Don’t Chase the Sun - Chase Your Shadow
I don’t believe in chasing the sun.
Because if you don’t embrace the dark, the dark will come looking for you.
I say this with love - and lived experience.
So many people in my life chase the sun: following warmth across continents, resisting the quiet of winter, the slow-down, the invitation inward.
I understand it. I have done it many times.
But I don’t agree.
Winter is like the dark - and many of us are deeply afraid of both.
Afraid of the silence that brings up what we’ve been avoiding.
Afraid of slowing down enough to feel what’s real.
Afraid of meeting our own shadow.
I spent nearly two years avoiding mine.
The summer of 2018 was huge - a blur of endings and goodbyes as I packed up my life and prepared to leave Australia.
I went out with a bang.
Loud. Hot. Full. Distracted.
Then came the heat of South Africa - seven months of wildness, ceremony, magic… and yet still, my darkness seeped through the seams.
From there I skipped into Europe, chasing one more sun-drenched summer like someone taking another hit even after the music’s stopped.
My body was begging for rest.
My soul needed silence.
But I wouldn’t stop.
Then something unexpected happened.
A call - not toward sun or ecstasy - but toward winter.
Real, true winter.
Sweden.
I arrived just before Christmas. The snow deep. The air thick with silence.
And for the first time, I stopped running.
I let the darkness catch me.
And it didn’t devour me.
It held me.
I remember trudging through thigh high snow in the forest, bedazzled by the beauty that darkness can bring as I finally surrendered.
I rested. I fed myself. I listened. I wrote.
I finally felt safe enough to fall apart.
In Celtic mythology, the Otherworld is a realm just beside this one - invisible, but not unreachable.
It’s accessed not through striving, but through stillness.
It’s the place the fae live.
The land of the ancestors, the witches, the wisdom-keepers.
It’s the winter that takes us there.
The darkness is the doorway.
And when we say yes to it, we remember what it means to be whole.
That winter in Sweden changed me forever.
It reawakened the witch within me.
The woman who loves ceremony.
The woman who sees spirits in the snow and hears songs in the trees.
The woman who no longer runs from herself.
This is why I no longer chase summer.
I make space for my underworld.
I honour the darkness.
I follow the rhythm of the Earth, not the rhythm of fear.
And that is why I’ve created Yin Love Within, our Winter Witch Retreat.
This is for the women, the witches, the wild ones who aren’t afraid of what lives in the dark.
It’s for those who want to deepen, slow down, and return to the sacred.
To reconnect with their softness, their truth, their soul.
📍 Venus Bay, VIC
🗓️ July 3–6
