The change begins quietly.
The light angles differently through the window, more gold than white. Mornings come slower, the air turns metallic, and the scent of the world shifts from green to earth. Summer’s laughter fades, replaced by something tender and almost imperceptible — a kind of remembering.
There’s a pause before the fall. A hush between abundance and surrender, when the body senses what’s coming even before the mind does. You might find yourself wanting to stay home, to wrap in blankets, to listen rather than speak. You might feel tired in a way that rest alone can’t touch.
Autumn asks us to notice.
It doesn’t demand or push — it simply reveals. As branches begin to loosen their hold, we too feel the instinct to release. And yet we hesitate. Something in us clings to brightness, to movement, to the illusion that things can stay as they were.
But the world is already shifting. The garden quiets. The fields turn bare. And somewhere deep in our bones, we know we are being invited into a slower rhythm — one that does not bloom or strive, but listens.
Perhaps this is why autumn can feel like both beauty and ache. It carries the scent of endings, but also the promise of rest. It reminds us that change does not always come through effort, but through yielding — through trusting that what must fall will fall, and that what remains will hold us through the dark.
When Leaves Fall, We Remember
One morning you look outside and see the first leaf drift down.
It turns slowly in the air before it lands — effortless, quiet, final. You watch, and for a moment, something inside you echoes that descent.
There is a melancholy particular to autumn, the way beauty and loss coexist in every tree. The brilliance of color is also the beginning of decay. The fire of the leaves is their final offering before they return to the soil. And perhaps that’s why this season catches us off guard: it makes visible what we often try to forget — that every joy carries its own impermanence.
We may not think of ourselves as grieving, yet the body knows. The soft light, the sound of rain on cooling ground — these awaken memory. Not always the kind with clear faces and names, but something older, quieter: the ache of what we’ve lost, or never had.
Autumn does not invent our sorrow; it reveals it. When the world grows still enough, the noise that once distracted us falls away, and what was hidden begins to surface — the unmet longing, the unspoken goodbye, the part of us that still waits for something to return.
This is the season that teaches us to remember. To stand beneath the falling leaves and feel the truth of what it means to be alive — to love, to lose, and to keep opening anyway.
Root Season — The Inner Work of Letting Go
In the natural world, autumn is the season for planting trees. It seems almost counterintuitive — to begin life just as everything else dies back. But this is precisely the wisdom of the season: growth begins underground.
When a young tree is planted in fall, its energy turns inward. With no leaves to feed, it can devote itself fully to establishing roots — stretching quietly through the dark soil, finding stability before the demands of new life return. In spring, those hidden roots will anchor its strength. But for now, the work is invisible.
Our emotional lives follow a similar rhythm.
We cannot heal while expending all our energy outward — performing, producing, pretending we’re fine. Healing asks for stillness. It asks us to let go of what drains us and tend to what grounds us.
Psychologists have long noted that autumn’s slower pace invites introspection. Research on seasonal emotional shifts (Keller et al., 2005) shows that as light fades and social rhythms soften, our minds turn naturally toward reflection and meaning-making. Yet for many, this turning inward awakens discomfort. Especially for those shaped by childhood emotional neglect, stillness can feel like danger. The nervous system, accustomed to scanning for what’s next, struggles to rest.
From the lens of Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011), this makes sense: safety is the prerequisite for healing. Our bodies need cues of calm — warmth, rhythm, breath, quiet — before we can touch what hurts. Without that, slowing down can trigger the very anxiety we’re trying to escape.
And here, Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a gentle map. Within us live “protector” parts — the ones that keep us moving, controlling, or numbing to avoid old pain. They’re not the enemy; they’re our history’s way of keeping us safe. But when the world slows, these parts often panic. If I stop, they whisper, everything will fall apart.
Yet if we listen, if we approach them not as obstacles but as loyal guardians, something softens. Their frantic energy begins to ease, and the exiled parts — the ones holding our deeper grief — can begin to breathe again.
Reflection:
“What part of me fears slowing down?”
“What does it believe would happen if I stopped holding everything together?”
You don’t have to convince that part otherwise. Just listen. Understanding is the first sign of safety. Like a newly planted tree, the work now is not to grow taller, but to root deeper — to find steadiness in the unseen soil of your inner world.
Bare Branches — Sitting With What Is
Eventually, the trees stand naked against the sky. And still, they remain.
There is a sacredness to this bareness. It reveals structure: the quiet architecture that held all the color. Grief does the same to us. When everything we once clung to falls away, what remains is what’s most real — our essence, our endurance, our capacity to feel.
To grieve is to enter that still landscape. It’s to sit with what cannot be fixed.
