Indulging the Inner Child
In the Northern Hemisphere, Summer Solstice officially occurs on June 21st at 5:13am EDT while readers in the Southern Hemisphere enter Winter Solstice in the same day at 7:13pm AEST. Wherever you call home and whatever season, this is an invitation to indulge your Inner Child and carve out time to play! Whether it’s spending time in the woods with the flourishing trees or bundling up to build a snow person after a storm, making time for our Inner Child to play is good medicine for our nervous systems, our minds, and our hearts in this very complicated, and sometimes heavy, human world.
When I think of the summers of my childhood, I remember the long days of playing outdoors with neighborhood friends for hours and hours until I was called in for dinner. I would quickly wolf down my meal and then run back out again to play until it was dark! Summer vacation meant that time passed without measurement. Summer also meant the time to visit my beloved maternal grandparents on an island on the coast of Maine for a few weeks. As a child, be-ing was prioritized while helping my grandfather sand his wooden boat, garden, and fish. I also enjoyed picking strawberries and bunches of heather with my grandmother, while witnessing the unfolding of life near the ocean.
Today, as a shamanic practitioner, I hold these memories deep in my heart. And, I am grateful to be able to carve out time to revisit “be-ing” in my daily practice. It allows me to step outside the responsibilities and concerns of my adult self and into the nature of who I am, which is who we all really are without the constructs of this often chaotic world. As I commune with the richness of the life-force that is expressing itself through the myriad of sentient, conscious beings in this world, I am humbled by their willingness to lend their wisdom and grateful for the resetting of my whole system just by dropping into the rhythms freely offered. This reset is available at any time to anyone seeking it, including you.
As adults in this modern world, we seem to be on treadmills heading nowhere with our tight schedules, and lists of responsibilities. In addition, global occurrences affect us all and emotionally processing them can be draining on many levels. Yet, we are here in a body only for the time that is given to us. It would behoove us to carve out time to enjoy the wonders and miracles that surround us, no matter what season or reason - and no matter what is occurring globally. All we have to do is stop, step away (and perhaps outside) from the daily pressures to breathe and welcome in the quiet moments that are actively offering themselves to us.
