FEATURED CEREMONY: CREATE YOUR OWN
This month’s featured ceremony is how to create your own personalized ceremony. The language of the soul is images, fairy tales and poetry, and how we work at the level of the soul is through ceremony and ritual. Ceremony and ritual is embedded in all cultures and religions, and is very evident at this holiday season through candles lit, prayers said in specific ways, gifts given and opened in a particular way, and what and when we eat.
When you are fully present and participate in ceremony you are residing at the place of the soul. You can easily create your own ceremony as a way of bringing honoring and gratitude to any part of your life. Ceremony and ritual allows the emotions of the limbic brain to come into stillness and you can then come into right relationship with your life. It is critical to honor where you are now even as you create who you are becoming. If you currently have incomplete business in your life, or hold some unresolved element from the past, these aspects will continue to come up as “shadow” elements in your life. Bringing those shadow elements to consciousness and honoring, will allow you to find and bring in the gifts you have available from those hidden areas.
Creating a ceremony is easy. I remember when my son Cody was just beginning to study Karate. I was getting ready for work one day and he asked me, “Mom, do you think I look like a Karate guy?” and followed with, “I don’t think I do.”. I mentioned this morning conversation to my husband in passing in the day. When I called at a break in teaching later that week my husband told me he and one of my daughters had created a ceremony for Cody. They had written on pieces of paper all the values Cody had to embody as part of his training and laid them out like stepping-stones on the floor. They then had Cody pick up each item, read the value, fully honor the value and then step into it. He walked to the next “stepping-stone” and fully stepped into it. At the end of all the values was laid out his karate uniform, which he put on and fully stepped into the identity of a “Karate Guy”. Cody is now a green belt and just received two first places at his karate competition this last weekend.
The first step is to identify what you want to hold with gratitude or honoring, remembering the Shaman is in Ayni, or right relationship, with EVERYTHING. The second step is to surrender. Surrender to not knowing what you need to create and follow your intuition. You may want to paint, or draw, or write, or do a sacred dance, or create an altar. It is important to bring the element(s) you are honoring outside your body so you can see them and hold them differently. You can bring sacred items to this honoring such as stones, pinecones, candles or gifts. Any item becomes sacred as you work with it, whether it is a pen, pencil or elements of nature. Become creative and follow your intuition.
When you create the ceremony, the key element is to find and acknowledge the gifts you receive from what you are bringing gratitude to or honoring. When you find these gifts, allow them to come into your body, noticing where they reside and how they will be with you through time. You will know when you are complete by the sense in your body.
If there is more to honor or if you need more time to bring gratitude to this place, the universe will let you know. In our recent Working with the Sacred class, we were honoring the duality within the masculine. We “moved” the duality so it would not be there and things would be “fixed”, instead of just honoring the split. Individuals reported the next day feeling sick, not in integrity and two individuals actually were in a rear end collision. The universe was clear that we needed to just honor the complimentary opposites.
Remember, you are on the journey of your soul, and do not “hold” anything you create for too long. You may need to put that poem, picture or old story into the fire so that you can continue to fly.
Be creative, surrender and have fun.
Warmly,
Linda
