The winter solstice and inner change

The winter solstice on december 21st marks the shortest day of the year- when there is the longest amount of dark in the entire year and the shortest amount of light. After this day, the days will slowly get longer until the summer solstice when it is the longest day of the year. Symbolically, this represents the triumph of the light over the dark. At the autumn equinox, we talked about how the days getting darker represents a time of going within. Just as the leaves start to fall and growth seems to stagnate in the natural world, deep underground there is a growth process that is invisible to the world above ground. During the winter, there are seeds beginning their process of new life and development in the safe darkness of the soil. This is a reminder that even when times may seem cold and bleak to us, there is a lot of growth happening in our inner life. We must give our pain the safety to transform us in our inner world and trust that it is helping us grow strong until we are ready to blossom, just as the flowers burst forth above ground in the spring.

“Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”

- Lao Tzu

"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."

- Carl Jung

"The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination

where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not.

It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life,

and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening.

The finding of God is a coming to one’s self."

- Aldous Huxley

“Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.”

– Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way”

– Alan Watts

"No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

"The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."

— Joseph Campbell