When the Dark Gets Heavy: Grief, Softness, and the Power of Not Doing It Alone.

a co-authored piece with Sam Messersmith, Forest Therapy Guide & Writer at Wandering Willow

This week, I invite Sam Messersmith of Wandering Willow to co-author this piece with me. We have both been writing this month about the dark days of winter and the effects of holiday hustle on our sensitive souls. This piece is about how coming together in community in this darkness is profoundly supportive to us all.

TeriLeigh

January 2013. The motel room in South Dakota cost $43 a night. It was the kind of place with the scratchy so-gross-you-don’t-want-to-touch-it polyester bedspreads, and dirt-caked carpets that forgot their natural colors decades ago.

I had left a weekend job teaching at yoga studio job in Sioux Falls with intentions to get to Florida in time for a job the following weekend. An ice storm had forced me off the road somewhere between my old life and whatever came next.

It was well after midnight when I sat on the corner of the bed and read the Dear Jane letter my husband had sent via email. The words “done”, “over”, and “divorce” punched me in the face.

The room had one of those heating units that rattles and blows lukewarm air that never quite reaches you. The thermostat on this one was stuck on 62 degrees. I couldn’t get warm. My body shook from the cold and what had broken up into shards inside me.

There was only one space big enough for my yoga mat—a strip of stained carpet right next to the door. I unrolled it there, invited Grief to the space, and came into child’s pose, and pulled my puffy down coat over my back like a tortoise shell.

I cried.

The kind of crying where I couldn’t catch my breath, but I heard myself wail and sob with words like ouch, and it hurts, and whyyyyyy spilling off my tongue. Sounds came out of me that I didn’t know I could make. I knew that the grief of the loss of the marriage triggered a bigger grief, the loss of every version of myself I thought I would become.

I made friends with Grief that day. I cried until there were no tears left (and I haven’t had tears since then, but that’s another story for another day).

I felt every feeling. I let it all be exactly as broken and terrible as it was.

And it worked.
The ritual worked.
I survived that night.

I got back in my car the next morning and kept driving toward whatever came next.

Sam

I’m a bad Forest Therapy guide.

I don’t always like going outside. I go out maybe once or twice a week—and yes, that includes trips to the mailbox and the grocery store. Of those excursions, perhaps twice a month are actually intentional about just being outside.

But I’ve learned to harvest micro moments. When I step out to my car or walk to the mailbox, I pause. I let the elements observe me. I let the wind touch my skin, the sky expand over me. I root into the earth and become one with the landscape, even if just for a breath or two—becoming this soft animal body, letting my wild and precious life live.

I notice the weather. As a highly sensitive person, small talk is my kryptonite, but weather? Weather is never small talk to me. It’s locational, part of the landscape itself. I notice the temperature on my bare skin versus my clothed parts. I notice what it feels like to be alive in this body, outside, right now.

For a long time, I believed healing meant doing more—more rituals, more journaling, more effort. But lately, I’ve discovered my nervous system doesn’t need stimulation. It needs softness. Space. It needs days when I don’t measure my worth by what I accomplish.

I call them “me days.”

Sometimes that looks like a walk at the local labyrinth.

Sometimes that looks like sitting in the woods or beside a stream. Not walking. Not seeking signs or insights. Just sitting—letting the water move and the wind think for me.

Other times, my “me day” happens in my recliner, controller in hand, podcast murmuring in the background. Sometimes I’m killing monsters; sometimes I’m decorating an island for talking animals. Either way, my mind gets to play while my body remembers it’s safe to rest.

These “me days” have become my favorite teddy bear of healing—a gentle comfort reminding me I don’t have to strive to be okay. Doing less isn’t laziness; it’s medicine for the parts of me that have forgotten what ease feels like.

In forest therapy, we often say the forest is never in a hurry. Every leaf falls when it’s ready. Every seed waits for its season. Maybe I’m learning to live that way too—accepting my own ebbs and flows, trusting the descent into autumn’s darkness as much as spring’s return. My own blooming will come when it’s time, if I just allow myself to rest.

That bitter cold ice-storm night, I did what sensitive souls learn to do. I sank into my practices and took care of myself alone. Sam harvests her micro-moments of gentleness. I built grief rituals on motel floors. Different methods, same reality: we’ve both gotten really good at “managing” darkness in solitude.

It’s what we sensitive souls do. We learn that depending on others to help and support us and understand our uber-sensitivity is unreliable (at best), so we sink into our selves and our “me-time”.

But I’ve always known, deep in my soul, that night would have been so much better if I hadn’t been alone.

Seven years later, when I built my blanket fort during covid quarantine, I had gotten really good at going through darkness alone. So good that hyper-independence had become a safety net for me.

And this year, as I’ve been watching my dear friend Sam talking on Substack about being tired, needing “me-time”, and letting herself shut down as the days get shorter and the nights get darker, I had an idea.

Let’s try NOT doing this thing alone this year.
Let’s try doing this darkness thing together.
In community.

We crave community. But, and this is a big BUT. . . We don’t need someone to fix it or offer advice or solutions or us that everything happens for a reason.

We crave someone to sit with us in that darkness, to hold our hands while we ugly-cry and mean it, to whisper to us gently that there is always expansion on the other side of contraction, that darkness never lasts forever and that as impossible as it seems when we’re in it, light always returns.

So, we’re gathering a circle.

A small community of sensitive souls who want to hold and bear witness for each each through the darkness as it deepens into the longest night of the year.

FREE COMMUNITY CHAT

On November 25th at 12pm EST, Sam and I are hosting an open community chat for anyone curious about Candlelit Soulstice. Come explore what we’re creating together, ask questions, share what winter brings up for you, and see if this circle feels like home. Just come and be with us.

Starting November 30th, Sam and I are holding space for a four-week journey together through the darkest part of the year, culminating on the winter solstice, December 21st. We’ll gather weekly to share practices, witness each other’s struggles and wisdom, and remind one another that we’re not alone in the dark. If hand-holding through darkness sounds like what you need this year, we’d love to have you with us.