The word solstice is derived from Latin sol (Sun) and sistere (to stand still). Each new year in the Gregorian calendar, our planet has recently passed through the December solstice, when the southern and northern poles of earth are tipped their closest or furthest away from the sun.
I usually feel this transition in my body. The lead in, the pause of the peak moment, and tipping into what is next. I feel my body's inner transit moving through this shift, and a partnering with the earth in a planetary, cosmic dance with the sun. In my own system I recognise a digesting and metabolising of pieces of the year past. An undressing and shedding of others. And then out of the compost a blooming of the new.
As humans, I like to think these planetary moments and longer rhythms are like a heartbeat pulsing in our collective psyche. We have ancient timekeeping traditions of marking and honouring these times with ceremony, special rites and cultural or physical structures. In the bright, expansive skies of the south, I feel a relinquishing and unfurling. While in the northern dark I imagine deep restoring and recharging.
But this year, the pandemic of coronavirus and the disruption of climate change strained my connection to a deeper, natural cycling, and 2021 drew to an end rapidly, with heat and intensity. I found myself craving attunement with the earth’s rhythms and listening intently for a myriad of messages; changing tides and storms, the call of frogs, forest textures and berries fruiting.
Out of this experience emerged a new process and meditation I'd like to offer you for reimagining, reaffirming and restorying. As we tip out and forward into January and turn ourselves toward the territory of a whole new year, let us honour and celebrate all the exquisitely unique ways that life and gifts will come through each of us!
Right here, right now.
What if this time, this moment, is precisely where we need to be?
Allow yourself to drop deeply into this moment. Actively suspend any thoughts from the past and questions about the future.
Breathing in the fullness of NOW.
Together we sit in this breath: perceptive, listening, self-aware. Allowing ourselves to tip in to all that is held within us in this moment. Notice arriving exactly where you are, and your sense of aliveness.
Draw your focus in to YOU. Bringing together your intention and attention to be with you in this moment. Allowing yourself to move into deeper terrain, your inner nature, how you know yourself to be not only in your mind, but in the heart of your being.
Your deep loves, and the ways only you embody love and care in your relations.
Your qualities and ways of living that are intrinsically, uniquely yours.
Your passions and joys.
The imaginative possibilities, calling and creations you dream and nurture.
Come deeply home into yourself.
Noticing too your body and its diverse, beautiful landscapes, full of its capacity to communicate between your outer and inner worlds. And how your body and psyche are deeply rooted in place/s and relationship with so many others.
Here there is an invitation into partnering with life. An invitation into your creativity and possibilities together.
Acknowledging now in this pause, how being alive feels for you right now. What ‘being’ means personally for you, not so much human doing and in action, simply being who you are in this time, place and ecosystem. Anchoring helpful feelings somewhere in your body to return to at any time.
And when you’re ready, breathing yourself into linear, more ordinary time again.
From this embodied place of being, right here, right now, allow yourself to be curious, and ask:
have any core questions about your 'being' arisen?
'who and how do you wish to be' as we tip and lean and dive into 2022?
and might there be a new way of partnering with life?
With love and possibility, Sara xox