Easter...beyond belief and religion

Published: Tue, 04/11/17

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April 11, 2017

Easter...Beyond Belief and Religion

If you downloaded this pdf last year (I've made a few changes in this year's issue), let me remind you to revisit your copy, hopefully, your Inner Easter binder/journal, and go deeper.

The events of Easter are the most complex and mysterious of any religious event, Christian or otherwise. I feel strongly that the mystery and complexity of these events, whether you have personal belief in their reality or not, require your attention, reflection and questioning. We need to look at each event deeply and question its purpose in the evolution of human consciousness and the spiritual and moral awareness of self as a being who thinks, acts and relates to everything as a free and loving individual.

What Easter-inspired questions appear in your soul about being an individual of moral consequence who lives and dies? Every year can bring new capacities for perceiving, understanding and relating to these profound mysteries of the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.

Easter questions will not be answered easily. Please don't look for answers in books, even the Bible simply paints brief pictures giving your heart directions for this inner quest. All the great writings on the meaning of Easter are the results of questions. Your questions and your answers only live in your soul. Spend this lifetime looking for them like an Easter Egg Hunt that lasts forever, knowing each egg inspires you to search for the next one.

To support your Inner Easter quest for meaning I have a gift for you.

Imagining Your Inner Easter

Here is your Inner Easter gift... a beautiful pdf of the Easter blogs I have written over the years. The blogs all focus on the challenge to imagine our own Inner Easter -- to see our Easter work not just as the reverent attention to the mystery of 2000 years ago, but as our soul's direct and personal experience of each aspect of Easter in our own lives.

Imagining Your Inner Easter.

Click here to download your gift:

Imagining Your Inner Easter Download

You'll find 31 pages to inspire your inner work over Easter this year and every year. I offer thoughts and imaginations to support your intimate and immediate reflections on your own direct questions and experience of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Celebrate the Easter festival by finding its meaning in what is happening in your soul.

Create Your Own

Inner Easter Book/Binder of Inspiration

Please download the Imagine Your Inner Christmas pdf . and print it. Put it in a binder and add some blank pages for your own writings. I love using binders as you can add pages and rearrange pages...binders let you create, capture and contain so much meaning and inspiration.

You can also do this on your digital device by creating an Inner Easter folder in Evernote, Mac Journal or another amazing application. But I love the physical and the tactile relationship with my paper, my pens, the act of opening the rings on the binder and placing the papers in with joy.

For your Inner Easter binder: Journal your Easter thoughts and feelings each year. Write Easter poems. You can also add to the binder the Easter wisdom of other writers and theologians. Download and print your favorite works of art that reflect the mysteries of Easter. Or create your own images. Use the binder to deepen and record your Inner Easter every year.

Imagining Your Inner Easter is a gift from me.

If it inspires you, please consider making a $10 donation. Thank you.

Donate

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Thoughts on Religious Festivals

& the Six Celebrations

For most of us, our religious festivals center around meals more than worship. Our ceremonies take place at dinner tables, not altars. We decorate with symbols that seem more to delight the senses than to bring spiritual significance. They are yearly family rituals rather than times of connecting with the great spiritual mysteries.

Our conversations rarely reflect on the spiritual meaning of the day but focus more on the food & decorations and the family & friends gathered. Yet our enjoyment of the food and the company would not take place unless the religious story made the day special and called everyone together.

Yet, in our feasts and in our friends and families, we can find surprising meanings that go very deep.

In the Christian Year and in most other spiritual festival calendars, there are two stories that shape the timing, the worship, and the festivities, the story of the gods and the story of nature. Long before the story of the Son of God, our ancient ancestors gathered together to celebrate the story of the Sun and the turning points of nature.

Considering Easter in 2017, it seems that we have a number of celebrations:

the celebration of Nature
the celebration of the Divine
the celebration of the Senses
the celebration of Relationships

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Each of us also celebrates our memories of the festival, particularly from childhood. I still remember the amazing, wonderful, giant chocolate Easter egg my grandfather got me when I was 9 years old. And I remember about the same time, learning the Stations of the Cross and wondering what they were all about.

The Inner Year draws attention to another celebration, the celebration of growing Selfhood or our own moral awareness of self. This is the most challenging and most rewarding of the celebrations for any and every holiday and festival. It asks us to celebrate the sum of our experiences that are revealed by wondering and questioning ourselves from the perspective of the great religious event being recalled.

We add these two personal celebrations

the celebration of Childhood

the celebration of Selfhood

to the other four and we find there are six meaningful ways we celebrate not only the festivals but every day of the year.

I explore the many aspects of all these celebrations in my book on Christmas, The Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas! and Celebrate You! If you want to explore the six ways we experience all our holy days, click here to order your copy of the book.

The Ways I Can Support Your Inner Work

Inner work is tough work and moving through the mysterious and labyrinthine pathways of your soul requires guides, tools, support, creativity, humor and perseverance.

Books, prayers, coaching, counseling, meditation, workshops, good friends...every kind of help is needed and available. But ultimately, only you can do the work of becoming you.

Below are the ways I can help you with your Spring inner work of finding, knowing and becoming yourself… and making sense of it all.

Every time I speak with you, my world makes sense. I move from child to woman. I am so grateful. Lilia M.

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Conversations with Me

Is this your time to open up, express your pain, solve a life mystery, transform a crisis, take a leap, imagine a future, find self-compassion, balance inner extremes?

Can I support you, guide you, mentor you, celebrate you as understand your past, find your center, make choices and shape your future? I will listen with compassion and bring a grounded, creative and spiritual perspective for understanding the challenges, dilemmas, and realities of your life.

Why don’t you

schedule a complimentary 20 minute conversation here

Let’s talk about what you are seeking and how I can help.

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Here’s to your inner work and becoming new this Easter!

Blessings & Imaginations,

Lynn

To join the Imagine Self email list, click here.

Lynn Jericho
www.imagineself.com