It’s not the first time I’ve been fascinated by how closely my health journey has matched the undulations of the solar cycles but today, when I saw this timeline graph on Spaceweather.com, showing cycles 23 and 24 (which is coming to a close), the match was so startling that I decided to play around with the main landmarks of my health diary over the last eighteen years to compare.

The bubbles are mine and show times when I had a profound wellbeing highlight and those times when my health seemed to crash for no good reason, typically with a lot of fatigue and inexplicable weight gain (or at least a struggle to prevent it). Here’s how my last two decades look; which prompts me to enquire whether you notice any correlation between the activities of the sun with your own “mystery” health ups and downs.

If your last decade or two looks at all like this then it can be good to notice there is a correlation with those fiery times of solar max (when the sun is most active)…and these sluggish times of solar minimum (when it goes very quiet). We can start to recognise our own fiery outbursts and the more stagnant times; perhaps observe when we felt at our best and like things were coming together and get better at holding that place. Anyone who has been with my blogs for a long time will know that I’ve often struggled with solar maximum because solar events such as flares and GM storms seem to trigger pain episodes yet they have also provoked some of my biggest leaps of consciousness (and by the way, I’m very far from the only sensitive to report that we feel these events “as they happen”, not three days later or whenever they are supposed to impact Earth). Yes,  sometimes we need a rocket-launcher to get our lives started, it seems, but there is always a happy medium…and it would be better to feel we were the conscious manifestor of our own ups and downs and not just subject to instructions “from above”. Yet I prefer to think of it like this; we are made of the same stuff as the sun, in fact we came from there in essence so it’s not happening outside of us so much as being quantumly shared around from within, in the way of a reminder of our own diverse potential. What happens one day can be completely different the next and when we allow this, not just in an effort to control it but to know how to surrender to it too (years of chronic illness will teach you that) then you start to be alright with the ups and downs, without agonising over it or making it wrong.

So this post isn’t meant to induce fear of that great big ball of energy in the sky; far from it.  However, once we accept that we are in a relationship with the sun (not separate from it) and that we are, in essence, part of it and made up of the same substances, we can start to work with that. I do believe from self-observations that the human body tends to grow sluggish and to gravitate towards weight retention during times of solar minimum, perhaps as self-protection against the onslaught of additional atmospheric radiation from cosmic rays (this is what today’s Space Weather article was about) during solar minimum. Also, if the body is already struggling at the cellular level due to toxic or viral load, this slowing down of universal rhythms and stagnation of environmental sludge (our own included!) is only going to tip it over the edge, which makes regular movement  of the body, healthy lifestyle and diet even more important. Oh, and of course water…yes we need more water if the body is feeling the compunction to retain this all the time, so we need to make sure we deliver fantastic quality water (not juice, tea, “soda”, etc but actual water) all the time. Yes, message to myself, do you hear that? Because I’m the world’s worse at remembering.

Above all, a positive mindset and a love of the fact that we are all connected to each other and the wider universe, rather than an ignorance or fear of this, would serve us well.  There’s beauty in seeing these relationships so clearly, and to all the up-and-down rhythms that act like the breath bellows of our planet. So far, we don’t even know the half of all the ways that the universe works as one giant living organism of which we are a tiny yet intrinsic part, so the best we can do is to be personally aware and open to the relationship we have…and to watch with great curiosity.