Ep. 73: The Wintering Body: Rewriting Illness, Rest, and Healing with Asha Frost

In this end-of-year (and Christmas 🧑‍🎄) conversation, I’m joined by Asha Frost for a deeply grounding and timely exploration of cyclical wisdom, rest, and healing. As we move toward winter solstice and the intensity of the holiday season, we speak about slowing down, honouring ancestral knowledge, and remembering that our worth is not tied to productivity. This episode invites you into the deep medicine of inner wintering — in the body, the creative process, and life itself.Asha Frost is an Indigenous (Ojibwa) healer, best-selling author of the book You Are The Medicine, speaker and guide. Drawing on her ancestral knowledge and innate gifts, Asha has become a prominent figure in the field of Indigenous healing, garnering recognition on both local and international platforms.She has created transformative experiences for thousands with heart, profound wisdom and unwavering dedication to her heritage.In this episode we talked about:💫 The origins of The Inner Winter: Asha shares what led her to write the book, emerging from a deep place of survival and her own resistance to rest, shaped by oppressive systems that equate worth with productivity.💫 Writing as decolonial healing: She reflects on how creating the book became a personal journey of unwinding colonial harm and internalised narratives around doing, striving, and earning rest.💫 Living with chronic illness: Drawing from her lived experience with lupus, Asha speaks honestly about illness, rest, and healing, challenging the shame and blame often attached to diagnosis and the belief that being unwell is our fault.💫 The gifts of the Inner Winter: The Inner Winter invites us to release productivity-based self-worth and recognise wintering as a powerful phase of intuition, connection, learning, and deep inner evolution.💫 Wintering in a fast, capitalist world: Asha explores how to honour rest and wintering in a culture that values speed and output, emphasising trust in our inherent enoughness simply as we are.💫 Illness, healing, and deep medicine: The Inner Winter speaks to those navigating chronic illness, mental health challenges, postpartum seasons, or feeling unseen and left behind—offering illness as an invitation to go deeper, where profound healing and creative medicine can emerge, even if cure is not possible.💫 The power of Spirit Animals: We spoke about spirit animals and explored the symbolism of the bear and the butterfly, and how spirit animals can support us through different phases of healing, transformation, and rest.Enjoy!---🌟 Join my softly rebellious on Substack: Subscribe here.🌟 Sign up here to receive a copy of my free workshop about The wild and poetic anatomy of the female body.🌟 Work with me 1:1 online or in person, find out more here.---💛 The Soft Rebellion Podcast is created and hosted by Flurina Dominique Thali. I love hearing from you. To contact me, email [email protected]:- Flurina Dominique Thali & The Soft Rebellion: @flurina.thali / www.flurinathali.com- My guest, Asha Frost: Find out more about her work through her website here. Follow Asha on Instagram here.Credits:Intro/outro music – ‘Hymn for Jim’ by Aspyrian: Robin Porter – saxophone, Jack Gillen – guitar, Matt Parkinson – drums, composed by Robin Porter, listen to the full track here.Graphic: Annina Thali, for more information click here This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit flurinathali.substack.com