What a cyclical approach to life and planning actually means in practice

Having a clear understanding of something in principle and actually applying that knowledge to your daily life, actually embodying those ideas day to day, are two very different things.

Sometimes you can fully grasp the concept of something — in this case, living seasonally and cyclically — see all the benefits, recognise why it makes sense and feel completely drawn to the idea, but still struggle to understand how you are actually supposed to implement it in your own life and what it would look like when Monday morning arrives and there is work to do, a family to care for, a business to run, appointments in the diary and a seemingly endless list of things that need your attention.

If this is you, and you have been living the idea of seasonal, cyclical living, nodding along as you read the blog posts and agreeing with the things I’ve been talking about, but then getting stuck as soon as you turn that lens onto your own life and daily experience, this one’s for you.

Because I think there is a point where understanding the philosophy of something is no longer enough, and you need to be able to see how those ideas actually translate into the ordinary, sometimes rather mundane, reality of your own life.

You might say I came to seasonal living backwards.

I was living the practices, immersed in nature day to day as a way to survive and find moments of joy whilst wading through the struggles of chronic illness, and it was only later, when I could look back with a little more hindsight, that I could see I had been living seasonally all along.

I was paying attention to what was happening around me because it gave me something to focus on. I was noticing the changing seasons, the plants appearing and disappearing, the different quality of the light, the changing weather and the rhythms of the natural world, whilst also beginning to notice the changes happening within me.

I was learning, without necessarily having the language for it at the time, that I could not expect myself to feel or function in exactly the same way every day.

That, as it turns out, might have been the easier approach.

It was much easier to understand the principles of something I had already spent years doing naturally, because I wasn’t trying to change my life to fit an idea; I was simply given a framework through which I could finally understand what I had already experienced.

And that is perhaps why I want to talk about the practical side of cyclical living, because it is very easy to make it sound beautiful and poetic when we talk about following the seasons, working with your energy, honouring rest, connecting with nature and planning around cycles, but much harder to know what that actually means when you are sitting at your kitchen table looking at your calendar.

If you aren’t already aware of what a cyclical and seasonal life entails, you can start here:

[LINK TO PIECES THAT MAKE UP A CYCLICAL LIFE POST]

Because ultimately, cyclical living isn’t about creating a beautiful seasonal routine and then attempting to follow it perfectly for the rest of your life.

It isn’t about making your life more complicated by adding another system, another set of rules or another list of things you should be doing.

And it certainly isn’t about deciding that because it is winter you are no longer allowed to be productive, or that you have to spend the whole of summer saying yes to everything because your energy is supposed to be higher.

Real life simply doesn’t work like that.

There will be seasons when you are tired and seasons when you feel energised, regardless of what the calendar says. There will be weeks when your beautifully planned seasonal rhythm goes completely out of the window because life happens, and there will be days when you realise you have been rushing around for three weeks without noticing what your body, your mind or the season has been asking of you.

There will be messy middle bits.

And I actually think embracing those messy middle bits is one of the most important parts of learning to live cyclically, because the aim isn’t to become someone who is perfectly aligned with every season, every moon phase and every change in energy.

The aim is to become someone who notices.

Someone who can recognise when something isn’t working, who can pause long enough to ask what has changed, and who is willing to adjust rather than simply pushing harder because the original plan said that this was what was supposed to happen.

So what does that actually look like in practice?

You begin to plan with the season you are actually in

Rather than treating the year as one long stretch of time in which you are expected to maintain the same level of energy, motivation and productivity from January through to December, you begin to recognise that each season offers something slightly different.

Spring can be a natural time for beginnings, ideas and movement.

Summer can offer more outward energy, connection, creativity and visibility.

Autumn can bring a natural desire to gather things together, refine, organise and let go.

Winter can create more space for reflection, restoration and looking inward.

This doesn’t mean that you can only start things in spring or that you shouldn’t make plans in winter.

It simply means that when you are planning your year, your quarters and your months, you begin to take the wider context into account.

Instead of asking only, What do I need to get done?, you might also ask, What kind of season am I moving into, and how might I want to work with that?

That small shift can change the way you approach an entire year.

