As we transition from the active season of Fall into the quiet of Winter, it’s time to intentionally slow down and embrace one of life’s most powerful lessons:
transformation through impermanence.
Nature shows us plainly that everything cycles. This time of year, the leaves fall, trees look bare, and the world seems to contract. But this “decay” isn’t an ending; it’s a profound process of renewal. The earth is being fertilized, getting ready for the next spring. Right now, though, our job is to observe the letting go. Fall teaches us the hardest truth for the human mind:
nothing you desperately hold onto stays, and nothing you genuinely release is truly lost, it simply converts into new potential.
Winter then brings stillness. It’s the moment for gathering energy, conserving resources, and resting. It is the great silence that precedes a new start.
The Practice of Essentialism
As the days get shorter and we naturally feel more inward, it’s the perfect time for introspection (looking within). This is your chance to reflect, declutter your life (mentally and physically), and focus only on what is essential.
Your Breath is Your Control Switch
We continue to use the breath not just for physical health, but as a direct way to manage the mind. It doesn’t matter if you take a few deep breaths or hundreds. What matters is the results of stopping the mental chatter (inner dialogue) and your internal state becomes still enough to see clearly.
Think of the breath as the doorway to your subconscious mind. You will either feed the subconscious unconsciously (with shallow, stressed breathing that reinforces survival-mode stress) or consciously (with deep, slow, intentional breaths). As soon as you breathe consciously, your entire system shifts toward calm and regulation.
This is how we manage the “Instinctual Mind.” This part of your brain is designed to run the body and excel at survival, but it floods your subconscious with anxiety and chaotic signals. To regulate this instinctual part, you must regulate your breath. To regulate your breath, you regulate your mind.
To regulate your mind is to reclaim control over your life.
Reflective Meditation: Reprocessing the Past
This time of year, is ideal for reviewing your life story. You can look back at significant life stages (e.g., grade school, adolescence, young adult, adulthood, etc.) or focus on a recent, emotionally charged event that changed your outlook, whether it was a trauma, a betrayal, a regret, or a success.
Try to tap into an experience that has lodged itself inside you, creating a kind of emotional stagnation that prevents you from moving forward.
The Method:
- Get Still: Sit down, breathe consciously, and calm your mind.
- Be the Witness: As a neutral observer, revisit the difficult moment.
- Gain Clarity: Your goal is not to rewrite the past, but to re-experience it through the lens of your current wisdom. You may realize things like:
- You may have been young and/or naïve at the time
- You weren’t at your best then, and that’s okay.
- They weren’t attacking you; they were simply reacting out of their own suffering.
- You may realize you were collateral damage to someone else’s unprocessed pain.
The point isn’t to judge the past, but rather it’s to release the story you’ve been carrying about it. Letting go of that unnecessary narrative is the highest medicine this season offers.
Reframing to Free Your Future
You revisit the moment, see it clearly, and analyze it from the perspective of the witness, not the wounded self. You breathe into the memory, letting the emotions reorganize. This is a process that unfolds over time, not in one session. Eventually, the energy tied up in the event loosens. You emotionally “digest” the experience, the stagnation dissolves, and your vital energy is free to move forward again.
The Ultimate Check-in: Meeting Your Younger Self
Once you’ve built stability in this practice, try this powerful exercise:
- Form Your Current Self: Clearly visualize the you of today as in your body, clothes, expression, and presence. This is your “Authentic Self.”
- Visit the Past: Send this Authentic Self back to meet a younger version of you, say, the a time in your youth or young adulthood, or at a crucial decision point.
- Just Sit: You don’t have to “heal” anything. Simply sit across from that past self, like two friends at a restaurant, and see: Would my younger self see me as an inspiration… or a warning… by who I have become?
This is the most honest mirror you’ll ever find. Your younger self knows your true, unburdened potential and remembers the promise you made to your own being. The question is: Have you kept that promise?
This honest self-assessment is the “Blade of Clarity.” It cuts away delusion and reveals the truth.
Finding Your Inner Compass
The world is constantly changing as is your circumstances, relationships, finances, and other people’s opinions are always in flux. Everything external moves.
But a mountain does not move. Its surface changes with weather and time, but its core profile, its Inner Compass or Unmoving Center,remains the same. In this philosophy,
That mountain is you.
If you don’t locate this unmoving center, you will constantly chase experiences, objects, and relationships that don’t align with your Highest Self.
- The Mountain is your continuity.
- It is your loyalty to your highest version.
- It is the promise you keep to your future and past self.
Fall/Clarity gives you the insight to locate the mountain. Winter/Stillness gives you the stability to sit on it. Spring/Growth gives you the momentum to move from it.
We are nearing the end of this Season of Clarity, the cutting away, the letting go of old stories, the regulation of mind and breath, the reclaiming of your internal state, the reflection upon who you were, and the commitment to who you can still become.
Stay grounded, be clear, and remain loyal to yourself; your mountain.
United Martial Arts Association 