A Gentle Turning: Imbolc, Trust & the Wheel of the Year (Ep. 54)

 In this gentle, grounding episode, Sarah invites you into the soft threshold of Imbolc , the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox  a season of subtle beginnings, inner listening, and quiet trust.

Wrapped in warmth and ritual, we explore the ancient Wheel of the Year, how seasonal living mirrors the cyclical nature of women’s bodies, and why modern linear systems often clash with female biology. Through a trauma-informed lens, we gently unpack what trust really means, why it can feel difficult, and how it grows organically when we honour our nervous system and natural rhythms.

This episode is an invitation to slow down, soften, and remember that healing, growth, and transformation unfold in spirals, not straight lines.

In this episode, we explore:

• What Imbolc is and why it marks a powerful and often overlooked turning point
• The Wheel of the Year and its roots in earth-based traditions
• How cyclical living supports women’s physical, emotional, and nervous system health
• Why trust is a nervous system experience — not a mindset issue
• Trauma-informed perspectives on safety, healing, and capacity building
• How modern productivity culture conflicts with female biology
• The archetypes of Brigid and the Cailleach — and what they represent within us
• Gentle journaling prompts and seasonal rituals for Imbolc
• How to mark this quiet season with intention, rest, and reverence
• 
  

Resources & Events:
Explore seasonal retreats, in-person events, and online offerings at:
🌿 https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/Imbolc

If you would like our free moon download to get the list of the 12 astrological signs and how they impact your body parts and emotions, grab that here: https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/moondownload

If you are looking to balance your hormones naturally, then try our free 5 day hormone balance challenge, back to balance. Register here: https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/Backtohormonebalance

