To the One Standing in the Summer Light
For the truths that have been sitting behind your teeth.
THE LONGEST DAY
Dear friend,
Can you stay with what the sunlight reveals?
Summer Solstice arrives with the longest day of the year. The sun lingers and the shadows shorten. Heat gathers in the pavement, in the garden beds, in the skin of the earth itself. The light reaches farther than it has all year, touching places winter protected and spring offered only the hint of a whisper.
Very little can hide in this kind of season.
You are nudged to enjoy the light and celebrate the longer days. To throw open the windows and stand barefoot in the warmth.
And also to stay with what the sunlight reveals.
The truth about your work. Your relationships. The relationship you have with your body, your grief, yourself. The thing you have almost said a hundred times.
The truth that has been sitting behind your teeth.
Summer asks us to stand in the heat long enough to see what remains. Staying with ourselves is where clarity lives. It is where our liberation begins. Where repair becomes possible. And often, it is where the next step quietly finds us.
COME BACK INSIDE
If you have been reading these letters throughout June, you know I have been writing about the practice of staying. About participation. About remaining with ourselves while life rearranges itself around us.
And if you are new here, perhaps this is the place to tell you what I mean.
I am not writing about endurance. This is not gritting your teeth and remaining where your spirit has already left.
Sometimes staying with ourselves sounds like no. Sometimes it sounds like enough. Sometimes it sounds like I cannot continue this way. Sometimes the most faithful act of staying is walking away.
What I mean is quieter than this.
There are days when my hand reaches for my phone before disappointment has fully arrived in a flush across my skin.
Days when usefulness feels easier than grief. Days when my to-do list becomes a shelter from what hurts. And there are days when I would rather explain my feelings than actually experience them. Days when solving feels easier than listening.
The truth waits for us anyway.
It waits in the first breath the next morning. It waits in our dreams. It waits in the jaw. It waits behind the eyes. It waits in shoulders that never quite come down. It waits while we scroll.
It waits while we read this letter. It waits while we negotiate. It waits while we tell ourselves we will deal with it later.
The body keeps the receipts of every time we leave ourselves.
THE ROOMS WE STAND IN
So much of our culture has taught us to stand outside ourselves.
We know our attachment styles. We understand our patterns. We can trace our family histories. We know where our nervous systems learned to brace. We understand why anxiety visits.
We have become remarkably skilled at understanding ourselves.
I have spent years understanding myself. I know many of the stories my family handed me. And some of the ones they could never speak aloud.
I understand why certain fears arrive. I know where my shoulders rise and where my body prepares for impact. I know when I'm flushing and why. And still, there have been days when I have left myself.
Awareness can become another room we stand inside, friend.
Another place to observe, to evaluate. Another way to explain ourselves instead of actually accompanying ourselves.
This practice asks something different.
Come back inside. Come back into your body. Come back into your anger. Return to your longing. Return to your wonder and joy. Come back into your uncertainty. Come back into the questions that do not yet have answers.
You do not have to solve yourself. You do not have to become someone else. You do not have to understand every chapter before you deserve your own companionship.
Stay beside yourself. Accompany yourself.
Remain with yourself long enough for the truth to become more than something you understand.
Allow it to become something you experience.
We can become exquisitely self-aware and still abandon ourselves.
WHAT WE INHERITED
I have been thinking lately about how many of us were raised by people who knew how to work.
How to provide. How to keep going. Survival was their language.
They knew how to put food on the table. How to wake up tired and go anyway. Many of them carried burdens we may never fully understand. Hard truths they themselves were never taught how to accompany.
And still, very few of us were raised by people who knew how to stay.
I do not mean physically. (Although that can be true too.) I mean remaining emotionally in the room. Remaining in the conversation. Staying with grief. Remaining with uncertainty. Accompanying another person through disappointment instead of trying to solve it.
I have been contemplating the impact of how many of us were taught to provide and how few of us were taught to accompany.
Provision and participation are not the same thing.
One keeps the lights on. The other remains in the room.
One asks what needs to be done. The other asks what is happening here.
One keeps moving. The other stays long enough to know what is being carried.