Modern culture urges us to move on, to reframe loss as lesson. But nature models something different. Trees don’t rush to re-leaf. They rest, exposed, trusting the process they’ve always known: that renewal begins only after surrender.
Research in mindfulness-based grief work (Feldman & Kuyken, 2019) shows that allowing sorrow without judgment — simply noticing sensations, memories, tears — activates regions of the brain linked to emotional integration rather than reactivity. Similarly, time spent in nature has been found to calm the mind and reduce rumination (Bratman et al., 2015). There is healing in the act of witnessing.
This is also where IFS moves from understanding to compassion. When we sit in quiet awareness, we begin to meet the exiled parts — those still holding the rawness of loss, fear, or shame. Often they appear as a heaviness in the chest, a lump in the throat, a sudden wave of fatigue. Their language is sensation before it is story.
If you can, let them speak in that language.
Rather than analyzing or naming, simply acknowledge:
I feel you. You’ve been here a long time.
It’s not about forcing resolution. It’s about relationship — the self within you becoming the one who can finally stay. This presence, calm and compassionate, is the beginning of wholeness.
Practice: Sitting With What Is
Find a quiet corner or go outside where the air is cool.
Notice what it feels like to simply be — no goal, no fixing.
Let the body breathe.
If emotion arises, place a hand over your heart or your belly and whisper inwardly:
“It’s okay to be bare for a while.”
Grief, when welcomed, becomes less like drowning and more like rain — cleansing, shaping, nourishing. It teaches us the humility of being human: that we are not meant to stay bright all the time, that darkness too has its wisdom.
When the branches stand empty, they are not dead. They are resting. Gathering strength. Waiting for the quiet alchemy that turns loss into life.
The Promise of Spring
One morning, almost without noticing, the light changes again.
It comes earlier, thinner at first, then warmer. The ground, which seemed lifeless for months, begins to soften. There’s a smell that signals something stirring beneath the surface.
This is how healing begins too: quietly, almost imperceptibly.
We don’t decide to move on; we simply find that we can breathe a little easier. That the ache, while still there, has softened around the edges. That we are not who we were when the leaves first fell.
What’s remarkable is that the healing did not happen despite the winter, but because of it. The long stillness gave our inner roots the chance to find water again. In grief work, this is often the point when our internal parts — the protectors, the exiles, the ones who bore the pain — begin to trust that they no longer have to do it alone. They start to share space. To integrate. To become a living system again.
Psychologically, renewal follows regulation.
As studies on post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004) suggest, transformation arises not from avoiding pain but from meaning-making — from allowing what happened to become part of who we are, rather than the whole of it.
Just as the trees’ fallen leaves nourish the soil, our losses enrich the ground of our being.
Reflection:
“What have I learned to hold with more tenderness this season?”
“Where do I feel small shoots of new life — a spark, a curiosity, a softening?”
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting or transcending grief. It means carrying it differently — as something that now hums quietly beneath our days, reminding us what matters. The goal is not to be “over it,” but to live through it — rooted, alive, and open to the cycles that keep turning.
Listening to the Rain
There’s a particular kind of rain that comes in late winter — steady, cleansing, patient. It doesn’t ask the earth to bloom before it’s ready; it simply prepares the way. Maybe this is the real work of grief: to become like that rain.
To stay long enough.
To trust that beneath every silence, life is rearranging itself.
If you listen, you might hear it — the quiet rhythm that connects everything that grows: falling, resting, rising. The same rhythm that pulses through your own healing.
So this season, when the world turns inward again, let yourself do the same.
Walk beneath the bare branches. Watch the slow return of light.
Feel how the earth never hurries, yet nothing is left undone.
Your grief belongs to this cycle.
Your healing, too.
References
Bratman, G. N., Anderson, C. B., Berman, M. G., et al. (2015). Nature and mental health: An ecosystem service perspective. Science Advances, 1(2), e1400217.
Feldman, C., & Kuyken, W. (2019). Mindfulness: Ancient wisdom meets modern psychology. The Guilford Press.
Keller, M. C., Fredrickson, B. L., et al. (2005). A warm heart and a clear head: The contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition. Psychological Science, 16(9), 724–731.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton.
Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
Explore Further:
The Lives We Didn’t Live: The Psychology of Choice, Regret, and Self-Trust
The Many Faces of Grief in Motherhood: Healing from Loss and CEN (+Journaling Workbook)
The Grief Beneath the Anger: How Restlessness, Somatic Healing, and Nature Lead Us Home (+free PDF)
When Attachment Healing Changes Our Relationships: Grieving, Growing, and Trusting the Process
Foraging as Healing: From CEN to Wholeness Through Nature’s Cycles (+Free Calendar)
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