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Transcript

0:00

Yes. Welcome to the Holistic Health Sisters podcast of Wellness and Real Life Sisters Hannah Carr and Sarah King from the Holistic Health Collective. In this podcast, we're going to be sharing our passion for, of course, holistic health, but also spirituality, healings, hormone, plant medicine, seasonal living, our love of nature, and our love of community. So we are gonna invite you to take a pause and take a nice deep breath. And join us on a path of healing, of self-discovery and self-love, and of stepping into the brilliance of who you really are. This is a podcast for the seekers out there. Those of you who know there's more to life than just surviving or going through the motions, and you want more, more health, wealth, happiness, love, compassion, connection, trust, surrender. And more faith. And you want that for others too. So we can make this world a better place for us all. So go and grab a cup of ceremonial grade cacao and join us as we explore what moves through us, that which is divinely led, so we can all move from fear to walls. More faith. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Hi, loves Sarah here. I'm wrapped in a blanket. I've just lit some incense and I cannot wait to delve into this seasonal eightfold wheel of the year episode. All about in imbolc. So let's arrive together. What we're gonna be doing in this episode is sharing what imbolc is, that might be a new word for you and why it marks a powerful and often overlooked threshold on the wheel of the year. How seasonal living reflects the cyclical nature of women's bodies and their inner worlds in Imbolc as the season of possible uncertainty, subtle beginnings and quiet trust. And we'll be looking at trust through a trauma-informed lens and how we can build it from within. And how modern linear systems clash with female biology, leading many women to feel that they are failing, and how reconnecting with our natural cycles folklore and the wisdom of the body can gently support renewal at this turning point of the year. So let's dive in, but let's arrive and settle. Not really by doing anything, but just by getting comfortable and maybe noticing your breath. Even if you are moving or if you're being still, if it feels supportive, you might let your shoulders soften and let your jaw unclench. There's nothing you need to understand perfectly today. Nothing you need to take away or act on immediately in Imbolc reminds us that some seasons are not for clarity, they're just for listening. So I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and letting it all land. So let me just explain a little more about the Wheel of the Year, if you haven't heard of it, or maybe you're deeply connected. But the Wheel of the Year is an ancient seasonal calendar, and it's made up of eight festivals that track the movement of the sun and the changing cycles of nature. So it originates in pre-Christian earth-based cultures, particularly across Celtic and European traditions as a way of living in rhythm with the land. The wheel is structured around four solar points, some of the solar points might be more celebrated or more familiar with you, the solstice and the equinoxes. And then you've got four cross quarter days, which mark the subtle seasonal shifts in between. I have enjoyed getting to know these points so much because it didn't feel right to go from winter solstice straight into spring equinox. That felt like a really big energetic shift and it didn't quite land for me. So when I found out about in Imbolc, which is celebrated around the first to the 2nd of February in the Northern Hemisphere. This just really made sense to me in my body. With the Wheel of the year, rather than seeing time as linear, the wheel reflects a cyclical experience of time. So really tuning into that cyclical rhythm of birth, growth, death, rest, and renewal. And he invites us to move with the seasons, not against them. And remember that life unfolds in spirals, not straight lines. And this is something I really took deeply with my case studies when we were looking at the perimenopause for my trauma informed work. Healing happens in spirals and not straight lines. There isn't a trajectory where we sign up for a program or seek out a therapist, and we just see linear growth with our healing. We come back to old patterns. Through new eyes. So I hope that really supports you if you feel like you are meant to be somewhere else and you feel like you're behind. And for women, this often feels instinctively familiar because our bodies are cyclical by nature. Just as the year moves through death, rest, rebirth, and growth. So do we through our menstrual cycles, our life stages, and inner seasons. So in Imbolc, this is an easy way for me to remember it. It's the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. It's like a quiet hinge point in the year. It's really often overlooked, and yet it mirrors something deeply true in our own lives. It's the in-between season that rarely gets celebrated. These moments when we are no longer who we were, but we don't know who we're becoming yet. It's not winter anymore, but it's not quite spring, and it's a time when life is stirring beneath the surface but hasn't yet made itself visible. So a little around the folklore. Imbolc is also associated with Bridget. Each point on the wheel of the year is associated with a goddess, and she's the maiden goddess of fertility and renewal. And it's also connected to the waning of Callieach. Winter power. The Callieach is the winter hag or ice queen. She was a figure in Scottish and Irish folklore who represented winter's harshness. I love the work of Sharon Blackie with Ude and she speaks a lot to the Cailleach and you know, the old. Lens of the hag being an undesirable character has totally been in inner transformed within me. I, I love the cak energy now. So it said, well, tradition holds that on, on, on in Imbolc. The Callieach gathers firewood for the remaining cold months. If she intends to prolong winter, she ensures February the first is bright and sunny, allowing her to collect ample wood. Conversely, a day of foul weather suggests she's asleep and that winter will soon yield to spring. And I believe that Groundhog Day is also on in Imbolc. So this is the prediction in the US of how long Winter will last as well. So it's seen in other cultures, Imbolc is a fire Festival, but not the roaring fire of summer. What actually happens this year in Imbolc and the LEO four Moon coincide together and we know things work in six month cycles that the Leo New Moon happens in summer, in the Northern Hemisphere in August usually, and it is about the outward sun, but in Imbolc is about the inner flame. It's the hearth fire, the ember, the flame that keeps going quietly in the dark. Traditionally, it was a time of purification, often connected to the origins of what we now call the spring clean. This is not a demand to improve yourself. This is a loving, clearing, making space for what wants to emerge next. And I really love the analogy of what are you holding right now? Because we have an astrological new year happening with the spring equinox, we're stepping into a whole new season, whole new cycle, and we can't take new things on that. Life wants us to have that, the gifts that the universe are trying to send our way if we're holding onto everything so we don't have to have some major clear out. But full means usually are a good time to let go a little bit emotionally, physically. And purification. It doesn't mean fixing. It means releasing what's not longer sustainable, will working for you and gently on in Imbolc and with consent in Imbolc is a season of trust. And to celebrate in Imbolc is to engage in trust. It's to trust in the future before this proof trust in life before you can see any blooms. And this is where it can feel a bit uncomfortable because trust is asked of us before it feels safe. And I wanted to speak to this through the trauma informed lens and why trust can feel so hard. So let's go in tenderly. Let's just be with our breath and our body for a moment. And if you