Perhaps this is why so many truths sit behind our teeth. Perhaps this is why our jaws tighten. Our shoulders and hips brace. And the body learns how to hold what the heart has not yet spoken.
WHAT THE TRUTH TEACHES
People often arrive here at The Courage Practice because something in their lives is changing.
A career. A partnership. A body. A business. A season of leadership. Relationships. A question that has been waiting years to be spoken aloud.
The change is what brings them here.
The transition is what asks them to stay.
Years ago, a client told me this work had helped her rearrange her choices in accordance with her courage. At first she believed courage would rearrange her life. What she discovered instead was that courage rearranged her relationship with herself. And from there, her choices began to change.
Perhaps this is the step we skip. The step not given to us by the algorithm or the screen.
The truth arrives and immediately we ask:
What do I do? What do I say? How will they respond? What happens next? How do I survive what might happen?
We begin trying to build strength for every possible outcome before we have stayed with the truth itself. Yet the strength we believe we need is often built before we ever speak the truth aloud.
It is built here, in the quiet practice of staying. In the returning to ourselves, again and again.
Here's what I know to be true: the truth will teach you how to hold it.
The truth will teach you how to express it. The truth will teach you how to carry it. The truth will teach you what comes next.
You do not have to solve your truth. You do not have to hand it away before you have learned to hold it yourself.
Stay with it. Let it breathe. Let it warm in the sunlight. Let it continue to root.
THE QUESTION
The river does not hurry itself toward the sea. The tree does not skip spring. Summer does not apologize for its heat. The earth remains with the season it is in. Perhaps this is what Summer Solstice really asks of us.
Can you stay with what the sunlight reveals?
Can you remain in the space between no longer and not yet?
Can you stay with yourself while your life rearranges itself?
I am not where I once was. I am not yet where I want to be. Perhaps you know this place too. The old life no longer fits. The new life has not fully arrived. The light has become difficult to ignore.
And there you are.
Standing in the warmth of the longest day of the year. Standing in the truth. The question is not whether you can see it. The question is:
Will you stay?
With you in this practice,
Practice Postscript
Where the letter stops being read and starts being lived.
The Reflection
What truth immediately comes to mind when you hear the phrase: The truth that has been sitting behind your teeth.
Notice the first response. The one that arrives before you begin negotiating with yourself.
The Everyday Practice
Now pause. Take one slow breath.
Notice your jaw. Notice your throat. Notice your shoulders.
Notice what happens in your body as you consider the truth that has been waiting for your attention.
You do not need to speak it today or solve it today.
You do not need to decide what comes next.
Simply ask: Can I stay with this?
Notice how quickly you move away. How quickly you explain. Negotiate. Distract. Plan.
Return to the truth. Return to your body. Return to the breath.
The practice is not expression.
The practice is accompaniment.
The Question to Carry Forward
What strength might become available in me if I stop trying to solve my truth and begin learning how to stay with it?
The Invitation
People arrive here because they want something to change.
A career. A business. Relationships. Their leadership. Their health. Their confidence. Their sense of purpose.
And understandably, they begin by trying to change everything outside themselves.
They work harder. They search for better strategies. They wait for someone to choose them. To recognize them and take a chance on them.
What I witness every day is this:
We want external change. We often do not realize that internal accompaniment accelerates external change.
We cannot ask the world to meet us if we continually leave ourselves.
People can feel the difference between proving and inhabiting. They can feel the difference between asking someone else to take a chance on us and being willing to take a chance on ourselves.
The external changes we want often become possible when we stop abandoning ourselves internally.
Something changes when we remain beside ourselves.
Our voice changes. Our posture changes. The way we interview changes. The way we lead changes. The way we listen changes. The way we love changes. The way we make decisions changes.
The world responds differently when we stop abandoning ourselves.
If you find yourself working harder and harder for the same outcomes, perhaps it is time for a different kind of conversation.
One that asks:
What do you want to change?
and
How do you stay with yourself while your life changes?
If you are standing in the space between no longer and not yet and wondering how to create what comes next, I would be honored to walk beside you.
