I was just thinking how the holidays elicit the adjectives MERRY and HAPPY. It’s so easy to think that means twinkling lights, presents with bows, tinsel, silver bells, noise-makers, champagne, and a cute array of decorated cookies. Perhaps I’ve been watching too many Hallmark Christmas movies? Anyway, nothing at all wrong with merry and happy. . . I just started to feel into a deeper function of this “turning of the year” ritual time, which we often forget to notice.
I have been interested in how we generally avoid dealing with endings, how we rarely allow ourselves to experience pleasure and satisfaction of a job well done before our mind leaps ahead to the next task on the “To Do” list. At the end of a cycle of creativity, our mind often panics as it thinks we are now facing “the Void.” Thoughts of loss, loneliness, the undertow of the unknown, depression, and failure can loom large. It’s natural to want distractions from this sort of anxiety. So let’s eat, drink, and be merry!
Is this part of why these end-of-year/start-of-year holidays are so important? To ease the transition between creation cycles? At the end of a cycle of creativity, it’s important to recognize what you’ve created and what you’ve been learning. Take stock. Feel the benefits. Feel good about yourself and the choices you made, the way life unfolded for you. See how you affected the flow, how you allowed the good, how you found the gifts in the garbage. Learn from what you did. Then: STOP! Take the pause that refreshes. That means a bit of quiet time, not necessarily partying!
Enter liminal space—that magical experience before a threshold and after a threshold, the place where the caterpillar transforms into the butterfly. Here is where you allow yourself to merge again with the imaginal realm, get out of your left brain and will power, and simply be. Remember you ARE the soul. You are connected. You know what you’re doing and have lots of help. The right thing will occur next when it’s ready. Meantime, you are a fruit getting ripe. Soak up what you need.
Thanksgiving (for those of us in the US) helps us enter the right frame of mind: gratitude is such a mind-relaxer and heart-opener. It prepares us for the end of the year, when ideally, we should take a little time to review the year, assess our accomplishments and the strength of our character, and celebrate the presence of love all-around.
And then, as New Year’s Day occurs, we might want to take some quiet time to focus, not so much on resolutions we might not keep for more than a week or two, but on how we want to be, and feel, and act in the coming year. And it’s nice that we have “a year”—it’s a manageable amount of experience we can chunk and remember easily. After we determine our preferred attitudes and states of being, out of that frequency will come ideas for what we’d like to create. Hold these things loosely but feel your core enthusiasm for doing them. These things do not have the word “should” attached! No! It’s “I want it! I love it! I want to dive in.”
Ask for the first steps, the hints, the glimmers, the synchronicities, and make an agreement with yourself and all the beings who help us: “I will pay attention to what I’m noticing. I will act on those things that feel just right, that allow me to stay in my home frequency. I will act in each moment in alignment with what feels courageous and uplifting.” The holidays, or holy-days, are times for remembering wholeness, or unity—your belongingness, your value in the scheme of all things, and for speaking of that, giving gifts with that in mind, and acting in alignment with that truth.