Imagining the Holidays of 2020: A Higher Octave

Published: Mon, 11/23/20

November 23, 2020

Dearest Friends,

One of the phrases that I have been working with in the last few months is “higher octave.” A higher octave is a resonance with a greater truth, a greater beauty, a greater goodness and a new harmony that takes your soul, your heart beyond the ordinary, the routine, and the unexamined.

Our holidays in 2020 can take us to a higher octave. Celebrate!

A New Inner Christmas Journey

Over the next few days, I will be sharing with you the higher octave of Inner Christmas. I am thrilled with this new approach to Imagining Self and Imagining the Inner Christmas Journey from the deepening dusk of Inner Advent, to the embracing sacredness of the Holy Nights to the rising dawn of Inner Epiphany. Look for the first email, describing the journey from 2020 to 2021. It will be coming soon.

With loving warmth,

Lynn

(You are receiving this email because you signed up for the Inner Christmas or Imagine Self mailing list.)

A Higher Octave of Holidays for 2020

Our 2020 celebrations and traditions, our social gatherings and sensory delights, are being thwarted, limited and disappointed by the pandemic and its threatening consequences. For all of us the holidays this year are different. Perhaps there is a hidden blessing that allows us to reflect rather than repeat or resent. I encourage you to contemplate and imagine both your inner and outer holidays as an opportunity to find inner warmth and wisdom. Experience a higher octave.

In our strange holidays this year find time to grieve and forgive not as a victim of world circumstances, but as a creative soul finding understanding. Then celebrate your deeper understanding, your higher octave.

True, we pass through difficult and sorrowful experiences, but in the greater life relations these present themselves as something that most enriches and strengthens us for life.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 181 – Earthly Death and Cosmic Life: Lecture 7: Confidence in Life and Rejuvenation of the Soul: A Bridge to the Dead – Berlin, 26th March 1918

What are your thoughts? What are your feelings? What are your intentions? How will you deal with the differences in the holidays this year? Let these challenges give you new strength and meaning.

Look at your reactions to yet another pandemic drama and challenge. Do they disturb your calmness? Perhaps your calmness is a way to suppress your intense disturbance? Maybe you are feeling relief from the pressures of the holidays. Maybe you are experiencing conflicting reactions.

Can you find an equanimity, an inner balance and creative centeredness, for the Holidays of 2020?

Here are some guiding suggestions:

Look at your ideals and your oughts around what a holiday should be.

Look at your biographical memories and find your identification with the appearances and symbols of the holidays. Wonder, observe, recognize and name your holidays

Look at the changes the holidays bring to your experience of well-being and aliveness. This is about the well-being and aliveness in yourself, in your family and social life, in how you experience yearly rhythms. Wonder, observe, recognize and name how the holiday nurtures your aliveness.

Look at the basic emotions of anger, happiness, fear and sadness around the holidays. Look at your patterns of perfecting, proving, pretending, pleasing. Look at your sense of being too much or not enough. Wonder, observe, recognize and name the emotional complexities and expectations of the holidays.

Look at your attachments to cultural, tribal and family rituals. The pandemic may keep you from how you have imitated, obeyed, and emulated these rituals. Wonder, observe, recognize and name your sentimental longings and personal meanings for your holidays.

Then begin to build your new meanings for your holidays.

I wrote a book on the personal meaning of celebration and I'm sharing a few thoughts from the Author's Note. This year gives new purpose to understanding these six celebrations.

If you want more than a merry Christmas, if you also want a meaningful Christmas, you will find Celebrate Christmas, Celebrate You - The Six Ways Your Soul Finds Meaning in Christmas an inspiring book. I write about the meaning of Christmas, and about the ways your soul renews its own meaning at Christmas time.

Celebrate comes from a Latin word for honoring. Today we don’t use the verb “honor” very often. Yet, we can imagine how different our world would be if we, each one of us on the planet, had been asked every day in school and at the dinner table to share what we honored – not told what to honor, but asked. Honoring lives naturally in our souls, but it must be awakened and exercised to encourage both reverence and blessing in our relationships to all things material and spiritual. Honoring can’t be taught, but it can be modeled.

This little book seeks to awaken and exercise your soul to what it honors and celebrates at Christmas.

In searching my own soul I found six distinct Christmas celebrations where I honored particular relationships in my life. My Christmas celebrations honor:

Nature and the cycle of the Sun as reflected in the cycle of my soul

Nativity and the (re)birth of the innocent Divine within my soul

Riches and the sensuous delights of my material existence

Relationships and the presence of my family, friends and community

Childhood and the powerful impact of my early memories on my present Christmas

Selfhood and my emerging, evolving sense of self

Celebrate Christmas, Celebrate You intends to help you find the ways your soul, your personal humanity, finds more inner depth, inner height and inner breadth in and through the six experiences of Christmas. Christmas is the time of year that both spirit and matter, both the heavenly and the earthly, come together to awaken the ways you honor your sense of self, your sense of others, your sense of our planet, your sense of the divine and your sense of the future.

Celebrate Christmas, Celebrate You asks you to think and contemplate on the many ways you find inner benefit, clarity and meaning during Christmas. The book offers questions and guidance for enriching your own Christmas experience and celebration.

~~If you would like a copy of this book on celebration, you can order it on Amazon.~~ Actually I just checked (good thing, I did!). Seems I need to republish the book, which will take a few days. I'll let you know when you can order it.