Sometimes I have so much that I want to say that I seem to get t stuck where to start. So I will start with making time to pause. The summer solstice is a perfect opportunity for us to pause and evaluate where we are. How the year is progressing…how the seeds we have planted and the projects we have started are progressing. Looking forward to our future harvest times…what and how will we be harvesting the fruit of our labors. How will our actions so far this year affect our future?
This pause in the middle of our year is like our mid life crisis! A time where we get to evaluate if we are moving in the right direction. Do our actions make us happy? Are we trying to be too productive from our land…even land needs a rest at times to renew the energy required for future growth and harvest! If a mid life crisis is often an opportunity to revisit the fun and opportunities of our youth should this pause not be an opportunity to revisit the optimism of spring? Should we not spend this time appreciating the warmth of the sun, the refreshing sweetness of morning dew, the beautiful colour and miracle of nature?
If spring is a time of optimism, like youth, then should summer be a time where our experience is like a bud waiting to open into a beautiful flower. Our autumn years a time for beautiful colour and a tendency for earlier nights before a winter of quieter times and reflection.
This summer for me feels like a time where I have become an adult!!! Well as much as I ever will! I feel that I have learnt so much over recent years, each experience providing fertilizer and nourishment feeding me into a stronger version of me still turning my head in the direction of sunlight wherever possible. Just like many summers in the UK, this one seems to have provided too much rain. The challenges in life, like rain, are necessary for growth, even if they often happen just when we really feel we could do with more sunshine! This year has been like a UK summer… life catching me unawares with its ever changing ‘weather’! There have been hard times, like hail storms in May and strong winds threatening my stability. There have been many days where the breaks in the clouds letting the sunshine through have been mainly my times on my yoga mat. There have been times when I’ve felt water logged or as though life had forgotten how to shine a sun down on me.
Basically it has been a tough year. Challenges have been on many levels, personal, in business & in my health. However I am staying strong like we all do in the UK hoping if not for a heatwave of constant sunshine for a while, then at least an Indian summer!!! I have learnt how strong I can be, how many great people I have supporting me. I have remembered how necessary my yoga practice is to my health, physical and psychological. I have remembered that like a bulb I sometimes need to retreat away from the world in order to flower again when the sunshine returns. Yoga has supported me, nourished me and strengthened me, like an internal sun when the external sun forgets to shine!
So this is a reminder that we all need to pause, to reflect, to enjoy the sunshine when it happens but also to appreciate the full range of weather conditions that we may face, and to hope that they don’t get too extreme! My advice for coping with the varying weather in the UK summer is to do yoga, more yoga, and know that the more yoga you do, the brighter your internal sun will shine. The more yoga you do the stronger & more flexible you will become to cope with rain storms, wind bending you over (but never breaking you). Blessed are the flexible for we shall not be bent out of shape!