You stop planning for your imaginary perfect self

One of the biggest shifts that comes with taking a cyclical approach to life is beginning to plan for the person you actually are, living the life you actually have, rather than continually creating plans for an imaginary version of yourself who has unlimited energy, never gets distracted, never has an unexpectedly exhausting day, always has enough time to cook something from scratch and somehow manages to complete everything on her to-do list whilst still having plenty of time left over for a walk, a bath and an hour of journalling before bed.

I think most of us are guilty of this to some degree, particularly when we are planning from a place of optimism rather than experience, because it is very easy to look at a completely empty week and imagine everything that could fit into it, rather than remembering what your previous weeks have actually looked like and how much energy all of those things tend to require once they are no longer neatly arranged on a blank calendar.

A cyclical approach asks you to become much more honest about capacity, and that doesn’t mean lowering your expectations or deciding that you aren’t capable of doing very much; it means recognising that your capacity is not a fixed resource that you can draw from in exactly the same quantities every day, every week or every season.

There are days when you will have more energy, periods when you feel particularly motivated or creative, and seasons when you naturally want to be more outward-facing and active, just as there will be days when your body is asking for something quieter, weeks when life requires more of you than usual and seasons when you simply don’t have the same appetite for pushing forwards.

Instead of making your plans based entirely on what you could do if everything went perfectly, you begin to take into account what you can realistically hold alongside everything else that is already happening in your life.

This might mean looking at your week and choosing three things that genuinely matter rather than creating a list of fifteen things that would all be nice to get done, or it might mean recognising that a week containing several appointments, social commitments and deadlines probably isn’t also the week to decide that you are going to completely reorganise the house, start a new exercise routine and launch a new creative project.

It sounds incredibly simple, but there is something quite radical about making plans that are actually designed around your life rather than constantly trying to squeeze your life into the plans you have made.

You create rhythms rather than rigid routines

There is also a subtle but important difference between creating routines and creating rhythms, because a routine can easily become another thing you feel you have to get right, whereas a rhythm gives you something familiar to return to whilst still allowing your life to change around it.

A routine might tell you that you need to get up at a particular time, exercise on particular days, complete a certain sequence of tasks every morning and follow the same structure every evening, whereas a rhythm might simply give your day a few familiar anchors that help you feel grounded without requiring every day to unfold in exactly the same way.

You might have a morning rhythm that usually includes getting outside, having something nourishing to eat, checking in with yourself and looking at the day ahead, but what that actually looks like can change depending on your energy, your commitments, the weather, the season or simply what kind of day it happens to be.

The same can apply to your working life, where you might create a rhythm around having a planning day, a couple of days for deeper creative work, time for administration and a quieter end to the week, without deciding that you have somehow failed if Tuesday’s creative work has to move to Thursday because something unexpected has happened.

This is one of the reasons I love the idea of rhythm so much, because it gives you structure without requiring rigidity, and it creates a sense of familiarity that can support you whilst still leaving enough space for the reality of being a human being whose energy, needs and circumstances are constantly changing.

You use the turning of the seasons as natural points to pause

Rather than treating the year as one continuous stretch of time in which you are expected to keep moving towards the same goals at the same pace, a cyclical approach gives you natural opportunities throughout the year to stop, look around and ask yourself whether the direction you are moving in still makes sense.

The equinoxes and solstices can become useful markers for this, not because you have to perform some elaborate seasonal ritual every three months, but because having these natural turning points in the calendar creates an opportunity to step out of the day-to-day flow of life and look at the bigger picture.

At the beginning of a season, you might think about what you want to prioritise over the coming months, what you would like to make space for and what the particular energy of that season might be inviting you towards, whilst halfway through you can check whether those intentions still feel relevant or whether life has taken you somewhere slightly different.

Then, as the season comes to an end, you can look back at what actually happened rather than simply moving straight on to the next thing, noticing what worked, what didn’t, what surprised you, what you learned and perhaps most importantly, what you want to carry forward and what you are ready to leave behind.

This creates a much more natural cycle of planning, living, reflecting and adjusting, rather than making one plan at the beginning of the year and then spending the next eleven months feeling vaguely guilty about all the ways you have inevitably deviated from it.

