,Our inner life has seasons, the seasons of the soul. Just like the seasons of Nature, each soul season has a particular mood and a particular activity.  In the past, inner seasons were acknowledged and shaped by outer cultural and religious celebrations and festivals.  They were communal and traditional.   The outer moods and activities were dominant.

But in our current times of self-awareness and self-development, there is a growing sensitivity to the need to bring a seasonal cycle to our individual inner life.  We need inner rhythms and practices to bring our attention to the cyclical nature of our souls.  Many of our emotional challenges, anxieties, and imbalances would resolve if we recognized this need and attended to and reflected on the seasonally available inspirations of the soul.

One of the more important seasons of the soul occurs during the late fall as Nature falls into darkness. This is the time in our outer, cultural life when we celebrate Thanksgiving and prepare for Christmas and the ending of the year. In the Christian Liturgical Year this season is called Advent and prepares for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus.  Inwardly, it is a time to do a compassionate and objective review of our year as preparation for the inner birth of a new consciousness of self at Inner Christmas. 

Your year made a difference – to you, to others, to the world, and to the future. What was the difference?

It was not just the same routine, the same gestures, and activities, the same rhythms of sleep, meals, work, relationships. It was different and it was powerful.

Inner Advent

• shows the differences this year made
• makes sense of your year
• gives you a feeling of completion and wholeness
• provides a surprisingly objective awareness of your truth.
• liberates you from limiting identities, stories and reactions
• reveals the lessons of the year
• increases your ability to creatively design your future
• celebrates who you’ve been, who  you are and who you are becoming

Inner Advent is an embrace, a conscious self-loving embrace, of your unfolding life. It’s a responsibility to yourself,  a spiritual and moral duty to yourself.  
We are different from animals in that we have the moral ability to be self-conscious and self-creative. We are not just about drives for survival or desires for being happy, we are about freedom and growth.

Freedom comes from knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is the highest spiritual practice.

Know how you survived this year. Know how you emotionally experienced the year.  Know how you grew and evolved over the year.

Know your year to know yourself!

Possess your year so you can let the stories go and find the meaning, the sacrifice of your 365 days, your 10.5 million breaths, your efforts and struggles, your dreams, your joys, your sorrows.

How do you begin to do this? How do you organize your recollection of the year? How do you analyze what happened? How do you intuit the meaning? What are the questions that will lead to the insights, the self-knowledge, to a new you, a wiser you, a freer you?

I want Inner Advent to be a relaxed and aware experience for you. I will guide the process, but you will do the work.  No one can do it but you. This is the gift you give your Self.

Integrating Your Soul’s Year

Inner Advent is simply a guide, a compassionate and creative structure for shaping the work of integrating your soul’s year.   Inner Advent reflects the traditional Christian Advent of the four Sundays before Christmas. The difference is in the focus of attention.  Christian tradition focuses on the four moods of Christmas: hope, joy, peace, and love. Inner Advent focuses on your soul’s activities of thinking, feeling and willing over the previous year and guides you to…

Recollect your memories of how you lived the year and expressed yourself.
Review and discover the meaning of your thoughts, feelings & deeds or your shadows, your sorrows & your sufferings.
Release your memories into the world ethers and create within your soul a new openness for wonder, warmth & wisdom.

The true gift of the Inner Advent program is the beauty and usefulness of the design, structure, and process. You learn how to create a spiritual practice that brings depth and rightness to your inner work. You will find the union between your soul and the cycle of the year in nature.  You will discover the spiritual meaning flowing through your inner development in each season. 

If you feel you don’t remember your year, that you couldn’t recollect it, the guidance of Inner Advent will awaken memories, but will also create a foundation for your relationship to the coming year.  Inner Advent serves the past year and the future year equally.

Time for Your Reflections

I realize that with our crazy, complex and chaotic outer lives it is very hard to carve out time for inner work.  But celebrating Inner Advent does not demand lots of time.  If you want to celebrate in a daily rhythm for 21 days, I suggest between five and 20 minutes each day.  If you are more comfortable attending to your inner life in a weekly session (like going to church on Sundays, yoga on Fridays, your therapy session on whatever day) do your best to devote 30 – 60 minutes on your chosen day to do this seasonal inner work.  In either the weekly or daily rhythm make sure you choose a time of day when you have the least demands and distractions. Create a mood of reverence and devotion.

Inner Advent: Structured and Guided by Lynn

Below are the links to the two self-study Inner Advent courses. Designed for you to work on your own, but with a discussion forum for you to share your experiences each week. 

Lynn guides you through the process in four inspiring audios and provides a number of pdf’s to support your work. 

Inner Advent whether you choose the Year of Light or the Year of Darkness offers a creative and illuminating spiritual practice. You will feel a new freedom and a deeper compassion filling your heart and mind as you arrive at the Holy Nights.