Feast Days are present in all sacred traditions. A Feast Day is a day in the year dedicated to the celebration of a particular person, event, quality, thought, feeling or activity.
It is a feast for the soul, an opportunity to raise, deepen and broaden consciousness. Perhaps, even to heal, liberate and empower consciousness.
Soul Feast Days
Inspired by my new questions about Inner Advent ( yes, I am always finding new questions), I’ve been spending a lot of time imagining a calendar of my inner year. I feel compelled to design an Imagine Self circular calendar (like the Inner Year Mandala) that visually represents the sacred soul-culitivating seasons and the great festivals of inner development. To this I want to add Soul Feast Days.
I’ll be sharing more about the Imagine Self Calendar project as it develops, but in this post I want to encourage you to think about the soul feast days you would want to celebrate every year. Please post below the person, event, quality, thought, feeling, or activity your soul longs to celebrate, to dedicate your thoughts to one day each year.
You might want to look at the Holy Days of Dedication in the various religions to find inspiration for your soul feast days. The idea would be to seek within your own self the focus of the feast.
It seems to me that inner celebration requires both a wisdom-seeking question and a self-compassionate observation. For example…
My Thoughts of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Today, in the Catholic Church, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It celebrates the conception of a female child whose soul is without original sin because she is destined to give birth to the male child that will redeem the sins of the world.
I like the idea of this feast when I free it from the burden of church dogma and let it live in the realm of universal archetypes of the feminine, the womb, the mother, conception of thought, of feeling, of intention, etc. (As an esoteric Christian and one deeply aroused by the feminine archetype of the Virgin Sophia, this Feast of the Immaculate Conception and all the other Marian Feast Days really call to me.)
Now I can come up with a thousand questions and just as many observations in regard to the archetypes in the image of the Immaculate Conception. Inner overload! But if I choose this as a yearly feast day and therefore know there will be many years when I can feast for a day on these archetypes , each year I can focus on one question and make one observation.
So this year, I will choose the question: What is sin? and I will observe my sense of “stain” (immaculate comes from “without stain.”) in my relationships. And I will write down my thoughts and feelings about my quesiton and my observation. Perhaps I will want to do a painting or write a poem.
I will give this feast 20 minutes of my dedicated attention. Maybe 1 hour. Maybe I will think about it before I go to sleep and in the morning write down what I find concieved in my morning thoughts. Or I will take a walk and think about the question as I move through nature. What are the ways you imagine celebrating, feasting and dedicating?
Create your Soul Feast Days and nourish your sense of self as an extraordinary being.
Here is a Guide to Imagine Your Soul Feast Days
Choose 12 Soul Feast Days…one for each month. Obviously we could have 365 Soul Feast Days, but start with 12. Perhaps you will choose 3 persons to venerate, 3 qualities to contemplate, 3 feelings to deepen, 3 thoughts to illuminate. (These can change over the years or you can add more.)
Write a paragraph or two on why you want to dedicate a feast day, a holy day of dedication to this person, quality, feeling, thought.
Choose the month and the day for this celebration.
Put it on your calendar.
Buy yourself a journal or sketch book to devote to your Soul Feast Days.
Imagine how you will design and do this inner work regarding amount of time, type of activity, the setting of your celebration. Maybe you will build an altar with certain objects.
Be creative…your devotion to your own soul will make the whole world more beautiful.
