Landing Spots for Winter: A Gentle Guide for Rest & Respite
As our 2025 fall Walk and Talk season comes to a soft close, I return to the quiet moments we shared along the Butterfly Loop Trail. The cooling air, the steady presence of birds above, and the way conversation eased open as we moved together created small openings in our bodies and hearts. Many of us felt nature meeting us with warmth and steadiness. As winter approaches, we are invited to carry these tender pauses inward. May the turning of the season offer us rest, connection, and soft places to land.
Below is a gentle guide on Landing Spots, inspired by our time together. May it support your wintering and offer you steady ground wherever you find yourself.
Landing Spots for Winter: A Gentle Guide for Rest and Respite
During our Walk and Talk experiences this fall, many of us found moments of softening, places where the body exhaled, the shoulders dropped, and something inside felt held. These are what we call Landing Spots, inner or outer places that offer calm, clarity, and connection. As we move into the winter season, a time of slowing, returning inward, and tending gently, this guide invites you to continue cultivating your own Landing Spots.
What Are Landing Spots?
Landing Spots are the spaces, practices, sensations, or relationships where your system feels a sense of arrival. They help you reconnect to your rhythm, soften protective edges, and access moments of rest, even when life feels full.
Landing Spots can support:
• Softening the nervous system
• Emotional release, grief, or quiet reflection
• Feeling grounded or rooted
• Returning to your breath and body
• Tending to yourself with warmth and honesty
Types of Landing Spots
Inner Landing Spots
• A breath pattern that brings ease
• A warm memory, image, or color
• Noticing your feet supported by the earth
• Mindful pauses throughout the day
• Journaling, drawing, or slow movement
Outer Landing Spots
• A corner of your home that feels peaceful
• A tree, park bench, garden, or trail
• Warm sunlight through a window
• Your car before entering a busy space
• A cozy café or familiar neighborhood walk
Relational Landing Spots
• A friend or loved one who listens with care
• A therapist or mentor who holds space
• A community where you feel seen
• Your relationship with nature, including birds, wind, water, or firelight
Reflective Prompts for Winter
Arrival: Where in your body do you feel a sense of landing, and what helps you notice it?
Rootedness: Which places help you feel grounded?
Wintering: What does your body, mind, and heart need more of this winter, and what do you need less of?
Care and Comfort: What practices invite you to soften or breathe deeper?
Connection: Who or what helps you return to yourself?
Grief and Release: What might you be ready to gently lay down as the season shifts?
Your Landing Spots are not places you must earn. They are spaces your system already knows how to find. As winter arrives, may you continue to locate, nurture, and return to these points of rest and reconnection. May they offer warmth, tenderness, and steady ground.
You are nature too, worthy of pauses, seasons, and gentle places to land.
Further Reading by BIPOC Authors
Here are a few readings that offer wisdom on connection, embodiment, rest, and our relationships with land and lineage. Each one beautifully complements the heart of Landing Spots.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A poetic exploration of reciprocity, belonging, and the teachings of the natural world grounded in Indigenous knowledge.
My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
A somatic invitation into ancestral healing, nervous system settling, and embodied awareness.
Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
A call to reclaim rest as a liberatory and communal practice, rooted in Black cultural and spiritual traditions.
