Most of us grow up learning that summer begins in June and ends in September. The school calendar says so. The weather often agrees, at least where Denise Elysa lives on the coast of British Columbia. But astronomically and energetically, something more significant is happening at the summer solstice than the start of a social season.
The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, the point at which daylight reaches its annual peak. After it passes, the days begin, almost imperceptibly at first, to shorten. Light starts giving way to darkness. And for those who work with the cyclical rhythms of nature as part of their self healing journey, this moment is far more than a calendar date; it’s a turning point.
In the latest episode of Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa, Denise explores what the summer solstice asks of us energetically, how it relates to manifestation and inner seasons, and why slowing down during the peak of light might be one of the most counterintuitive and necessary things we can do. She also shares a significant personal health update, and speaks with unusual directness about safety when choosing a spiritual practitioner, including what she sees in the space around neurodivergent people and how some practitioners are getting it dangerously wrong.
What the Longest Day of the Year Is Actually Asking
The summer solstice marks the peak of a cycle that began back at the winter solstice, when light was at its lowest point and things were quietly growing in the dark. Between December and June, the days have been slowly, steadily lengthening. Now, at the solstice, that expansion reaches its fullest expression.
Denise invites her listeners to sit with a simple question: what is coming to peak in your own life right now? What has been building, growing, or quietly emerging that is now fully entering the light? This could be something that began with an intention planted at the Spring Equinox. It could be something that took root in the depths of winter and has only now become visible.
This kind of inquiry is the foundation of a Summer Solstice ritual that doesn’t require candles or ceremony, though those have their place too. It requires only a willingness to pause, to feel your feet on the ground, and to honestly take stock of where you are.
And then, she says, to acknowledge it. Because so many of us reach a milestone and immediately move on to the next thing without ever registering that we got there.
Inner Seasons, the Self Healing Journey, and the Permission to Slow Down
Denise is clear that the outer seasons don’t always match the inner ones. Someone can be in an internal winter while summer blooms around them, or in full inner spring in the depths of December (which is winter in the Northern Hemisphere). Working with the seasons isn’t about forcing alignment with nature; it’s about using nature’s rhythms as a consistent practice that eventually makes it easier to recognize and honor your own.
What she does encourage at the Summer Solstice specifically is a kind of honest inventory, not a halt or a collapse into stillness, but a genuine check-in. Is the energy being expended actually serving something? Are the people being prioritized the ones who form the sturdy, foundational pillars in your life, not only the easy summer connections? Is there space being held for integration, or is the pace one of constant production?
That last question carries real weight, especially for those who have been doing deep healing work. Integration isn’t a passive thing. It’s the process through which what has been learned, felt, or shifted actually becomes embodied, becomes part of how someone moves through the world. Without time and space for it, she explains, even the most potent healing tends not to stick. The same layers keep surfacing and the knowing doesn’t translate into living.
The invitation at the Summer Solstice is to use the energy of the light, the expansiveness and warmth that many people naturally feel during these months, to build something that will sustain through the darker ones. Connection with that light now, cultivated consciously, becomes an inner resource when the days shorten and the void state of winter asks something different of us.
A Personal Health Update: Mast Cell Activation Symptoms and the Road Back
Denise shares openly in this episode that June 2025 marks the last time she required a wheelchair for outings. She had been advised by her doctors that she would likely need a wheelchair for the rest of her life, and that she would probably remain largely homebound or bedridden. In 2023, she had become completely bedridden, unable to eat or speak.
By spring 2026, she had slowly and safely titrated off all of her antihistamines for mast cell activation symptoms, coming down from eight pills a day to none, after a period during which she was still going into anaphylaxis despite being on the highest therapeutic dosages available.
She is careful, as always, to be clear that this is her personal story and not medical advice. The process of titrating down medication was slow, intentional, and accompanied by significant somatic work and intuitive energy healing at every stage, allowing the sensations the medication had been suppressing to surface and be explored rather than pushed through. She is not saying medication is the wrong choice, and she says this very directly; there are circumstances where it is absolutely necessary and where beginning this kind of inner work requires the safety that medication can provide. What she is describing is a specific, supported, titrated process that was right for her body, at her pace, with the guidance she had in place.
For those curious about the fuller picture of that process, she points toward her blog and the free somatic lesson available inside the EmbodiedSoul community, which walks through how somatic inquiry and energy healing can work with chronic symptoms rather than around them.
