Winter Made Me Question Whether My Rituals Were Just Light Therapy With Extra Steps

[amy_e_9137]

Winter in Chicago hits different when you’re the kind of person who notices exactly how the light dies at 4:45 p.m. I’m a photographer, so this isn’t poetic for me — it’s practical. When the sun drops, my mood drops with it. I’ve had a doctor mention seasonal affective disorder before, and I get it. My brain isn’t “just being dramatic” because the windows are gray. It’s a circadian rhythm issue, plus a whole pile of human stuff: less daylight, less movement, less novelty.

What I don’t get is when someone says moon rituals “cured” their winter depression. Not me. I’m polite, but I’ll say it: a candle on the windowsill is not a substitute for light therapy, exercise, or talking to a clinician if you’re sliding.

That said, I do use ritual. Every Sunday night I do a short breathwork session and a tiny “closing the week” practice. It’s not magic. It’s structure. When the days are short and parenting is loud and my own needs keep getting filed under “later,” the ritual gives me a predictable place to pause. It works on me the way behavioral activation works — not because the universe is listening, but because I’m doing something for me on purpose.

Tarot has been weirdly useful here, too. I don’t pull cards to get answers. I use them as prompts. Lately I keep getting The Moon in a way that used to scare me. Now I read it as: you’re in the foggy part of the cycle. Don’t make big decisions from the dark. The Hanged Man also shows up, and I don’t read that as punishment either. It’s more like: stop forcing momentum. Let the week settle. Let the next move be smaller.

The thing I keep coming back to is that rituals don’t have to be mystical to be useful. They can be a low-stakes way of saying: this part of the day belongs to me, not to the inbox, not to the kids’ schedule, not to the fact that it’s dark outside by the time I get home. If my Sunday breathwork is basically a tiny behavioral anchor, fine. If my tarot prompt is basically a journaling cue, fine. If my candle is basically a visual reminder that I’m allowed to slow down, fine.

What I’m less okay with is when people frame those rituals as replacements for the actual things that help in winter. If I’m feeling flat, I want light, movement, sleep, social contact, and professional support if needed. A ritual can make those easier to do, but it shouldn’t become the whole plan. That’s where I get skeptical. Not because I don’t like rituals, but because I’ve seen “spiritual” get used to mean “don’t do the boring, evidence-based stuff.”

So yes, winter made me question whether my rituals were just light therapy with extra steps. Maybe a little. But I’d rather keep them than pretend the pause isn’t useful. The fog is real. The dark is real. And if a small Sunday practice helps me move through it without turning everything into a crisis, I’ll take that. I just don’t need it to be magic. I need it to be mine.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Psychedelic Therapy: Psilocybin, MDMA, and the Modern Renaissance | Mystic Wiki.)

[cant_decide_8841]

If my Sunday breathwork is basically a tiny behavioral anchor, fine.
I'd push back on that "basically," because reducing ritual to a behavioral anchor flattens what I think is happening. Carving the Elder Futhark isn't useful for me only because it fills a quiet window; the repeated cutting, naming, and facing of the rune gives the dark a shape, and that symbolic act can shift attention in ways a checklist doesn't. In Jung's active imagination, the value of a practice isn't just its scheduling function—it's that it lets unconscious material get a form, which can make the inner weather more bearable. So winter rituals may sit beside light therapy, not underneath it, as their own kind of symbolic maintenance.