Solstice.

The Winter Solstice snuck up on me this year. Before I even had a chance to feel the cold, dark depths of Winter the way I usually do, we have made it to the top of the mountain. The Sun is getting closer to us by the day, it is on its way back.

I feel the Sun’s movement, I believe we all do on some level and as with most things for me, the level I feel it on is extreme.

Some would call it Seasonal Affective Disorder but honestly, that makes me a little mad and simultaneously a little amused. To call having a connection with the Sun’s movement ‘disorder’ when the Sun is life, when the Sun is vital for the Earth’s existence and also for our existence as humans. When we are of the Earth and of the Sun…feeling where the Sun is, in relation to us on the Earth, feels completely natural and useful to me.

I feel it, I acknowledge it and accept it. I move with it and I move through it. I have been able to do this, without consciously working at it, this year because I have practiced and honed being with everything I feel in this way.

The contraction I once felt when I sensed the moving away- the freezing up, the fearing, the getting stuck in the dark hole of it- that was all a result of believing that what I was feeling was a problem. It was avoidance, denial, pushing through and ignoring what my body was feeling, sensing, communicating to me because I perceived that it was a problem.

But it makes sense to me, now that I am more in tune with my senses, to notice the moving away in order to slow down and honour that and then to notice the coming back in order to celebrate and use the energy of that with intention.

Because it makes sense now, in my body, for me to experience these responses to the Sun moving away and then coming back. I’m not scared of them anymore.

I feel sadness when I think about how it could have made sense, in the same way, years ago when my beautifully, perfectly sensitive child found the first years of his life in an environment that was constantly overstimulating to him…overwhelming. 

How it could have made sense when I found his resulting behaviour and my inability to fix it confusing, chaotic and difficult to cope with. When I had no support, no voice for my needs and no connection to my compass and I became depleted and depressed. That could have made sense rather than feeling like a problem to fear and hide. 

It all makes sense to me now. That how we feel is what our senses want us to know, so that we can make the changes required to come back to balance.

When we are able to feel, acknowledge, accept then we can move with what is there and into what is next. When we avoid, ignore, fight and fear we are forced to stay with it, in the dark, unable to see that the light, like the sun, is always on its way around.

So when I realised this morning that I haven’t been awaiting the solstice, haven’t been holding my breath, wishing for it, feeling impatient and desperate for its arrival and suddenly it is here, I felt huge gratitude.

For all of the things I have struggled to feel in my past and the way that they have each played a part in bringing me to this place. Of being able to feel what is here and know that if I can just stay with it then it will eventually make sense. That it will then move out of the way for the next piece of life to come.