Over the course of the year, we experience periods where everything seems harder, motivation is low and achieving tasks that sometimes seem basic suddenly feel far more taxing. It’s like you have gone from walking on a footpath to walking in mud or trying to make consequential decisions while in the car from the airport after getting off a long-haul flight from a two-week holiday in a serene part of the world.

Today we enter one of those periods, a time that many people report experiencing the Cheshvan Blues. It’s a month-long period in which people feel like they have lost their spark, like there’s a fog that has come over them, not a sadness but a heaviness. Being that the sun has risen and set like every day and the world today seems like it’s the world of yesterday, we don’t see it coming and many people automatically assume there’s something wrong with them rather than see it as a different dimension we are all passing through. We haven’t changed, the dimension we live in has.

Cheshvan is the lunar month after Tishrei (the month of the High Holidays and Sukkot). The sages added a formal title to this month’s name: Mar meaning bitter. The month of Mar Cheshvan contains no holidays, not even a fast day(!), it is flat and barren, bereft of any hill or valley. Its energy is so contrasting to the month before no wonder it brings us down. 

Because we are talking about something as invisible and abstract as a mazal, an energy, we don’t notice the transition point and begin wondering why we feel foggy and muddled suddenly. We start searching for reasons in the wrong places and even end up blaming things & people that actually have nothing to do with it.

 Knowing that the Cheshvan Blues are a real thing may help you as you journey through the next few weeks. You need not soul search or blame yourself or others. There is no need to question your purpose or abilities. 

For the next month trudge. Put one foot in front of the other and don’t overthink your feelings or life around you. These periods crop up throughout the year. Sometimes they are a general, global, mazal that is time based and sometimes it is because of a personal mazal stage that you are going through (personal ones can be more easily altered but that’s not for now). 

I encourage you to accept that the next few weeks may be a little more sluggish, respond to that accordingly and don’t let it unravel you.

Much like jet lag, it will pass. Keep eating, walking and sleeping and you will feel better in a few weeks.