So how do we embrace death in a season of dying within our own practice? Here is a simple ritual to get you started:

• Find a comfortable position and allow yourself to settle.
• Be in your body without judgment.
• Notice the ways you are being held.
• After some time, imagine yourself lying on your deathbed. Stay with that feeling.
• What sensations arise?
• What thoughts follow?
• Write them down. Read them out loud.

Consider how you want to release your thoughts and feeling. You might burn the paper or bury it, depending on what feels most fitting. The essential ingredient is non judgment. Take what feels useful and leave the rest. Make this ritual death yours.

In a world where burnout is so common, a ritual death offers a chance to listen to nature and to your inner voice. Do not fear the darkness. Let the season show you what is ready to be released. Allow stillness to become its own form of guidance. When we embrace the season of dying, we create space for what is truest in us to take root.

Just as you began, imagine yourself back on that winter walk, surrounded by the quiet and the stillness. The world is at rest. The land stripped back to its bones. Nature shows us that nothing new can grow without first honoring what has ended.