The Summer Solstice

The summer solstice is the height of the south on the medicine wheel as I work with it. The long days, the heat and intense light and warmth – everything is reveling in the life force coursing through the world, bringing all creatures into their fullness.  Everything comes into the physical world through the gate of the east, grows into fullness in the south, sheds its assembled form in the west, and returns to the great, spacious womb of power in the north.

In the Celtic tradition, which is my source for the Wheel, the south is the place of the Oran Mor, the “Great Song” of creation. Many shamanic cosmologies tell us that fundamentally, reality is made of sound or vibration. Many times, this is called The Song. When we play the drum or any instrument, and when we sing, we are working with vibration, and in this way, we are connecting with, and summoning, the power of the Great Song of Life.

The south and the summer solstice are connected to the energy of heart: the intense love of life, the love of being incarnated. In this way, the south is the direction of joy. When I teach about the wheel, I’ve found that many people have trouble with the south, because they have trouble giving themselves permission to be in the field of joy. Maybe they feel it’s selfish or shallow, or maybe they are stuck in troubles of life, or maybe they are afraid of the power of joy.

The positive pole of the south is authentic joy: the joy of being in the body, here with all the other bodies, experiencing the life that we can only experience in the body. To be in the body is a rare and wondrous gift. If you live in the astral plane, or the spirit world, or if you are a vapor being living in the rings of Saturn, you don’t get to be in a body. One of the main prayers we can make is to remember the preciousness of this incarnation that was given to me, that I chose. The Buddhists recognize how many millions of lifetimes it took to arrive in this human shape, so it’s really a precious opportunity filled with opportunity and liberty.

The negative pole of the south is addiction, greed, and compulsive pleasure seeking, which isn’t really about joy, but about lack, and fear. We can easily make the mistake that we are revealing in authentic joy when we are really thrashing about in compulsivity.

Because the south is about love of life, it is about the heart. Cultural anthropologist and spiritual teacher, Angeles Arien, taught that the human heart has four chambers. In the material world, these are the two atriums and two ventricles, and each has a job of pumping oxygen throughout the body. In the spiritual world, these four chambers of the heart pump spiritual power through us.

• The clear heart pumps the power of true, clear, unafraid expression through us.
• The open heart pumps the power of creativity, curiosity, and tolerance through us.
• The strong heart pumps determination, courage, confidence and discipline through us.
• The whole heart pumps faith, passion and love for the All through us.

To be human is to have this awesome source of power implanted in each of us. And to be human is to wrestle with shutting down or constricting one or more of these chambers. When the flow from any chamber is constricted, we leak energy, we become more susceptible to psychic attacks, and we create more suffering for ourselves and others through our decisions.

When the clear heart is blocked, we put on the act for everyone, we hold ourselves to inoffensive niceties and become comfortable with little lies on our tongues and the tongues of others; we make excuses and live in constant apology.

When the open heart is blocked, we become mistrustful of the unusual, we become listless and flat, uninterested in beauty, exhausted by change; stubbornness rules us, we easily fall into blame and finger pointing.

When the strong heart is blocked, we feel victimized by everyone and everything; inner voices of worthlessness control us, we can’t get anything done and we make fear our most trusted advisor.

When the whole heart is blocked, we lose faith in creation, we lose faith in the power of love to heal; cynicism and arrogance lie on our couch all day; wry cleverness and sarcasm rule our language as a defense against intimacy with awe and wonder.

Much of our journey through childhood is about being taught to constrict one or more heart chambers, to diminish the flow. Think through your childhood. Which chamber was closed down in you, under the guise of becoming an acceptable person? For those who, as adults, decide to walk a spiritual path, much of the work is about renovating these chambers of the heart and reopening any blocked flow.

Our current times are not that unusual in some ways. We’ve always had a wrestling match between the forces that urge us to close the four chambered heart and the forces that urge us to open it. In our current times, these forces are crystal clear, and that may be one reason why these times have come to us.  Maybe the Great Song is here, with its can of Spirit WD-40, lubricating your old four-chambered heart valves, opening, opening, opening.

In current times, we are flooded with new information and new knowledge. We have come to know that more information is not the solution we need. Information needs to be cooked into wisdom, and that is done in the cauldron of the four-chambered heart. Spiritual teachings, scientific discoveries, psychology – all of it needs to be cooked in the cauldron of the heart in order to be of real use. Opening the heart, re-opening any chamber that has been constricted, is the core to every actual wisdom path, and its where the work is.

The first bit of the work is to merely become awake to this radiant, powerful, awesome gift implanted in you by Spirit. Make the decision to spend time each day visualizing this luminous gift in your body’s center. Decide – yes make the decision – to trust that it’s all true, this heart of power. This Song is who you truly are.

We may spend a great deal of time each day imagining the opposite – how wounded, limited and insufficient we are, how broken and damaged we are. Much of the spiritual industrial complex is about swimming in our brokeness. We make being broken our daily habit, our daily prayer. One of my teachers called this being addicted to our suffering, riding our wounds like it’s our trusted horse. So, make the decision to also spend time imagining your silver and gold radiant heart, and make that your horse that you ride into town on.

Then, you can go on to review each of the four chambers of your heart, asking which one(s) operate with a lower flow than you want. Ask Spirit to come with that WD-40 and turn the rusty sprocket. Say it out loud: “Bring it, Spirit! Bring it! Bring the WD-40. Bring it now!” (You may think I’m joking, but I am serious about this prayer.)

Look at the qualities I’ve outlined in each heart chamber above and decide to put one into action in some simple way. You can begin by asking which chamber scares you, which one is most daunting. Ask, “What would my life be like if that chamber were fully open?” Ask Spirit to give you strength and support in all of this.

I leave you with this the Irish poet Seamus Heany: 

Kinship

Rooted in earth, branch into sky,

A pulse beneath a weathered ply.

The heft of sod, the river’s pull,

Each muscle knows its origin full.

The quickening breath, a sunlit sting,

The taste of berries that summer bring.

To feel the rain upon the face,

A primal joy time cannot erase.

This frame of bone, this skin’s embrace,

A wild belonging to this place.

To walk the fields, to stand and see,

The vibrant thrum of being free.

Resource:

Angeles Arrien’s concept of “The Four Chambered Heart” is presented in her book, Living in Gratitude, and her audio lecture, “Gathering Medicine.”