June Solstice 2026: Threshold walking

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Greetings of the Solstice to you and yours! How are you celebrating your new beginning during this Solstice time?

Although here where I am we are moving into drier, warmer days, the sun will be shifting little by little to shorter days and longer nights. It seems incongruous, as if the summer is just beginning yet the sun’s light is starting to weaken. The Solstice always marks this turning point of the light: what has been expanding will now be contracting; what has been contracting will now be expanding. How can we accept this shift of the sun, of the light, and bring its threshold energy into our own lives?

At threshold times, we can participate by releasing what we no longer need and welcoming something new—a new intention, a new dream, a new commitment to ourselves or others—into our lives. Walking through figurative thresholds can support the full cycle of change. If we don’t release the dreams, ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc., that no longer serve us, it is more difficult to complete the process. There will be no room for something new.

Many people use the threshold energy of the Summer and Winter Solstice to set these intentions. Fires are built where we can burn scribbled notes of what we want to release and what we want to welcome in. We dance, play music, and celebrate the sunrise as the threshold of the shift in light. Although being in ceremony with others can lend more power to our intentions and release, we can also celebrate in quieter, simpler ways.

I had been walking labyrinths for over a decade when a stranger finally offered me the idea that I can carry the intention of release as I walk into the labyrinth, and carry the intention of opening to something new as I walk my way out of it. In the last few years I’ve found myself doing these intentional meditations more and more, knowing that the sacredness of the practice amplifies my intentions.

Setting my intentions through this practice also helps me to take them more seriously as I move out of the sacred space and into the world. That doesn’t mean that I won’t have more work to do to release the old and welcome in the new in my daily life, but the more I accustom myself to these sacred walks, the easier that integration work becomes.

But the ceremony of release of the old and opening to the new does not require a labyrinth. It can be simply a walk with intention. Walking can bring us through a doorway into some new way of thinking or being, some new idea or solution. The trail itself can be our sacred space. Walking into a forest, or along a body of water, or out to a stopping point that we choose, we can hold the intention of letting something go that no longer serves us (it helps to be able to name it).

Once we’ve reached our turnaround point, or the halfway of a loop, we can give gratitude to the earth or sun or water or wind that is taking what we’ve released, and we can set and name a new intention in order to welcome and walk something new in. Then, we can carry that intention until we are back at our starting point, where we offer gratitude for the practice and move into the rest of our day. (If we are homebound for any reason, we can bring to mind a familiar place and try to take this intentional walk in our imagination.) Often, we’ll be assisted in cementing our intentions by what we notice in the wind or weather, the soil or plants or wildlife, as we go.

When I do these walks, I usually feel lighter, as if I’d been carrying something that had become a burden—too heavy for me and no longer supporting balance in my life. I believe a lot of that light feeling has to do with the hopefulness that any new intention can ignite. 

I have not yet done my Solstice walk, although I have found myself doing threshold walks very often at random times as change, or my desire to jumpstart change, has been coming more often to my life lately. If you try a threshold walk at this Solstice time and feel you need more threshold walks throughout your year, many people say that each New Moon is a good time to bring in new intentions.

Wishing you joy and hopefulness through this threshold time, as we toss what we no longer need into the Solstice sun so that we can burn new intentions into being ☀️

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