Dear Friends,
This week I learned something that stopped me in my tracks – quite literally, as you’ll soon understand. I had been speaking with my dear friend Alice about how much I intuitively feel that this time of year is about slowing down. One would think it would be peak productivity time as the sun reaches its zenith in the northern hemisphere, but I just always feel something else.
A few days later she forwarded me an email from Chameli Ardagh of Awakening Women Institute. Chameli had written: The word Solstice is derived from the Latin words, sol for “Sun” and sistere for “To Stand Still”. It is the time where the sun reaches its highest point and there is a pause in the world. This pause is a portal, an opportunity to interrupt the momentum of habits and energy patterns that no longer serve you.
I love this so much! I knew it. I’ve been feeling this for years, but never more than these last few weeks – a deep pull toward the earth, toward my garden, toward something slower and more grounded than our society typically allows.
And might I add, we are at a point where we desperately need to dismantle not only personal patterns that don’t serve us, but collective patterns that are destroying our planet and its peoples.
And then, as if life wanted to underscore this teaching, I received my own mandatory pause in the form of mild sunstroke this past weekend.
For three days, I had no choice but to surrender. Ten to thirteen hours of sleep each night. I got up at 6am Monday morning ready to get to it, and fell to the floor with dizziness and nausea. I crawled to the bathroom and then went back to bed for 4.5 more hours.
On one level, foolish—I could have worn sunscreen. On another level, so soulfully beautiful. The Sun was literally forcing me to rest deep and restore.
The Radical Act of Pause
Here’s the thing. We so often think, “Very well for you to speak of rest, but there’s NO WAY I could do that. I have way too much to DO!”
But what happens when we get physically sick or experience a major loss that brings us completely to our knees? We find a way. When the body makes the decision for us, we stop.
We call on community. We reduce our needs to the bare minimum. I’ve witnessed close friends, clients and myself be forced to do this countless times – had our lives completely upended by illness or loss.
It’s not something any of us would wish for, but often, we survive.
And yes, there ARE times in our lives when we do have to push through to survive. I will not deny the spectrum of that reality. The people in Gaza who have been displaced and forced to move and evacuate and move again and again over the last 20 months are an extreme example. And the Congo, this has been going on for over 20 years now. 💔
Of course no one is going to rest under those conditions. But eventually, when the war and genocide is over (In’shallah, God willing, may it be soon!), the body must be supported to come out of fight/flight/push mode and it must rest deeply.
Many of us on this Earth are the grandchildren of survivors of displacement or genocide, and many of us are still learning to allow our bodies and our nervous systems to rest.
“Mycelium Dreaming” by Autumn Skye Morrison
It takes generations, and it will take generations to undo the harm that is happening in Gaza, Congo and even the United States right now. 💔 We are going to need all hands on deck, which is partly why I’m so passionate about teaching this Somatic Grief Tending work. I am playing the long game.
One of my favourite authors, Sophie Strand, recently published her memoir, The Body is a Doorway. Sophie lives with chronic illness and is immensely creative and brilliant. The title says it all. The body is a door when we can go inside and learn from its wisdom. It’s a critical perspective that offers so much to our culture of upward momentum that says, “you need to get better..” (what if you never will?)
In our relentlessly productive world, we live in what I can only call a colonized relationship with time. One that pushes us toward constant output. That measures our worth by our productivity. That has us believing summer solstice means peak performance rather than sacred pause.
But here’s what grief & illness teach us, and what the Earth demonstrates through her seasons: some of the most important work happens when we are seemingly unproductive, at least from the outside.
“Strong Girl” by Lucy Campbell
The Medicine of Forced Pause
As anyone who has walked through grief knows, we absolutely cannot go back to life as usual. And that’s not a failing – it’s a feature. Grief requires us to stop, to pause, to let our usual patterns fall away so something new can emerge.
The same is true for these points on the wheel of the year, where the sun appears to literally pause mid-flight and change its course. I’ll be writing more soon about the concept of pendulation, which is foundational to working with grief and trauma. But if you think about a pendulum swinging, at the Solstices, we’re at the top of that pendulum swing of the universe – the cosmos and our place in it on this planet spiralling through the galaxy.
