New Year; New Ways

"Keep on doing what you've always done and you'll always get what you've always got."

It's 2015. What, if anything, does this mean to you? Do you step into the New Year full of resolve, full of  'resolutions' to change things, full of longing to be different somehow than you were yesterday, or last week, or last month?

Being a pagan witchy kind of a woman, I must admit that for me, new year always feels as if it falls both on November after the deep riches of Samhain releasing, or on Winter Solstice with the return of the light. "Happy new Gregorian calendar" is more like it on January 1st. That said, there is definitely something in the collective consciousness that takes us a little deeper into setting our intentions for our year to come.

So why do we make resolutions that suggest the rest of the year we are falling out of awareness of our deepest desires, soul longings and spirit callings? Being human is complicated! There is a mass seduction going on out there via television, the media and other influential corporations and institutions that can make it easy for us to fall into a kind of deep, somnambulant, and hypnotic paralysis. We forget! We lose the clarity of these visions, we lose sight of our dreams and our intentions as we became caught in old habits and patterns, busy-ness and the fast pace at which so many of us live these days. 

The old ways taught us how to come regularly back into connection with our remembering - by working closely with the cycles of nature, change and transformation we're ever present in our lives. Nature echoes life, life echoes nature. We are not born into technology, we are born into presence, pure and simple presence. 

So what does it mean that once a year, we all get into a resolute place of "I WILL CHANGE THESE THINGS"? Working with the cycles of nature, the moon and my own inner landscape means I am increasingly aware when I'm out of alignment, and when this is so, I tend to find that I am easily tripped up, engage more readily in tensions and conflict, disagreement or upset and forget the simple basic truth that we are all connected. Everything changes if we use our conscious mind to 'change thought change direction' or 'change energy, change pattern' as we sometimes say in tantra. 

2014 was a year of transformation for me, largely revolving around intimacy, relationship and love and all that this means. Whether that be with family, partners, friends or my relationship with my self, transformation was definitely key. 

Now the thing with transformation is that it is endless in its possibility; like the oroborus eating its own tail and eternally self replicating, we move through time in an infinite loop of possibilities all of which lead us with certainty back to the same place - US! 

Yes! There's no getting away from it, all roads lead back to the self, so we may as well find ways to love ourselves, to love our lives and create the things we dream of right? The top five regrets of the dying are listed as:

1) I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2) I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3) I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5) I wish that I had let myself be happier.

My mother's death in May of this year brought many of these into sharp focus. My throat chakra opened as I found the balls to speak out more in the areas I found challenging (intimate relationships). My habit of over working began to slow down….that's a work in progress but it is shifting. I've never really lived doing what others expect of me so my work therefore lies in dealing with the consequences of other people's projections around where they perceive my failings to be if I don't live the life they expect, and around other people's values being in conflict with my own in this case. Then, the lesson lies in finding peaceful resolution. I'm definitely carving out more committed time for friends and activities that nourish me this year, and without doubt, playfulness, lightness and humour and summoned to the party! 

So, if you're the kind of person who comes to January loaded with resolutions, or if you're more like me and your intentions move with you around the cycle of the year, in either case, let it be more than lip service we pay to our deepest soul longings. Let our spirits manifest their deepest, truest expression of self in this coming year. What are YOU going to do about that? 

In the words of Star Trek's Picard, let's not faff about…just make it so! 

The Dark Night of The Soul.

Greetings everyone, winter solstice is here. Long dark nights and short, dusky days. Biting cold and damp chills pervade. This….this is the shortest day and the longest night and here is where Persephone, deep in her Underworld home, takes with her the fruits and seeds of a fertile season as we have moved into dormant stasis. However, nothing is ever truly dormant, for there is life even in stillness.

As a Goddess, Persephone's personal journey can be seen as the epitome of balance between night and day, dark and light. Kidnapped by Hades and taken into the Underworld, it was said that she grieved so deeply for her previous life that she did not eat from the moment of her abduction. Moreover her mother Demeter, Goddess of earthly fertility, refused to allow anything to flourish above ground whilst her daughter was captive in her underworld prison. Zeus, king of the Gods, seeing the earth moving deeper into famine and barrenness, relented to spare further hardship and allowed Persephone to return to her mother and her upper world home. Perspehone, like Eve before her, Pandora, and a thousand other curious women, had eaten of the fruits of her dark home (pomegranate seeds) thus binding her to 'suffering,' and tying her to her underworld life for at least half of the year.

I love the symbolism in this mythology; I grew up on it. As a child, my mother read Greek mythology to me at bedtime; it became the essence of my childhood, a dreamlike mystical place where dark demons battled gods of light and women and men danced with lust, greed, envy, fear, and pleasure, love, honour, allegiance, and more.

At winter solstice, one of my favourite times of year and one that for me, holds so much more spirit and soul than Christmas, we are called to really enter the darkness and accept it. When we reject our darkness and our shadows, they have control over us. Similarly when we dive in and forget how to swim through it, we risk becoming stuck in it, reaffirming our pain, over and over and over. But what purpose is there to this life we live if not to find ultimate peace and harmony in being here? Why wait until we shuffle off this mortal coil to realise we've blown it by forgetting how simple it can be? Surely being human is about the remembrance that light must always follow darkness and thus darkness must inevitably follow light. Just as the sun rises and sets, as the dawn breaks and dusk brings night, so we too must hold faith that in our darkest moments, light WILL return as we mirror the patterns in nature and in the evolution of life.

It can be hard to hold that faith when in our darkest hours; we become attached to our suffering and fear takes hold, the ego gets busy, the monkey mind starts to convince us that we are alone in our pain, that no-one else understands. The danger is that in becoming over identified with it, we create more of the same and become locked in an endless Sisyphusian cycle of repetition. We become gracious hosts to our very own self fulfilling prophecies; a sad table to feast at for sure, and so it is here at this pauper's seat when we must call upon our inner Kali, our Baba Yaga, our wildest, most primal selves, or risk becoming lost in that sea of suffering, lost in an endless Samsara of pain and repeating patterns.

At this pivotal point of the year, as light returns, so we must understand our own cycles and stories. Our personal mythology must become alchemically transformed into gold, or it will surely consume us as winter and summer merge to become one endless torment, the contrast of light and dark becomes meaningless. Every one of us has some kind of cross to bear, each of us knows separation, each of us has known elation, for the human condition is a universal one.

This morning I awoke in the middle of a strong dream. In my dream I saw a man, a south American or Mexican man, standing over me pulling energetic cords out of my throat. He was cutting these ties and explaining to me what needed to be cleared, he was also teaching me the importance of resting and clearing the energy field when working this way. In other words, we can get help when needed and we are also responsible for taking care of our own needs. Community and self sufficiency; paradox in perfect harmony!

My invitation for the Solstice is that we all remember to return to the still point in the centre, the heart of our experience of a human lifetime, right here, right now. We choose in every moment how we respond to things. For me, I'm starting to look at the energy of resistance and what it creates to engage with this. Choosing instead, to call upon 'flow' and to move like water around a perceived obstacle or source of conflict, to respond instead with compassion, kindness and love whilst coming over and over into breath, self knowledge and timeless awareness.

There is an island…I'll meet you there xx