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.