Winter Solstice – Let there be ‘Joyful’ light.

I write this blog with more than usual excitement for the
Winter Solstice this year. After all that we have endured, learned, accepted during 2020, this last festival, revered by the yoga community, is most joyously welcomed and honoured. ‘Let there be light’.

The Winter Solstice is an ancient pagan ritual that celebrates the return of the light on the 21st December each year. I think it is a more beautiful positive way to view this date than to view the 21 December as the ‘shortest’ day….
My heart certainly leaps into greater drumming within me when I imagine each day lengthening in light by a cockerel’s stride as some of us (me|) believe.

The Solstice is actually a period of intense energetic activity until the 10th of January when the light is actually birthed by the mother. This is the Divine Feminine part of you, that resides in all of us, male or female, and is the part of your consciousness that guides you with intuition, feeling not thinking, empathy, creating not competing, and caring for others, the planet, and of course, offering yourself compassion and self-love.

There’s no wonder then that Winter Solstice has become a feast that the yoga and well-being world have adopted as their own ‘annual highpoint’ and constructed scaffolding around the date to allow us to use our yoga for fresh intention whilst collaborating with all the tools that encourage transformation; ritual, prayer, mantra meditation, and gong sound. We may open our hearts with a special cacao brew, dance, pray, shake or enjoy a ceremony of light, however, we ‘play with the magic’ of this date, you can be sure it is the time of intense planetary energy for humans to align with . It is the time, we must embrace that power of spirit, that ‘ indwelling light’ that we are given as a gift from the creator when we are born. Every year on the Solstice we can ‘remember’ – literally meaning to piece back our bodies and lives so that we are using our personal gifts and finding or keeping our ‘mission.’

So be it – thus YogaSpace Yorkshire joins the merry dance of light – this year, due to Covid and pre-Christmas arrangements – we are celebrating the special date on the 30th Dec at 4.30-m.

2020 has been an interesting year. All of us will have experienced some revelation or transformation. In relation to the planet -radical change is needed urgently; we need gatherings where we join as a collective consciousness to heal not only ourselves, for past and future generations, but to be light-workers for the planet.