Choosing a Somatic Practitioner or Intuitive Energy Healer: Green Flags, Red Flags, and Your Own Discernment
A significant portion of this episode is given over to something Denise says she covered in her earliest episodes but is now seeing resurface repeatedly. The wellness and healing space is largely unregulated, and she is hearing more stories than she would like about people being harmed, misled, or left more dependent than when they arrived.
She speaks about spiritual bypassing, the pattern of using spiritual concepts to avoid accountability or deflect responsibility, as one of the clearest signs that a practitioner has not fully done their own work. A healer who responds to being questioned with accusations that the questioner is projecting negative energy may not be demonstrating spiritual wisdom. Circumstances differ of course, and there are scenarios where the guest truly is projecting their own unhealed wounds onto the practitioner. This is where your own intuitive discernment becomes crucial, because the healer may be demonstrating an inability to self-reflect that, she argues, makes it unsafe for them to hold space for others.
The green flags she names are worth holding onto. A practitioner who is willing to slow things down when a client is pushing past what their system can integrate. Someone who is transparent about the limits of their training and will refer out when something falls outside their scope. Someone who actively teaches their clients how to take these tools home, how to recognize and work with what arises between sessions, so that the client is building genuine capacity rather than ongoing reliance. Also notable, is someone who is honest that they are still doing this work themselves, because there is no finish line.
The red flags she names are equally clear. Practitioners who imply that illness is the client’s fault, that mast cell activation symptoms, myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, Fibromyalgia or other illnesses or chronic symptoms you may be navigating are a matter of karma or insufficient motivation. Practitioners who insist that medication is always a form of repression, without acknowledging the situations where it is necessary to establish the baseline safety required to do any inner work at all. And practitioners who do not teach the people they work with how to connect with their own intuitive discernment, because that dependency is, she says, sometimes intentional.
Her recommendation: take time before committing. Read their work or explore their free resources. Join a lower commitment offering or group and observe how they respond to other people in live spaces. Notice whether they position themselves as the authority on your healing, or whether they consistently point you back to yourself.
Most importantly, notice how your body responds to their work: are you experiencing an openness and sense of expansion or safety? If you’re noticing tension or discomfort, is it because your body is showing you the layers of healing that are ready to be explored through this work, or, is it showing you that this work or that specific practitioner isn’t aligned for you? It’s important to remember that even the best practitioners are not always aligned for every person. There is value in there being so many different styles and methods readily available, and Denise notes that what works beautifully for one person doesn’t always feel right for another. This is worth honoring within your own system; just because a practitioner doesn’t feel aligned or effective for you doesn’t mean they aren’t great at what they do, and, you deserve to work with the ones whose methods are effective at supporting your individual transformation or healing.
A Note on Neurodivergent People and the Healing Space
Denise touches on something she says she could spend an entire episode on, and perhaps will. She is seeing and hearing about practitioners who frame neurodivergence as something that needs to be healed, fixed, or energetically cleared. Their suggestions are often that being autistic or being an ADHDer is the result of unprocessed emotion, ancestral wounding, or unresolved trauma, and that it can therefore be resolved through somatic or energetic work. She does not hold that specific view, and she says so with notable plainness. As usual for her work, she feels this subject holds a lot more important nuance than that.
What she does believe is that many of the challenges neurodivergent people experience are not internal deficits but the predictable result of navigating systems, environments, and social structures that were not designed with their nervous systems in mind. Somatic tools, nervous system support, and energy healing can offer genuine support in navigating those challenges more gently. They can help someone reconnect with sensation, build interoceptive awareness, and develop a relationship with their own body that makes daily life less depleting. That is different from implying those tools will or should change the fundamental nature of who someone is.
Neurodivergent ways of being are not problems to be corrected. The heightened sensitivity and awareness that many neurodivergent people carry can be, in the right context, a genuine gift. The work is about creating conditions in which that person can actually access it and be supported in the unique and individual ways that each person needs.
The Work of Acknowledging How Far You Have Come
Denise ends this episode where the solstice energy itself points: toward acknowledgment. Toward the practice of actually pausing to register the accomplishments, the shifts, and what has been survived. Not as a stopping point, but as a genuine moment of receipt.
She reflects on her own journey with some directness. Many people in her life, she says, see only how far she still has to go, the limitations that remain, and rarely stop to acknowledge what was not supposed to be possible.
That pattern, she suggests, is not unique to her. Most of us are surrounded by people who have no real frame of reference for what it took to get here, wherever here is for each person listening. And many of us have absorbed that same narrowness in how we see ourselves.
The summer solstice, with everything in bloom around us and the light at its fullest, is an invitation to look inward with that same quality of light and really see what has come to fruition. To truly feel, for a moment, the fullness of it.
