As the holiday craze races towards us at lightning speed and calendars get booked up, food ordered and presents bought, many of us get overwhelmed with seemingly endless social expectations and to-do lists. For obvious commercial reasons, we have been programmed as a society to run from one holiday to the next—and so, on a deeper level, we are ever racing to the next social event, the next goal, the next possession, the next achievement to cross off of our lists. An important question to ask ourselves when we scurry through life like this, bearing the weight of how much we “have to do and achieve”, is: “What is the quality of my doing? Am I fully present in my doing? What am I doing this for?”

Coincidentally, right after our end-of-the-year holy-days dim with a final firework of outer celebration, Mother Nature draws us into a profound darkness. We enter into a void: the darkest time of the year. Most of us have been cluttered with, admittedly, very convenient and to-be-grateful-for artificial lights, artificial heating and ever-increasing streams of technological distraction since we were born. Although the comforts of modern life are to be embraced, they also come with a downside: Most of us have completely lost touch with the natural cycles of the four seasons and what nature’s exquisite design is meant to stir up within us on a deeper level. In a world where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol and distraction is the status quo, it takes tremendous amounts of courage and soul-force to be still and go within.

The experience of self-inquiry can be a frightful thing for us humans because we are so prone to constantly judge the way we feel. Imagine what would happen if all of us, for a change, would just allow our feelings to be, and we would look upon their comings and goings as something as natural as the changes in the weather, the going of night and day, and of the four seasons—all of us might just be at peace with ourselves.

During this darkest time of the year, may we be in tune with the spiritual significance of it, as dictated and narrated by the contracting “Death of Winter”. May we move without resistance into its void, so we may bloom back into fullness in the spring. Let us remember the true gift of the holidays, which is the Light that shines through our loved ones’ eyes, which beats our hearts in harmony, which breathes our bodies and digests our food—it is that same Light that underlies and sustains all things. It is that Light that is your true nature. It is that inner Light that shines even in the darkest days—the Light of the soul, that deeper dimension within which is one with the fabric of existence itself. Happy holy-days.

Giulia Eve Flores is the founder and artistic director of the Conscious Performers Collective, a nonprofit holistic theatre company. She is an actor, writer, workshop facilitator, parent and wife. For more information, visit ConsciousPerformersCollective.com.