To Reckon with the Sun

There is a day, once a year, when the sun refuses to leave.

The summer solstice is the moment the earth tilts as close to the light as it will ever get. It is the longest day when ancient cultures would celebrate the richness of life and contemplate the human presence and what is asked of us. 

The solstice is a reckoning. It invites the earth to bask in the glory of life’s brightness.

We are no different.

This is an invitation to sit with the longest day to ask the same question the ancients asked. What in you is being illuminated right now? And are you willing to look?

Behind the Solar Eclipse

To exist is to endure what is to come. We carry within us this instinct — this drive — for life and what it can offer of love, beauty and pleasure.

And yet, how does one endure the massive weight of the present? How do we exist inside dichotomies, reaching forward towards what we long for, while outrunning the inevitable pains of life?

For many, avoidance is the moon that casts its soft, borrowed light, carrying with it the gentle promise of tomorrow. At its core, avoidance is an adaptive, instinctive response that emerges when direct confrontation feels unsafe, impossible or simply too much to hold.

But during the solar cycle, there comes a point where the moon stands in the way of the sun;  in the way of our truth. Avoidance expands quietly, until it reaches far beyond the ignoring of people, places or memories. Slowly, without noticing, we begin to distance ourselves from our own inner life. By that, we mean the emotions that stir before we can explain them or the sensations the body holds long before the mind catches up. It stops being the difficult conversation that’s getting avoided, but the version of ourselves that the conversation would ask us to meet. 

And here is the thing about emotions: They demand our attention. They do not dissolve in the dark. They persist within the unconscious, finding their way to the surface through our patterns, our behaviors, the words we choose and the ones we cannot finish saying.

The difficulty begins when avoidance outlives its usefulness and, instead, severs the connection between who we are and what we truly feel. Research supports what many sense intuitively. Chronic experiential avoidance is linked to increased anxiety, emotional dysregulation and psychological inflexibility, trapping us in cycles that feel strangely familiar, because they are.

And so the pattern repeats itself. Unbeknownst to us, we get caught in a cycle where time does not lend its wisdom when we struggle to receive it. As Carl Jung beautifully states, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” 

As you’re reading this, let me invite you towards a small moment of compassionate reflection. What have you been avoiding?

If you’ve been stuck on this question for a while, here are five signals that something deeper may need to be addressed:

Projection — the emotion you cannot hold within yourself begins to appear in how you see others. What irritates, unsettles or moves you in someone else is often a reflection of something unmet in you.

Repetition compulsion — the pattern that keeps finding you across new situations and new faces, as though life is returning you, again and again, to the same unfinished room. Take, for example, burnout cycles or breakup situations. Repeated processes are often unacknowledged pain. 

Emotional triggering — a reaction whose intensity feels disproportionate to the moment, because it belongs, in part, to something much older.

Somatic signals — the tightness in the chest before a difficult conversation, the fatigue that arrives without explanation, the chronic tension the body holds long after the mind has moved on.

Language patterns — we think our speech reflects what we think. While that’s true, language also exists in the unconscious. What you minimize, deflect, or can never quite bring yourself to finish saying is also a form of internal communication in need of our presence.

What the Light Actually Reveals 

And so the eclipse begins to pass with the slow, inevitable return of what was always true. The sun becomes undeniable, and the internal truth we’ve been avoiding starts to make itself known.

This is what the summer solstice has always asked of us. It has always encouraged us to reach for the light, to examine it honestly, and prepare ourselves for what the light reveals when it finally reaches the parts of us we have kept in shadow. And, only then, we start to live in internal harvest.

 Yet, the question remains:

Can the system – human or natural – sustain this abundance?

Because sometimes, functionality can look like illumination. Summer plans elevate our passion. Working for hours and hours starts to feel rewarding and thrilling. In Emotional Intelligence Coaching, we call this surface acting. It’s noticing the difference between managing the expression of emotion rather than the emotion itself, a process that eventually leads to emotional exhaustion and burnout.

Sustainability is built, consistently and gradually. It’s about us more than it is about what we do. Illumination shines when what we feel, what we value and how we live begin to move in the same direction.

Self-awareness — Existing with emotion, naming it and giving it a voice. Affect labeling (naming emotions) demonstrably reduces amygdala reactivity to ensure a well-regulated nervous system despite the emotions that are arising. 

Self-management — Creating internal space before reacting. Viktor Frankl wrote about the gap between stimulus and response, allowing ourselves the validation of the emotions, but the liberation from its impact.

Social awareness — Maturing in relationships to hold space for nuance, rupture and repair. It’s about moving from emotional reactivity to relational presence. It is here that a deeper question begins to surface about the things we have never allowed ourselves to need. 

Internal alignment — Connecting values to behavior, not as a productivity goal but as a coherence practice for well-being. Think, perhaps, of the pressure of a “good Arab”. Stable job, high status, family-orientation. Yet, deep down, something remains unexplored. Internal alignment is the slow, honest work of asking, “Is the way I am living an expression of who I actually am, or a devotion to who I was expected to become?” In cultures where collective identity is deeply woven into selfhood, this question takes particular courage. 

Going Back to The Roots

Eventually, as long as the day may be, it will come to an end. The sun will set, and what remains is the system that embraced it. The ground. The roots. So, let’s go back to them. Let’s restore the compassion and strength of the roots, so that when the sun comes back, you can hold its light without flinching. 

Because it will come back. It always does. And when it does, it will ask you to look at what has been avoided for so long.

This is the work of a lifetime. And it is worth every moment of it.