Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thank you so much for listening.

So I want to talk about the winter solstice. Today is December 21st in the northern hemisphere.

That means it is the longest night and the shortest day of the year.

Forever, for countless generations, human beings have been looking up into the sky at the stars,

at the sun, at the moon, searching for meaning.

And the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, has shown up in world cultures pervasively.

And there's something alluring, there's something irresistible about this metaphor of the darkness.

How do we feel on the darkest day of the year?

What does it mean to be entering into the dark?

If you go back to the time in your life where you were very young, say just a few years old,

and you remember what it felt like to be in the dark.

Maybe you wanted a nightlight to go to sleep because it was too scary. It was too much to be in the

darkness. And if you go back in your imagination, 10,000 years, right? And the world was scary. It was dangerous. We don't know what wild beasts are

lurking out there, stalking us. So the darkness, it's not just this idea. It's an embodied. It's a

visceral experience. And historically, it's an experience that's called up a lot of anxiety, right?

A lot of fear, panic.

Right.

And somewhere in our experience, this is going on all the time.

It's going on at the winter solstice. Darkness envelops us. It's something we have to

contend with. So I want to just recognize this. And metaphorically, I want to talk for a moment about

what does darkness mean in our lives, even if it's not the winter solstice?

How do we engage the darkness?

...