You begin to pay attention to your own patterns

A large part of cyclical living is simply becoming more observant about yourself, because when you begin to pay attention to your energy, your mood, your creativity, your body and your capacity over a longer period of time, you start to notice patterns that are almost impossible to see when you are simply moving from one busy week to the next.

Perhaps you notice that you are naturally more creative in the mornings, that you need a quieter day after a particularly social weekend, that you tend to have a burst of enthusiasm when a new season begins or that there are certain times of year when you consistently find yourself wanting to simplify your commitments and spend more time at home.

Perhaps you notice that you keep planning far too much for certain kinds of weeks, or that you consistently underestimate how much recovery you need after periods of intense work, or that your body has been giving you the same signals for months and you have simply become very good at ignoring them.

The point isn’t to turn these observations into rigid rules that say you must behave a certain way every time the same pattern appears, because that would simply replace one form of rigidity with another; instead, you are collecting information about yourself that can help you make more supportive decisions.

The more you notice, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the easier it becomes to create a life that actually works with you rather than continually asking you to work against yourself.

You leave space in your plans

Another practical part of cyclical planning is learning to leave some space in your calendar, which can be surprisingly difficult when you have become accustomed to seeing an empty afternoon as something that should immediately be filled with another task, project, appointment or piece of productivity.

But an empty space in your calendar isn’t necessarily something that needs filling, because sometimes that space is exactly what allows the rest of your life to function without becoming overwhelming.

It gives you somewhere for the unexpected to go when something takes longer than planned, when you are more tired than you anticipated, when a friend needs you, when you suddenly realise you need a day without commitments or when you simply want to sit outside with a cup of tea and notice what is happening around you.

Leaving space also acknowledges something that rigid productivity systems often forget, which is that rest, thinking time, wandering, daydreaming, creativity and simply having an unstructured hour are all part of a life, even though they don’t necessarily produce something that can be ticked off a list.

And when you begin to see those spaces as part of your plan rather than evidence that your plan is incomplete, the whole experience of planning can start to feel much more spacious.

You use the moon as another rhythm to return to

The moon can provide another layer of cyclical awareness, particularly if you enjoy having regular points throughout the month where you can pause and reflect on what is happening in your life.

You might use the New Moon as a moment to think about what you are beginning, what you are planting or what you would like to invite more of into the coming weeks, and then use the Full Moon as an opportunity to look at what has grown, what has become visible and what you might now be ready to release.

You don’t need to reorganise your entire life around the lunar cycle, and you certainly don’t need to feel as though you have somehow missed the point because you forgot about the Full Moon until the following morning.

The value is often much simpler than that, because having a visible cycle outside yourself can act as a gentle reminder that life itself moves through phases, and that there are times for beginning, building, fullness, release, rest and beginning again.

Even simply knowing where you are in the lunar cycle can become a little moment of awareness within an otherwise busy month.

You use astrology as a framework rather than a set of instructions

Astrology can work in much the same way, particularly when you approach it as a reflective framework rather than a list of things you are supposed to be doing because a particular planet has moved into a particular sign.

The movement of the Sun through the zodiac gives us another seasonal rhythm to work with, and each sign can offer a different set of themes through which to look at the month ahead, whether that is the initiating energy of Aries, the grounding and embodiment of Taurus, the curiosity and communication of Gemini or the nourishment and emotional connection associated with Cancer.

You can use those themes as prompts rather than prescriptions, asking yourself what they might be highlighting in your own life and whether there is anything you want to explore, develop or pay particular attention to during that time.

This means astrology becomes less about trying to predict what is going to happen to you and more about giving you another language through which to understand the patterns and experiences you are already moving through.

You build reflection into the rhythm of your life

Because cyclical living is fundamentally about noticing patterns, reflection naturally becomes part of the process, but this doesn’t need to become another elaborate self-development practice that requires an hour of journalling every Sunday evening before you are allowed to move on to Monday.

It might be as simple as taking a few minutes at the end of the week to look back at what actually happened, noticing where your energy went, what felt nourishing, what felt draining, what you enjoyed, what you found difficult and whether the things you planned were actually the things that mattered once the week unfolded.

Over time, these small moments of reflection begin to create a much clearer picture of your life, because you are no longer relying entirely on memory or on the vague feeling that you are always too busy, too tired or somehow behind.

