Summer Solstice

love & grief ::: celebrating life's bounty & bittersweetness

Welcome to Midsummer! And happy Venus Day 🌹🌸💗💋🍓

What a beautiful, special time of the year it is. We are being blessed with long days, radiant, life-giving sunlight, gorgeous luscious blooms and lush nature exploding all around us.

It’s a time to embrace the warmth and abundance of summer.

The time is here to celebrate life, to celebrate light, to celebrate joy. Also to celebrate life’s precious cycles of growth, fruition, eventual decay and rebirth. We could not be enjoying this present moment without the death and letting go of seasons past. From today forward, the light begins to slowly ripen and fade, sharing of its fruits as it gives and goes.

It’s not all rosy ~ this can bring up very natural feelings of bittersweetness or grief (I know I’m feeling it alongside the beautiful joys and abundance), that all of this will go away. Another year will pass, the seasons will shift, life will go on. And with it — change. We could not have our summers and these moments of pure joy and light without the darkness and pain of letting it all go someday.

This song is feeling especially fitting right now.

It’s a great time to reflect on what you were doing, how you were feeling, what seeds of intention you were planting back at the winter solstice 6 months ago.

How have things blossomed to life since then, within and around you?

What have you learned about the power of your inner light, that spark of life and creation, during this time of the turning wheel?

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Albert Camus

How does the sun’s warmth and radiance make you feel?

Midsummer and Litha are a time that holds symbolic meaning related to fertility, renewal, and the magical properties of nature. We’re invited to bask in the sun’s embrace and connect with the life-affirming energy that radiates throughout nature.

This weekend or in the coming week, I encourage you to spend some time lying in the grass, taking in the sun’s rays. Feel the warmth on your skin.

Solstice Flower Water Ritual

Take a slow walk in a garden and pick whatever flowers speak to your heart. You can create a simple yet incredibly powerful ritual of infusing water with these flowers and their essence in the bright sunlight (and full moon light!) for several hours. Drink with reverence, honouring with gratitude nature’s bounty and gifts. Celebrate the beauty of it all. Celebrate life. Celebrate your place in it all, always unfolding with divine grace.

Honour the sun at her peak, enjoy the earth’s generous bounty, and lean into the big, beautiful magic of the natural world.

The Full Radiance Yoga Nidrā practice below would be perfect as you rest sweetly in the grass :)

There shall be an eternal summer in the grateful heart.

Celia Thaxter

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
The year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar

Margaret Atwood

Many many Solstice blessings to you love!

xoxo
Julia

Full Radiance Yoga Nidrā
{~25 minutes}