Summer Solstice Replay

**This episode is a replay of the 2020 Summer Solstice. Enjoy!**

{From 2020} June 20th was the Summer Solstice, and it is the first solstice in many years that I didn’t teach a special meditation event. I usually host something extra special to harness the power of these reflective times, and yet, this year, even though I had already mapped up what I wanted to share and reflect on, I just kept delaying until the day was upon us and it was too late…

The Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year; the most light we see in a 24 hour period.

When we meditate, we are in essence harnessing the light of awareness and shining it inside. This light allows us to look deeper inside, to see more, to clear out the cobwebs.

Turning on the lights is brave. It is powerful. It is enlivening.

And yet, if we haven’t done the work to shore up the foundation, to clear the path leading deeper in, turning on the light can serve as a shock.

If you’ve been in the dark a long time and you step out into the brightness of daylight, it can be blinding, can’t it?

We shield our eyes; perhaps we run back inside for sunglasses, something to protect ourselves from the glare….

If we haven’t done the work to be with little discomforts, how might it feel to face bigger discomforts? It can send us running for the hills, abandoning our meditation practice with the seemingly innocent excuse of “I just don’t feel like it” right now. I’ve caught this at play in myself lately {hence the lack of a Solstice event this year}.

My invitation today is to let go of the need to “think” through this natural play of events. Instead of analyzing, how can you choose to move with each moment as a moment of transformation?

How to do this? Well, step one is ‘don’t skip your meditation practice even when you want to…’ Step two is ‘anchor more deeply into your heart.’

The practices of meditation, while they start out working with the mind and the thoughts, are always gently guiding us into the heart.

Not in a sappy way; not in a hippy-dippy way. In a clean, clear trajectory towards deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Every meditation text, every meditation guru from millenia before, guides us here.

It is from here that we can gain steady traction, firm footing, and gather courage to bring what is needed from the darkness into the light.

We start to trust the images, the thoughts, the threads of connection that are revealed to us.

We start to be more curious about the responses we have to the daily moments in our lives.

We start to explore the freedom of choice.

Today’s meditation is a practice of shining the light. Let’s get to it.

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