You begin to have evidence.

You can see the patterns.

You can start to recognise the kinds of weeks that leave you feeling well supported and the kinds of weeks that consistently leave you depleted, and that information can then feed back into the next cycle of planning.

This is what makes cyclical planning different from simply making a schedule, because the plan is continually learning from the life you are actually living.

You allow the plan to change

Perhaps one of the most important parts of all of this is becoming comfortable with changing your plans, because if the whole purpose of cyclical living is to respond to changing circumstances, changing energy and changing seasons, it doesn’t make much sense to create a plan that you then refuse to alter when life inevitably changes around it.

A plan is not a contract you have made with your past self that your present self is obliged to fulfil regardless of what has happened in the meantime.

It is a tool that is there to support you, and if the circumstances change, the plan is allowed to change too.

Sometimes something that felt incredibly important when you planned your month will feel much less important three weeks later, and sometimes something unexpected will happen that suddenly requires your attention, meaning that the things you thought you were going to focus on need to move further down the list.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this.

In fact, the ability to adjust your plans without immediately interpreting that adjustment as failure is one of the clearest signs that you are moving away from rigid productivity and towards a more cyclical way of living.

You aren’t asking, How can I force myself to stick to the plan?

You are asking, Does this plan still support the life I am actually living?

And if it doesn’t, you change it.

You spend time noticing the natural world

Underneath all of these practical habits is something much simpler, and perhaps much more important, which is the practice of actually noticing the world around you.

You notice what is growing and what is beginning to disappear, which flowers are opening, which berries are ripening, when the first leaves begin to turn, how the light changes throughout the year, what the birds are doing, how the temperature feels against your skin and how the landscape around you slowly shifts from one season into another.

You don’t have to know the names of everything you see, and you don’t need to turn every walk into a nature study lesson.

You simply have to start looking.

Because the more you notice the natural world, the more obvious it becomes that there is no such thing as constant growth, and that nothing in nature is expected to produce flowers, fruit or new growth indefinitely.

There are periods of expansion and periods of retreat, times of abundance and times of scarcity, moments when everything seems to be moving rapidly and others when very little appears to be happening at all, and none of those phases are considered a failure.

They are simply part of the cycle.

And the more we pay attention to those patterns outside ourselves, the easier it becomes to recognise that we are not somehow separate from them.

You make room for life to be cyclical rather than linear

Ultimately, I think this is what a cyclical approach to life and planning really means in practice.

It means beginning to move away from the idea that you should always be progressing, always building, always improving and always moving towards the next thing, and instead recognising that there will naturally be periods when your focus is on growth and others when your attention needs to turn towards maintenance, reflection, rest, integration or simply allowing what you have already created to exist without immediately asking it to become something more.

It means using the seasons as a framework for the year, the moon as a rhythm for regular reflection, astrology as a language for exploring different themes and your own lived experience as an ongoing source of information about what you actually need.

It means planning with your capacity rather than against it, leaving enough space for life to happen, creating rhythms rather than rigid routines and giving yourself permission to change direction when the circumstances you are responding to have changed.

And perhaps most importantly, it means accepting that none of this is ever going to look as neat in practice as it does when you write about it.

There will be busy periods where you forget everything you know about seasonal living, weeks where your calendar becomes far too full, months where you don’t journal once, mornings where you completely ignore your carefully considered rhythm and moments where you realise that you have been pushing yourself far beyond your capacity without even noticing.

That doesn’t mean you have failed at cyclical living.

It is actually where the practice becomes real.

Because the point isn’t to create a perfect life in which you are permanently aligned with the season, the moon, your energy and every natural rhythm around you; the point is to become more aware of when you are out of balance, to recognise what that might be telling you and to have enough flexibility in your life that you can make a different choice when you are ready.

You are not trying to become perfectly seasonal.

You are simply learning to notice.

And then, once you notice, you have the opportunity to pause, reflect, adjust and begin again.

Perhaps that is the most practical definition of cyclical living I can give you: creating a life that is structured enough to support you, but flexible enough to change as you do, and learning to trust that changing your plans, your pace, your priorities and even your direction is not evidence that you are doing life badly.

It is evidence that you are paying attention.

And really, that is where the whole thing begins.