Blessed Samhain, Happy Halloween, and a Happy New Year to all.
As pagans, we dedicate this holy day to celebrate the culmination of the harvest season and all the hard work we’ve put in to take care of our families and the community. With the winter season closing in now, it’s time for us to start infusing the new cycle with more magic, more fun, and more meaning.
The pagan new year is a good time for setting intentions for the cycle ahead. I find it easier to set intentions than to make resolutions in departments where I may not have built enough resolve to solve. That being said, here are some of the activities I will be dedicating more of my practice to this season:
Daily Card Reading:
As a professional Tarot and oracle counselor, I find it can be helpful to have a deck of cards with me wherever I go. I tend to run into friends and coworkers who look at meetings with me as a way to get more clarity in their lives and who like being validated by someone else taking their Intuition’s side over their trauma perspective. This is a powerful opportunity to connect with my community that I deeply value, but it can leave my well running a little dry from time to time.
So, in the spirit of the season, I’ll be going back to my roots and reinvigorating my practice with a daily routine of pulling one to three cards for myself at some point during the day. My goal is to add a little more fun and research into my personal flows outside of business, and I know this will be a great way to work with cards that don’t always make themselves seen regularly. If you’re working with the cards and are having trouble getting started, this is an excellent practice that doesn’t take a lot of time.
Just pull a few cards from your deck as you wake up. Your subconscious and conscious minds are still working together to decipher the dreams you left behind when you came back to wakefulness, and your intuitive ability to lock on to symbols will be powerfully helpful in deciphering the messages of your cards as you learn to work with your decks.
It’s also a blendable practice that some practitioners of magic and spirituality find emboldens their yoga, meditation, and healing practices as well.
Mindful Movement:
I would very much like to live a long and healthy life. One of the practices I’m interested in learning more about is Yoga. I am fascinated by the long history of this ancient modality for connecting to the body, building it up and honing it into a tool for creating beauty. I also think that we should all be more aware of the way our bodies are used and how the body feels about it.
When I’ve been to classes or taken them online, it has really helped me to see the ways that I have overused certain muscle groups compensating for something as simple as bad posture. In this way, I learn not to take my body and the work it does to get me from one stage of my life to the next for granted. This is something that most of us can experience together in groups or through working with teachers online.
I believe that yoga is a beautiful way to get attuned to your spiritual self in a powerful way, but not always the fit for everyone today. What works for some may not always work for all. So, if yoga is not your thing right now, that’s awesome! Finding new ways to move the body and get more joy and appreciation flowing into it and around me is the powerful intention I set for my mindful movement practice. I can dance, sing, stretch, hike, slide, and swim my way to that sacred place just as well!
Self Care, not After Care: This season, I’m focused on taking care of myself at the beginning of the cycle just as much as I would care for someone at the end of a cycle. A fundamental understanding of the way I used to be tells me that if I run as hard as I can, I won’t make it a very long way before feeling winded, and less and less will I progress before I have to take a break.
It takes a lot more energy to get a thing moving when it gets used to being still, and I’ve learned over the years not to get in my own way and to take things as they come. I will be incorporating my self care more organically into my practice than I have before. Why? Because sometimes all you need is a bubble bath, and sometimes lighting it on fire makes me feel better too.
Being upfront about how I’m feeling, at least with myself, helps me to understand how my emotional reactions to life feed into a narrative I may or may not want expressed to others. It also helps me to step out of those narratives and into a whole new character arc for myself. Talk about taking big steps to growth from the small steps of watching and then responding.
I hope this was a helpful look at the kind of work those who work for you, with you, and around you may be doing this spooky season. Stay safe out there, yall, and come back real soon.
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