Dear Friends…
At the end of Christmas Day I wanted to share with you my thoughts on
The Christmas Experience of Selfhood
an excerpt from my book,
Celebrate Christmas Celebrate You
The celebrations of Christmas have moved from the vast world of nature to the intimate world of your home, from your relationship to the birth of Jesus to your relationships with others, and finally from your dreams of your childhood to your dreams of your selfhood.
The final Christmas to contemplate is the Christmas of Selfhood. This Christmas is just dawning in your consciousness. Beginning with a longing, a soft inner cry for something beyond the other five Christmases, the Christmas of Selfhood is rising in your soul like the sun on a misty Christmas morning.
A Special Time in the Soul’s Calendar
In the cyclical flow of the year, our souls are filled with and open to the invisible world of Spirit, all the glories of the heavens.
A Yearly Journey
The Christmas of Selfhood calls for a state of consciousness that evolves from a deep wintry sleep into a warming dream of self-awareness and finally toward a new waking imagination of your own soul development. Deeply personal and deeply spiritual in its celebration, gifts, and meaning, the Christmas of Selfhood asks you to follow your own inner path once a year.
This path feels like a journey to the manger in your soul, the place in your soul where the divine in you is reborn each year. You find your soul’s expression of divinity evolving. In the soul’s manger you find a new perspective on your individuality as both a spiritual being and an earthly being.
Inner and Individual
No one shares this Christmas of Selfhood with you. Nor can you experience another’s journey to their soul’s manger. The Christmas of Selfhood is the solitary Christmas. Joyfully solitary.
Like the Sun in the Christmas of Nature, which at each Winter Solstice remains the same sun but carries different forces from the Zodiac, each Christmas your “I Am,” the Divine within, moves into a new experience of selfhood. The gifts of new strengths and new challenges found in the Christmas of Selfhood offer the form and force for your soul’s creative activity in the coming year.
The blessings revealed in your soul’s manger nourish and nurture the courage in your heart and the imagination in your desires. As the Christmas of Riches delights your senses, the Christmas of Selfhood delights your inner being. You find your soul illuminated with new lights of transcendent truth, beauty, harmony, and goodness.
Each year you find in the manger a new way of being in your thinking, in your feeling, and in your willing. You find a personal star that shines your way to a reconnection to your higher self and guides you to a year of practical and moral fulfillment. You experience an inner Christmas of Nativity.
The Christmas of Selfhood mirrors the Christmas of Relationships. From the manger of your soul you relate to and embrace all the many aspects of your inner life. You will be introduced for the first time to parts of your soul that are just emerging. You will say goodbye with sadness and gratitude to the parts of your inner life that are fading.
With tenderness, you recall the complex memories of the past year and shape the dreams of the coming year. The inner gestures of recollection and anticipation, of self-celebration and self-evolution, of self-forgiveness and self-encouragement are the gifts of the Christmas of Selfhood.
How do you celebrate The Christmas of Selfhood?
There are many ways. Most important is the need to spend some quiet time alone. Take a long, slow walk with yourself or find a quiet place to sit by yourself. No ipods or cellphones. You want to give yourself sacred silence with no distractions.
Imagine going into the purest and most powerful place of your being. From this place ask yourself questions and listen to your answers. You may want to use a special Inner Christmas Everyday Journal to write down your questions and answers.
Your Christmas of Selfhood requires more than one day of celebration and attention. Please consider 3,4,7 or 12 days of celebration. Twelve is the ideal number of days because it symbolizes the circle of life and completion, but twelve may require too much commitment for you. Commit to a number of days that is just beyond your sense of comfort and capacity. It is in the extra attention that you will open up the gift of Selfhood.
You don’t need to spend more than 10 - 30 minutes celebrating each day. Choose or create a meditative verse to open and close your celebration.
You can choose to meditate on a question or on an image. Work with the question or image twice: once to see what appears as self-awareness in the present, then again, with the goal of inspiring a new possibility. Selfhood seeks to strengthen will, the intentional force that allows us to become more fully ourselves and express ourselves spiritually and practically. Do not confuse this will imagination with creating a “to do” list or a “to transform” list. It
is a lighting of an inner spark to illumine and warm your way in the coming year.
In my Inner Christmas messages (to which I hope you are subscribed - www.imagineself.com/icm-subscribe), I work with a yearly theme to guide each daily meditation of the Christmas of Selfhood. If you are not interested in my guiding messages or a self determined theme of meditation, you can also simply quiet your mind and see what comes to the surface of your soul.
I find it very strengthening and deepening to write during these meditations. So I urge you to keep a Selfhood journal. You can do a writing meditation, where you record all your thoughts as they surface in your mind. Another writing activity is the recording of the feelings that arise after the meditation.
The celebration of the Christmas of Selfhood is yours to create and fulfill. You can include or leave out whatever feels right. Just celebrate the unfolding deed of love that is YOU.
Your Inner Christmas Messages 2018
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