Solstice
A poetic vision.
Today the sun stands still. Solstice, from the Latin sol, the sun, and sistere, to stand. At the top of its climb the sun appears to pause, to hold at the height of the year before it turns and begins the long descent. The longest day. The fullness of the light. This is the Mother's hour, the sustaining light at its zenith.
All year the sun traces one path across the sky, rising and setting, climbing and falling through the solstices and the equinoxes, drawing a cross upon the heavens. The same cross is traced upon the body, and at its centre is the still point, the place where the light seems to stand. The place the ancients marked with the Ankh, the disk of the sun lifted into the sky upon the Key of Life.
When we speak of the Womb of the Heart, we speak of a symbol, not only the name of a circle. The Womb is the Mother, She who births the sun, who births the light. What rises on this longest day rises first from her.
So we open on the day the sun stands still, and we ask what it is to be met by the Life that is breathing us.
A deepening into what we are calling the observer effect, from the perspective we are cultivating in the Womb of the Heart, is that there is no problem to solve and nothing to correct. The observer effect can be understood as intimacy. Life is not being watched from a distance. Life is being met. And in being met, it moves. It is always moving.
Life is observing Life as I Am, tracing the “I” thought back to its source, to the “I I” that Ramana speaks of. The breath responds because it is not separate from the one who is aware of it.
When we work with the sacred symbol of the Ankh, the Key of Life, we enter its mystery through the Breath of Life. The Ankh opens a remembrance of Life, and breath is one of the most intimate ways that Life reveals itself within the body.
The same Ankh, in the temples of Egypt, lifts the sun into the sky. The solar disk rises upon the Key of Life, and the day is born. What the breath is to the body, the sun is to the world: the visible rising of Life into form.
This is the witness that Mary Magdalene carries. She was the first to come to the tomb, the first to see the Sun risen from the dead. She did not witness from a distance. She witnessed as the lover, the one who stayed. The Magdalene is the witness of the soul, and her witnessing is love.
Prana, the vital life force, is the bridge between the visible and invisible worlds, linking body and Spirit. The very roots of our language remember this: spirare, to breathe, lives inside the word spirit. In the ancient world, breath was a living expression of life, vitality, and soul, a symbol of Life itself.
The Matrikas, the sacred Mothers of sound, carry the same transmission. Their syllables are living keys that unlock dormant pathways of remembrance within the body. Just as breath moves Life through us, sacred sound moves consciousness through us. Both are Shakti, the living current of creation.
The Ankh, the breath, and the Matrikas point toward one mystery: Life is continually breathing itself into form, into awareness, and into relationship. There is no watcher standing outside. There is only participation, taking different shapes: breath, sensation, attention, thought, subtle control, and surrender.
Through the Divine Goddess we name these shapes, through concepts, archetypes, and the packed thought forms that act as reminders of the sacred. We receive meaning from the ancient voice of our own blood. Yet even naming is a form of magic. It may guide us toward truth, or it may deviate us from it, when the symbol is mistaken for what it reveals.
So we do not follow. We immerse. We immerse through the body, through presencing in the pelvic bowl, birthing our awareness through an inner passage of initiation into self.
We birth a new awareness. We observe the rising light. We sustain it. We shed what is not it.
This is the sun's own movement: it rises, it stands at the height of the day, it sets. Today, at the solstice, it stands at the height of the year before it turns. The rising light, the sustaining light, the dissolving light: one wheel, turning in the sky and in the womb.
We remember the inheritances of our ancestors, the belief systems through which the soul once navigated, and we let them move through fire and passion, to transform. We breathe Life as we submerge again into the waters of the soul, passing through spiritual death and reawakening as I Am.
This is the cross 🙇♀️
And the cross is the sun's own signature, drawn each day from east to west, each year through the solstices and the equinoxes. We do not invent it. We remember it, already traced upon the body.
Through presencing energy, we awaken memory. Through sensing, the astral body. Through the sacred codes held in ancient symbols, the higher mind. And we open to the bliss of Being. I Am That I Am.
Yet this is not a transcendence beyond the world. It seeks embodiment, to be lived, felt, and known through the flesh. And so remembrance becomes a pilgrimage through the bodies, the tanmatras, the manas, and the programmes held within the flesh of woman.
We are pilgrims walking the inner pilgrimage of embodiment, the spiral path. The spiral is a vritti, a turning, a whirl. We trace the whirl of the “I” back toward its source. Not a march of conquest, but a quiet act of self remembrance, homage, and love.
We bring flowers to each aspect of our sacred inner being. We bring flowers to our sacred site. Our yoni/linga.
And still, this is only a beautiful story, for the true pilgrimage transcends the spoken word. The Heart does not divide experience into pure observation and distortion; that split belongs to the mind trying to be correct. We work with the Divine as the Divine, tuning into the Heart, the true organ of knowing. Here, knowing is not separate from being. It is felt in the breath, rewoven through intention, awakened through the relational field.
From there, our sankalpa arises: I Am...
Within the womb/hara, the question shifts. It moves from the shadow, where I Am contracts into the “I” thought and seeks the mind's validation, asking, “Am I observing correctly?” And it opens into the Lover’s inquiry: “Can I stay in relationship with what is here?”
When attention touches the breath, the breath may soften because it is being held. Its movement does not mean it is being manipulated. Life responds to contact. And the one who wants to observe correctly is also being held. She who wonders whether she is doing it right is not outside the field either. She is part of the same living movement, asking to be included.
And so we include it all. From the macro to the micro, the above and the below, all held within the loving bosom of the Great Mother. The practice is not to withdraw attention to make it pure, nor to refine experience into neutrality. The practice is to let everything belong. For the womb excludes nothing. The Mother rejects nothing. What we call awakening is often simply the willingness to remain in relationship with what is here.
We are daughters/sons of Life, and we, as a circle, are being invited to embody that. All of our expressions belong, all of our wounds belong. We are held in sacred space.
And responsibility also belongs. Within that holding, we take our place in the circle. When we give our responsibility to another, asking them to do what is ours to meet, the balance is disturbed. The womb holds us all, but it does not ask another to stand in our place.