The full episode of Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music. A new episode releases the first Sunday of every month.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the spiritual meaning of the Summer Solstice?
The Summer Solstice marks the longest day of the year, the point at which light reaches its annual peak before the days begin slowly shortening again. Energetically, many people who work with seasonal cycles understand this as a time when what has been quietly growing, whether a seed planted at the Spring Equinox or something that took root much earlier, is now fully entering the light. It is a moment for honest reflection on what is coming to peak in your own life, what has shifted or been accomplished, and what you are ready to carry forward into the months ahead.
What does a Summer Solstice ritual actually involve?
A summer solstice ritual doesn’t require elaborate preparation. At its core, it is a practice of intentional pausing. This might look like grounding yourself, feeling your feet beneath you, and sitting with a genuine question about where you are and what this season is asking of you. For those who want to go deeper, practices like meditation, somatic inquiry, oracle card reading, energy healing, and circle ceremony can bring a more structured quality to that reflection. Denise explores all of these inside the Seasonal Pause Summer Solstice Ceremony, held live each year for EmbodiedSoul community members.
How does the Summer Solstice connect to manifestation?
The Summer Solstice functions as a natural checkpoint in the manifestation cycle. Seeds planted at the Spring Equinox have had months to develop, and the Solstice offers an opportunity to honestly assess how they are growing. Have you been tending to them, acting in alignment with what you set in motion? And does your nervous system actually have the capacity to hold what you are calling in? Denise’s Embodied Manifesting Foundations workshop inside the EmbodiedSoul community explores this in depth, including why nervous system capacity is often the missing piece in manifestation work.
How can somatic practices support a self healing journey?
Somatic practices work by bringing attention back into the body and the felt sense of experience, rather than staying at the level of thought. On a self healing journey, this matters because stress responses and survival energy that didn’t have space to process at the time they occurred tend to remain stored in the body. Somatic inquiry creates the conditions for that stored energy to surface and move through, rather than continuing to be expressed as symptoms or patterns of disconnection. This kind of work is slow by design; titration and integration are as important as the moments of insight themselves.
What should I look for when choosing a spiritual healer or somatic practitioner?
The most important qualities to look for are transparency, embodiment, and a genuine orientation toward your autonomy. A practitioner who is honest about their training and its limits, who welcomes questions rather than deflecting them, and who actively works to help you develop your own skills and discernment rather than fostering reliance on them. Red flags include spiritual bypassing, any suggestion that your illness or struggles are a matter of karma or your fault, pressure to move faster than your system can integrate, and any dynamic that positions the practitioner as the sole authority on your healing. Taking time before committing, exploring their work through whatever accessible means are available, and trusting your own intuitive read on the fit, are all reasonable and worthwhile steps.
Resources
The Seasonal Pause: Summer Solstice Ceremony
Denise’s quarterly virtual gathering, held live for EmbodiedSoul members at each solstice and equinox. Includes meditation, somatic practices, oracle card reading, energy healing, and space for manifestation work. Free for members; pre-registration required. Replay available inside the app. Available inside the EmbodiedSoul Community
EmbodiedSoul with Denise Elysa Community
A desktop and mobile-friendly web app and community platform. Inside, members have instant access to over $1,000 worth of on-demand guided practices, workshops, ceremonies, meditations and more. Denise hosts approximately 2–3 live events per month, including Live Guest Experts, Live Connection Calls, the Seasonal Pause ceremonies, and live energy healing sessions. All events are free to members and pre-registration is required. Explore the EmbodiedSoul Community or browse first at embodiedsoul.passion.io before creating any account.
Free Resource: Somatic Healing for Chronic Symptoms
A free lesson walking through how to apply somatic inquiry in real time when experiencing symptoms that feel scary. Browse the app at embodiedsoul.passion.io before creating a free account, as creating any account removes the ability to preview other available content. Access the free lesson
The Bridge to Embodiment – Signature 1:1 Program
Denise’s most comprehensive 1:1 offering. Eight sessions over approximately six months, blending somatic inquiry, energy healing, intuitive practices, past life regression (for those who wish to incorporate it), meditation, and soul-led exploration. New spaces open as people complete their time with Denise. Explore the Bridge to Embodiment
Work with Denise
Explore how to work with Denise
Embodied Manifesting Foundations
A workshop exploring manifestation through nervous system safety, embodiment, and intuitive alignment, without force or pushing through. Available inside the EmbodiedSoul Community
The Podcast
A new episode of Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa releases the first Sunday of every month. Available on web browser, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and Amazon Music. Listen now
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