Almost as an aside to my usual topics (though it feels like an important one), I feel I want to share an observation this morning and its that I believe there is such a strong correlation between health and the solar cycles as they switch between solar maximum and minimum. There’s no denying that I have really struggled with my health and energy levels this year and the only time I can really compare this with is the period about 9 or so years ago when I also felt exhaustedly sluggish, inexplicably painful and like every day was a physical mountain to climb (like this). That era came just before I got onto the fast-track trajectory of healing that has been the material of this blog ever since; which was about the same time the progression back towards solar maximum began once more. Coincidence? Without this explanation, what other reason can I give for finding myself (frustratingly) back here? There are a handful of “logical” reasons but none of them significant enough and I do feel like I have done very much to, “logically”, iron those excuses out, through ever-more wonderful diet, resoundingly positive thought and every effort made to use my entire healing arsenal, every day, and with such determination and optimism, that I should be enjoying tremendous health and energy levels by now. Still, I struggle with daily chronic fatigue and pain levels that have no easy explanation. I notice similar patterns in some of the people I observe around me; for instance, a woman who helps me do housework, who has thyroid issues and is (with great success) following the Medical Medium’s healing plan as I am, and who is thus far more aware of her body and its variables than many of the people she generally gets to talk to so we often compare notes. I notice how the bizarre ups and downs in her health have been exactly mirroring the dance of mine over recent months…her sudden elated improvements when the sun rallies followed by returned lethargy and symptoms when it goes very quiet again. My theory is that we are all affected by these sun-rhythms but most people have yet to wake up to the fact or mask the variables with lifestyle habits such as alcohol, drugs, sugar and other addictive foods and behaviours that cover-over the tracks of its ever-present effects.

Around a decade ago, when I diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, it was much the same for me (though I had none of the understanding around it that I now have)…like wading through thick soup to get through the physical onslaught each day; and one other circumstance is resoundingly the same. Back then, the sun’s eleven year cycle of peaks and troughs was at solar minimum (though I knew nothing whatsoever about such a thing at the time). In 2011, the sun came out of a longer than average solar minimum…and it was like I started to crack the surface of a long period of feeling buried in terribly stagnant health issues, pain and apparently unsolvable exhaustion. And right now, the sun is currently plummeting back into its cyclical period of solar minimum, far faster than anticipated, meaning the sun is left blank of sunspots for many days or even weeks at a time right now (and I too have felt like I am on some sort of backward slide). That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been solar events…holes in the sun’s atmosphere spewing solar wind that comes hurtling Earthward to graze our planet and so on; and when they happen, I almost feel them more pointedly than ever, as a shock wave to my system (in ways both good and bad…), but the bits in between feel like a mini-death that has no other explanation given all I am doing to “feel healthy” and the place I am at in my life, which is otherwise such a good one. Given all that I am doing, the way I am currently feeling makes no real sense outside the context of the solar cycle. Over the last few years of more variable solar conditions I’ve monitored, in myself, my responses to the sun’s various activities and when it goes quiet, times I refer to as “flatlining”, I so often feel like I’m doing that too. Conversely, I can always tell when there’s been a solar event…asside from numerous physical symptoms, including renewed warmth deep in my cells or even hot flushes (and yes, sometimes pain), I suddenly get busy again!

It’s scientifcally accepted that times of solar max correlate with increased health dramas such as heart attacks, strokes and seizures so, one assumes, the opposite also applies. It must be “better for us”, you might think, for the sun to be less volatile and going through its less provocative phase but here’s how it feels to me. Its a known thing that our exposure to naturally occurring radiation increases during solar minimum due to a lack of the kind of the kind of solar events that, helpfully, side-swipe such radiation away from our planet (* see below). Also, when the sun is less active, the body seems to hold onto more toxic waste or find it harder to shift it through and so eliminate it…and whilst I have managed to do a very great deal to process, reduce or eliminate the kind of toxic waste that life inevitably generates, through such a “clean” diet and healthy lifestyle that I should be quite “squeaky” inside, the reality is that one or two kinds of toxic onslaught have become ever harder to avoid or mitigate in the last decade…and man-made radiation is central amongst them. This latter has been the biggest provocateur of my year; one to which I am reacting more and more each day (and having to take ever more measures to eliminate or reduce in my daily environment).

We are energetic beings, our systems a finely tuned electrical circuit, our health far more determined by the frequency that we hold in the quantum spaces in our cells than by the “matter” surrounding them; something of which I have become minutely aware over this past decade. So, my hypothesis is, when our biology becomes naturally more sluggish akin to the sun’s activity “dying down” (since, yes, we are intrisically connected) these, as yet, largely misunderstood man-made aggravants to our biology take over and provoke our natural electrical frequencies even more than ever before. Perhaps this is, in part, because the body craves (at some unconscious level) the very electro-magnetic stimuli that the sun has temporarily withdrawn and which it, at some highly addictive level of the cells, welcomes and so “sucks in” all the more eagerly, like a child greedily slurping on its favourite sugar-packed drink, regardless of whether it is “good for it”. We long for the invigoration and fiery warmth of the high-speed technology we surround ourselves with, along with the fizz and uplift of the sugar fix and the chemical stimulants, (one other thing I have really noticed about solar minimum is how my body feels inherently colder, like I can never quite get warm; the rare solar events arriving as such welcome heat); so we turn to these addictions and to the wrong kinds of food to fill the gap of the solar minimum years, gobbling them up. Well, that’s how it feels to me! And just as cane sugar is no substitute for Nature’s sugar taken direct from organically grown plant sourced food, man-made sources of “energy” (whether technological or chemical) are a very poor substitute for this life force we crave when our lives become otherwise stagnant. These alternative may scratch some kind of itch but they only deplete in the end.

