Fall and Winter: The Seasons of Divine Feminine Energy

When the weather turns colder and darker in the Northern Hemisphere, we enter moon season. This is a time when many of us find ourselves experiencing a moon that rises earlier in the evening and stays up later in the mornings as more darkness descends on our day. It’s also a season of darkness, death, and spirit work. All these aspects are in alignment with Divine Feminine energy.

Masculine energies are aligned with action, light, and what’s sometimes called yang. Feminine energies are aligned with quiet, darkness, dreaming, and what’s sometimes called yin. The important thing to understand is that there is yang and yin, masculine and feminine, in everything, in all of us. There is always a balance.

The Value of Divine Feminine Energy

From the Shakta tantric perspective, the Divine Feminine reigns supreme, manifested as a goddess who is all-powerful. She is the energy that created the Big Bang, the energy that exists within everything in the universe, including every single one of us. The Divine Masculine is her lover, her consort, her other half, who gives shape to her energy, the boundaries to her river banks. Without the Goddess, God is a corpse, merely a body with no energy within him. In order for anything to exist, both must be present.

We live in a culture that tends to overly value qualities that have been deemed masculine—all the things we can do with a body, with a shape or a container for our energy. Productivity, extroversion, and external action can all be considered masculine, while rest and the cultivation of spiritual energy is considered feminine. Dreaming, imagining, and creating, especially when this is internal and not externally “produced,” are often derided in a culture that does not honor the Divine Feminine.

Divine Feminine Energy in the Fall and Winter

We often resist transitioning to the cold seasons. Summer is bright, fun, extroverted; a time to be outside and play; a time when there is a lot of energy coming from the sun. We tend to sleep less in the summertime, which gives us the opportunity to do more. These are wonderful qualities that are very masculine in nature. Sun season is mostly yang in nature, and many of us need to turn to some yin—cool water, dark rooms, more rest—in order to balance the intensity of that masculine energy.

As we turn to moon season, we head inside, slow down, and tend to want to sleep and dream more. This is a time for reflection and inner work, and many of us find that we naturally turn toward our spirituality. As the masculine rests, to a degree, in the fall and winter seasons, Divine Feminine energy is free to roam within us in our dreams, our spiritual connections, and our learning and healing selves. Fall and winter are not times for “doing” as much as they are for “being”: for integrating, processing, dreaming, and crafting intentions we will not yet act on. It is an inward time, and that should be honored and appreciated.

When we work with these energies in balance, they support each other. Spending time in the darker season resting and cultivating our imaginative and spiritual selves prepares us to express that energy outwardly when the masculine wakes up again in the spring and summer. Spending time with our bodies and the natural world in the masculine season allows us to return to Source again in the fall and winter and repeat the cycle all over again.

Ways to Honor Divine Feminine Energy This Time of Year

We cannot always live our lives in alignment with the energies of the seasons, since we live in a world that is focused on productivity and action at all times. However, here are some ways we can honor Divine Feminine energy as we enter into moon season:

• Set aside some time for meditation or quiet reflection, even if it is just for five minutes a day.

• Make some space for creative pursuits, such as writing and drawing.

• Cultivate spiritual connection, whatever that looks like for you.

• Rest more whenever possible. You may need an extra hour of sleep in the winter compared to the summer.

• Balance the dark, cold season with warm drinks, fireplaces, and movement practices that keep your blood flowing without overwhelming your system.

Have a wonderful moon season!

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