Celebration honors!
It is a form of recollection, review and release of moments in our life experience. In this blog I offer suggestions on the art and .practice of Celebration.
What Do We Celebrate?
The celebrations can honor an experience of nature, cosmos, the divine, sensory delight, relationships, memories, or self-development.
You can celebrate your efforts and the contribution they made to others, to your home, to your finances, to the future.
You can celebrate what you have received and what you have given.
You can celebrate what you have begun, what you have moved forward and what you have completed.
You can celebrate that you have honored our personal commitment to seek, express and experience truth, beauty, harmony, goodness.
You can celebrate the presence of freedom and love in our soul.
The art of celebration is a feeling in your heart. The heart doesn’t measure so what you celebrate is not based on importance. You can celebrate a seed in the same way you celebrate a flower.
When Do We Celebrate?
Celebration as art and practice is not happenstance.
The most important aspect of celebrating, grieving and forgiving is rhythm and consistency. Decide on your rhythm and do your best to maintain the rhythm.
Celebrate at the end of your day (as a form of “ruch schau”, the practice of reviewing your day backwards as if you are unwinding the day before sleep), or at the end of the week, the lunar phase, the month, the season, the year (Inner Advent). Choose the rhythm that works best for you.
If you choose to do this daily before entering sleep, I suggest you choose one thing to celebrate each day. Don’t try to make celebration a laundry list. Celebration is not about quantity. Perhaps a different celebration for each day (Sunday – the presence of the Divine, Monday – an aspect of Nature you experienced, Tuesday – a relationship that you connected with during the day, and so on.)
Doing this weekly offers another design for this important work, a kind of Inner Sunday.
Likewise a lunar or monthly review gives you 12 days of personal celebration each year.
Working with the seasonal gestures:
on the Spring Equinox you could celebrate what you have learned about yourself or nature or friend during Winter,
at the Summer Solstice you could celebrate what new spiritual insights have illuminated your life during Spring,
at the Fall Equinox you could celebrate the development and delights of your sense perceptions during Summer,
on the Winter Solstice you can celebrate how you overcame the seductions of evil and egotism during Autumn.
Design your rhythm or rhythms of celebration. You will find this an enriching way to self-imagine.
(I remember to celebrate before falling asleep about 3-4 nights a week. We are not programmed machines…we are wonderful, fallible human beings. I have put a sign on my closet door that says “I Celebrate, I Grieve, I Forgive. I Sleep well! I have attached a pdf of the sign to this message. Or you can make your own.)
The Ways We Celebrate?
My favorite and highly recommended way of celebrating is to keep a celebrating/grieving/ forgiving journal. Nothing enriches our sense of self more than creative recording and imaging in words and pictures.
Working with pictures. You may want to journal daily or weekly and then monthly or seasonally reread your entries and spend sometime looking for images on the web or even drawing your own that offer a visual image of your thoughts and words.
Write down your celebrations!!! Take your thoughts an find the right words and phrases. Do this with humor and gravity…a powerful combination.
Many people have a daily gratitude practice. When you add to this the practice of celebrating you will find your gratitude taking on a richer significance in you inner development.
Grieving and forgiving are essential companions for celebrating. I will explore them in the next post.
Meanwhile, begin celebrating. Honor all the elements of your existence.
I celebrate YOU!!!
