How has your year been? Can you answer?

I could answer with a few words, but they would be reactive and superficial and lack any real truth as I haven’t yet really looked at my year, at the last 317 days of breathing, thinking, feeling, and willing of my life (48 days still remain). 

Between now and the Christmas Solstice, I will examine my year using the guidance of Inner Advent.

We can’t go back to the life and the world of a year ago. I can’t go back to who I was a year ago. Neither can you. Time moves in one direction and we can’t control what happens in time as it moves forward, but we can reflect. 

I think we were given the capacity, not to just remember, but to work with our memories, so that time could support our self-knowledge, allow us to reflect in the search for meaning and purpose, and give us the potential for choice, transformation, creativity, and wisdom. We can digest memories and use them to understand the present and shape the future and most of all, to learn the lessons of each year.

Dementia is so scary, not because we lose our memories, but because we lose the ability to make meaning and choose purpose. 

The Inner Advent Courses: Your Year of Light and Your Year of Darkness are about discovering the meaning of 52 weeks of our lives, 

Every year, truly needs us to make meaning for ourselves and for the year. We need Inner Advent. In a world with so much mistrust and threat, Inner Advent and the entire Inner Christmas Journey restores trust and empowers love.

With Inner Advent we discern the many parts of our soul’s experiences over the year. We look at the outer contexts of the year. Having formed clear pictures of the outer circumstances, we can examine our inner lives. We can build a powerful, liberating imagination of who we were. We can celebrate the mysteries of our own unfolding. We can also recognize and release what lacked meaning or purpose. 

Inner Advent is different from Traditional Advent.

Traditional Advent, the Christian Liturgical season, can comfort us with its sweetness and simplicity of the wreath and the candles and the attention to peace, joy, love, and hope on the four Sundays. I light my candles and find soothing comfort every Sunday throughout Advent.

Inner Advent is not necessarily a Sunday ritual and it is not about worshipping or a wreath with candles. It is about knowing...yourself and your year! It gives a process and a permission to review your year and find truth, beauty, goodness, celebration, grief, and  forgiveness. 

Inner Advent doesn’t soothe. It strengthens.

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