This is Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast, a place to explore spiritual concepts, tools, and practices to deepen your healing and awakening. I'm your host, Josephine Hartman, a certified intuitive healer and Akashik Records practitioner and teacher.

I'm honored that you're here and happy to serve as a guide and companion on your path for a little while.

To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one or through my courses, please visit josephinehartman.com.

This is a special episode for listeners in parts of the world and in climates that experience

the four seasons, as we'll be focusing on the phenomenon of seasonal

depression related particularly to the fall and winter months. My gratitude goes out to Chelsea,

a lovely podcast listener who sent in a question about this. So Chelsea said in her email,

with fall arriving, my anxieties are triggered and I have underlying fear. Do you have thoughts about different ways to cope with harsh

Midwest winters? So I, Josephine, don't live in the Midwest. I live on the east coast of the U.S. in Massachusetts.

So we do experience winters. They might not be as harsh, although sometimes they can be pretty bad.

And I am recording this episode in September of 2022 as the autumn is rapidly approaching in this part of the world,

which is why I thought Chelsea's question was really timely, and I wanted to address it now.

Hopefully this will be useful to you if you're in a place in the world where the fall is coming, winter is coming, or if you're going to experience the fall or winter at some later point in time, if you're in a different hemisphere.

At any rate, we'll be exploring seasonal depression and these fall and winter months from a spiritual

perspective, since that's what this podcast is about, right, as its name implies.

In other words, what's the deeper meaning of these seasonal cycles? What do these colder, darker, quieter months

bring up within you? Why do we sometimes have resistance to the autumn and or the winter?

And why do we experience this change in mood, mindset, sometimes even personality, it feels like, as the seasons change?

Let's dive into all of this and see how we can make some sense of it.

Now, first, a quick disclaimer. This podcast is not a substitute for psychiatric treatment

or seeing a mental health counselor.

If you need to do so, please follow your own intuition and common sense and do whatever you need to do to care for yourself.

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