That other absentee when the sun goes quiet, I notice, is inspiration. When the sun is active (along with the myriad of other biological effects that I have been the noter of these last few years), I would wake on particularly “active” mornings with my mind full of pressing inspiration, the kind that would have me leaping out of bed on trajectories of behaviour that I had no idea I was going to go off in pursuit of the day before. It would feel more like taking dictation than “thinking up new ideas” as I laid down those first words on paper or brush strokes on canvas. In fact, it would feel much as it does feels today, writing this so early (today, we have a solar wind from a coronal hole approaching…) that I am having to rub sleep from my eyes to type; and I also realise its been quite a while since I wrote anything that felt so pressing or like I have nothing much to do with it apart from delivering the message it contains. That urge has been virtually “switched off” and noticeably declining all year and those very few things that I have written have seldom made it further than the few scribbles left by the side my bed, only to “go cold” and be abandoned later. Today, the urge to share this felt pressing and not to be argued with. To reach the same heady heights of inspiration, these days, I have to “think” my way towards what I want to do (not just have the idea delivered, complete and ready to go) and it’s quite a different process; the “left-brained” compatriot to his work chum, the now absent “right”, the one who likes to surprise and be unruly yet strangely genius. My workflow has been achieved through effort, less so through inspiration, this year…which was how it was a decade ago, before those heady-crazy days of paint and create in between. Yes, daily meditation (my new staple practice) gets me back into that inspiration zone…but not in such a way that I can easily turn its materials into “things” since my aim there is to notice yet let the thoughts go, allowing them to “be” without need of materialising them into an action or product. The paradox in this is that my family seem to like me better now as I’m more grounded and less intense (rather than working with head down, shushing them to be quiet as I offload my latest piece of inspiration most mornings) but I’m also in far more physical disability and pain. Thus, I notice, part of this solar-minimum theme (which can be quite depressing if you let it be) is a sense that you have lost purpose or traction with your creative projects (your muse!), even your very sense of identity as a productive person in the world…and I have battled with those feelings, in spadeloads, this year too!

At the broadest level, its “all good”; the sun is meant to go through these cycles and our planet knows what to do. At the superconscious level, we do too…but the unconscious daily human residing in our body, who lives life according to what is socially acceptable or expected of them, always clutching a mobile phone in one hand as they multi-task and consume their way through a day of activities that know no natural cycles, quite blissfully unaware of the far faster bigger picture to which they are intrinsically attached, can often continue-on oblivious until something significant “happens” in their health to wake them up to the fact, as happened to me a decade ago.

There is no conclusion to this post; it is merely a set of observations and, perhaps, a reminder not to take the sun or its activities for granted. We are intrinsically linked to its cycles, for all most people have no idea or deny the very fact. Much like the seasons, I have learned that, whilst I might not always like this connection to the way I feel and the way my biology operates in response, this is a “given” of my human state and the more we come to recognise, understand and respect it, the better we will get on with our future life on this planet as we seek to interfere with forces and cycles we have yet to fully understand.

Things we can do:

1. Use mobile technology and radiation generating devices such as microwaves, DECT phones etc consciously or not at all, turning off when possible (especially when sleeping).
2. Consume high dose antioxidants to keep free radical damage to a minimum.
3. Work to eliminate any toxic load that we already have eg. heavy metals or active viruses (which generate a constant onslaught of waste products in the body). The Medical Medium, Anthony William, is the best source of information on this topic that I know!
4. Make mindfulness into a daily practice eg. meditation, time spent in nature, yoga and qigong.
5. Keep the body moving with daily exercise, preferably outdoors.
6. Make optimism, positive thinking and laugher part of our essential daily life-kit.
7. Know that self-love should be core to all that we do – love and support the body, listen to what it needs whilst driving it towards new outcomes and a more comfortable response to old triggers by talking hold of our own reins through positive thinking and affirmation.
8. Minimise toxic food, situations and behaviours. Clean up our act!
9. Provide the body with plenty of natural (fruit derived) sugars for energy (dates are great). Avoid or eliminate cane sugar altogether; it’s just not worth it!
10. Take infrared saunas and seek out (the right kind of) massage to keep things moving; I’m about to explore Manual Lymphatic Drainage massage.
11. Ground yourself! Often!
12. Explore energy healing modalities such as Donna Eden‘s Energy Medicine, which includes a daily practice that takes next to no time to run through, as well as rescue and energy boost routines that can radically support the body.
13. Build up our own energetic autonomy with any device or practice that builds upon our own innate protection and groundedness (and, again, this includes meditation, yoga and qigong, plus there is so much exciting new science emerging – more on this topic soon).
14. Keep track of space weather conditions via websites such as spaceweather.com, not to obsess or ruminate about it but to make use of it; it may help us understand our own health rhythms and allow us to gain a better foothold dealing with them.

* Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation. (Source: spaceweather.com)

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