feel tense as I speak, maybe your body's trying to communicate something with you, or if something really lands, you might feel really ready to embody this wheel of the Year more and evoke these goddesses within you and work with this cyclical way more. So trust it isn't a mindset issue. If you find it hard to trust, it's a nervous system experience. When someone has lived through instability, disappointment, harm, then your body learns to stay alert and it reverts to being hypervigilant. And let me just reaffirm, this is not a flaw. This isn't something you need to get rid of or override. It's intelligence, deep intelligence within the brain, within the body, within the nervous system, and it's shaped by the need to survive. So a system holding trauma or even high stress is scanning for what could go wrong. You know those people. They always seem to be disaster managing or complaining about what went wrong and they can't see the good things. And this isn't a character flaw. It's their system seeking safety, not because they're pessimists, but because it's trying to prevent pain. Disaster, retraumatization, and in Imbolc does not asked us to force trust. What it's inviting is a gentle building of capacity so that trust can grow organically from the inside out. So remembering our bodies are cyclical, but the systems that we live in are not. Modern life is structured around constant productivity, like daily productivity, predictability, and linear output models. Historically, based on male, hormonal patterns, not female biology. And research consistently shows that women are underrepresented in medical studies and conditions related to menstruation. So things like endometriosis, PMDD and chronic pelvic pain are really frequently underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or completely dismissed. And so many women are prescribed treatments that do not account for hormone cycling or nervous system, sensitivity and definitely rarely trauma history. So this really contributes to burnout, autoimmune illness, chronic stress. And I want to just say it again, this isn't because women's bodies are failing. It's not because we're not good enough. It's not because we can't keep up. It's because we're being asked to function inside systems that aren't designed for us. Right. That's why I love the wheel of the year. Your body has never let you down. It has paced itself. It's adapted, it's survived. So I hope there's something in there for you, and I may have used this a few times and I want to say it again. You are a masterpiece and a work in progress. You're exactly. Where you need to be. And there aren't really many people I've worked with or met that don't wanna be a little further long. But we did have a huge client insight where she has been working with us for years, Hannah and I, and she always has said that she wishes she was further along. She doesn't feel like she's making progress. She's invested a lot of time in her health and, doesn't feel like it's working, but. There was a turning point where she slowed down and she got the reflection time and she realized, yes, I have come so far. Okay. We can't pick up everything we learn and apply it immediately. That's why we revisit the same challenges, but through new eyes, through the eyes of wisdom and embodied experience. And so I'll speak a little bit to the archetypes, which are associated with the goddesses with the Wheel of the year. So Bridget is under the spotlight. She's the goddess of the flame, the hearth, healing, creativity, and sacred fire. And we embody this goddess within us. We embody the callieach and Bridget. Psychologically, these are parts, you know, internal family systems. I speak about part work when I work with clients and I have on other podcast episodes. We have parts of us that really feel the need to protect the system, protect us, or stay on guard until they think it's safe or feel safe. And this could take. Days, weeks, months, years, decades. Personal experience. I'm just saying decades. It has taken for some of my parts to know it's safe to let go of the belief system, the action, story. They want stabilization, Goddess Callieach and Bridget, they kind of show us callieach is looking for that protection still. She wants to keep the fire going. She wants to guard the fire and keep us safe in winter, she wants us to survive winter. And then we have the beautiful Bridget and she's showing us a part that she's ready to soften. She's ready to lean into hope and possibility. Neither or wrong, in Imbolc honors the moment when control loosens just a little, just enough. Because trust doesn't come from uncertainty. It comes from remembering. You have lived through uncertainty before and the wheel turned then and it's still turning now. So hope isn't naive. It's biological and life continues to move forward, even underground. So what I want to say is I hope some of the takeaways are you can go at your own pace. If you've got things in your life that are big, that are happening that require you to slow down, tune in, take time out, use the wheel of the year to notice when it is time to pull back, when it is time to open up and soften. And a few inquiries for you, so you might wanna grab a journal at this point. Where in my life am I between endings and beginnings? What feels quietly alive beneath the surface right now? What would it feel like to trust my body's pacing instead of forcing or fighting it? And what am I ready to gently clear? Not forcefully change. So my invitation for you is to mark that point on the wheel of the year, around the first or 2nd of February to go for a walk. Look for those gentle stirrings beneath the surface of the soil, looking for new life that's slowly coming up, the snow drops, pushing up. There might be lambs in the belly of the Ewe. Notice what's coming up within you. Any ideas? Maybe in the past you've kind of thought, oh, here's an idea. Let's run with it. But what if you took a pause and just let it percolate a little bit longer? The spring equinox is a little bit of a showstopper in the wheel of the year, and. I'm definitely gonna invite you to gather with friends perhaps, and take the weekend off and really lean into that as a big event on the wheel of the year. The Imbolc much more subtler. You might wanna take an hour or a half day. And light a candle for certain light, a fire if you can perhaps even gather some firewood or refresh your altar. We love to refresh our altar on in Imbolc and usually we make an offering in, so we'll cook some food, which is very seasonal, and look on our website. We've got a beautiful retreat this year, which is 2026 to celebrate in Imbolc, which is called Embody Bridget's Flame. It's connected to this lovely full moon energy as well. But we do, always run seasonal events, so keep an eye on that page, but turn in words my loves. See what's staring within you and don't make anything wrong. Just run with it. So I hope you enjoy a beautiful in Imbolc celebration, however that looks for you. And I'll drop an episode on just the Leo full Moon so we can concentrate a little bit more. On what the flavors of that are and how we can look at that for a trauma-informed lens, just to resolve anything that's ready for us to move. And thanks so much for listening, and I'd really love to hear how you are celebrating or how you mark in Imbolc, and I'll see you on the next episode. Thank you a million times, Ava, for joining us on this podcast episode. You can support the show by giving us a follow on any podcast platform you're listening to this on. If you already follow us, then thank you so much and maybe share this episode. If you think of someone, someone comes to mind where you think they'd really benefit from listening to this. This is one way that we like to spread the love with our friends, is sharing podcasts or playlist. So let them know that we are thinking about them. So just send it on to them with a few words about why they might enjoy it. And if you'd like to check out any of our in-person events or retreats or our online offerings, head over to our website, www.holistichealthcollective.co.uk. We'll see you in the next episode.