The 2023 summer solstice is Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 14:58 UTC. In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice is the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. The summer solstice is a turning point when the days start to grow shorter. This occurs June 20, 21, or 22, varying from year to year, dependent upon the elliptical path of the Earth around our sun. Technically the summer solstice marks the instant at which the Earth's axis stops tilting toward the sun and starts going back the other way. Solstice means "standing-still-sun." At summer solstice, the sun journeys farthest north in its orbital path and for the next three days it rises and sets at virtually the same place on the horizon, appearing to stand still, and then it slowly returns south. Β
At the summer solstice, we begin a new cycle on the Medicine Wheel of Life, entering the South--the home of summer, midday, youth, joy, trust, and growth. From the South rises the vital energy of renewal, regeneration, and growth. From the South we learn to plant seeds of good cause. We learn that our thoughts and actions create our reality. Whether we realize it or not, we are creating our reality all the time. Our reality is the perfect, exact mirror of our thoughts and what we consistently focus upon. Every thought, idea, or image in the mind has form and substance. Everything that we perceive began with a thought. The structure of our universe is thought, mind and consciousness. Consciousness determines the form of our experience. Consciousness is the "theater of perceptual awareness." It is the collective consciousness of humanity that shapes our physical reality.
We are creating our reality with our thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and more. When we are oblivious to the power that we all share to create our collective reality, that power slips away from us and our reality becomes a nightmare. We begin to feel like victims of a dark and chaotic creation that we are unable to influence or change. We are inundated with negative world events that create anxiety, fear and hopelessness. The only way to end this dreadful reality is to awaken to the fact that it is imaginary, and recognize our ability to imagine a better story, one that the universe will work with us to manifest.
We cannot "restore" our broken reality without "restorying" our life. It is easy to create in the world that everyone believes to be true, the collective story of humanity. It is easy to reproduce and replicate the reality of the world as we know it; in fact, it is automatic. It requires no thought or awareness. We can only change our collective story by changing the way we think--by changing our beliefs, expectations and assumptions which keep us stuck in a limited perspective of our personal and social reality. Those aspects of our experience that are most enduring are the effect of habitual expectations and beliefs, or in other words, what we focus our attention on.
It is through our attention that we influence and direct the aspects of our experience and the world around us. What we pay attention to becomes what we know as ourselves and our world, for energy flows where attention goes. As positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, "We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience." What we focus our attention on is what our life becomes--the clearer the intention, the greater the impact.