“Song of the Makers” by Autumn Skye Morrison
Our society tells us that ‘success’ comes from hustle and pushing through. But it doesn’t teach us much about accessing brilliance, genius, and authentic innovation & creativity. And innovation is desperately needed on the planet right now – we need different solutions to the systemic violence that has plagued us for too long.
The real gifts – our creativity, our insights, our capacity for deep connection – arise from restful, receptive places within us. From the places we can only access when we finally stop running, stop trying, stop pushing through.
During my three days of enforced rest, something beautiful happened. This morning, I woke naturally at 4:30 AM to witness the full moon hanging low and golden near the horizon. This moment felt like the Earth’s way of saying: See what becomes available when you trust the pause?
An Invitation to Conscious Pause
The energy we give to rest returns to us tenfold.
I’ve experienced this countless times in my life, and yet I still need to be reminded. And here’s what else I keep learning: we can choose to pause consciously, or we can wait until our bodies choose for us.
Neither is wrong, but many ancient cultures honoured these seasonal markers with collective movement into sacred ritual – a ritualized, communal pause from regular life. What a beautiful way to invoke collective health into the culture.
Stonehenge – a place of Sacred Solstice Ritual
We can honour the solstice invitation to stop with the sun. Or we can push through until we find ourselves flat on our backs with no other option.
As someone who has experienced grief and perhaps tends others through it, you might already understand that transformation often requires us to fall apart before we can come back together differently. You might already know that the deepest healing happens not in the doing, but in the allowing.
So here’s my gentle invitation during this time of Solstice:
How might you create conscious space for stillness?
How might you honor your own rhythms alongside the seasonal wisdom that surrounds us?
What would it look like to trust that your gifts, your insights, your capacity to heal and grow all become more available when you first tend to your own need for sacred rest?
“Sanctum” by Lucy Campbell
Rest as Resistance
It’s not easy to rest when there is so much need in the world. When Gaza is besieged and thousands are gathering from all corners of the globe to bring aid and end the siege. When immigrant families in our neighbouring country are being attacked and separated, and communities are rising up to protect them.
I want to be all these places helping, and I’m sure many of you wish you could do more and be more places at once, as well. And maybe some of you ARE there, and you need to take a breathe.
There is so much grief, so much pain, so much suffering that needs tending.
But I know that it is from rest and contemplation that brilliance, truth, and humanity emerge – along with the solutions. What is truly helpful for our world is not something we have collectively tried before. We need something that is deeply ancient and innovative at the same time, and we need it now, and now, and now.
Fortunately, those of us who love life and have our humanity intact are like a circle of singers. Because we are many, we can each take a breath when we need to, and the song will keep being sung. In a choir, there is also a spectrum of vocal range and function. All parts are needed to have overall harmony and texture of the music.
Don’t discount your role, no matter what it is. It is colonization that wants you to believe you should be doing it all and comparing yourself to everybody else.
What is actually imperative is that you find YOUR unique song.
So I invite you to tune in and listen to your body’s wisdom right now. Is your body calling you to take action – perhaps a fire in the belly and a desire to move in your limbs? Or is your body calling you toward the Earth, to dreaming and resting and restoring?
Will you rest and dream with me, and move only when the moment is right?
The Sun stops. The Earth breathes. And in that breathing space, possibilities we may not yet have imagined open. The body is a doorway, and the Solstice is, perhaps, truly, a portal.
I’m still picking roses to dry for our fall grief rituals (rose is medicine for grief) and tending to my garden, and writing to you here with my musings and reflections.
But a lot of what needs to unfold is unfolding internally, in the deep creative stillness of doing what may look like not much from the outside.
It’s not easy to be in that in a society constantly pushing us into fight or flight and fear. But we can do it, together!
With Big Love and Solstice blessings,
Josea Tamira Crossley & the Dark Woods Team
May All Beings Be Happy.
May All Beings Be Free.
Free From Suffering and the Causes of Suffering.
May we all recognize our liberation, together. 🌹
