Pixie Lighthorse | Self-Healing Writer

Writer: Self-Healing Earth-Centered Books

10 Ways to Create a Meaningful Ceremony

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This is My Season

Fall is so close… isn’t it so much more sensual than Spring? Autumn is a seductress and an Earth Mama all at once.

I can smell this season on the trees, feel it in the morning air, see it in the subtle way the sun has tilted back as if to begin his post-Solstice withdrawal. The Ceremonialist in me is stirred up by my birth month, and the sense that, “this is my time.”

I’m routinely asked how to create sacred ceremony, so I put together this little guide of dates and favorite ways to celebrate to help you navigate the Autumn and holiday season with grounded, spirited meaning.

Upcoming dates to celebrate with a plan for ceremony:

Harvest Now

September 21 Autumnal Equinox/Mabon

November 1 Samhain

November 28 Thanksgiving

December 21 Winter Solstice/Yule

December 25 Christmas

January 1 New Year’s Day

Celebrating in both a sacred, ceremonial way makes this medicine mama very happy.

Screen Shot 2015-12-30 at 12.04.55 PMimage by Anne Carmack

My Must-Have, Essential Elements for a Meaningful Ceremony

1. Smudge

Plant medicine burned, waved out, and smoked over a fireproof bowl or in a fireplace sweeps out unwanted energies, while inviting in the new and benevolent.

My current favorites are mugwort, lavender, palo santo, and rosemary, with White Sage being my go-to for serious herbal purification.

Sprays can also be used to turn any moment into a sacred cleanse-I have a long-running obsession with Napa Valley.

2. Plantable paper

Writing my seasonal intentions on tree-free pieces of paper I can plant in the earth, or a natural paper I can put into the fire, means that I get to see my visions grow into wildflowers and vegetables.

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3. Offerings

Tobacco is a traditional offering to the spirits, but loose lavender buds or a little crystal planted in the earth works just as well to express gratitude for the Earth and her blessings.

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4. Fire

Transforming energies and the alchemical process of flames is simply MAGIC. Candles, firepits, fireplaces, yule logs can all be prepared with care and ritual to bring warmth and depth to your celebration. Place prayer ties, releasing bundles, and paper messages into a fire to shed the old and ring in the new!

My fave: Bonfires. Light ’em up.

5. Divination

Pull cards from a favorite deck or flip to a random page in the book you consider to be your bible. Discover the application of the message or passage for here and now.

6. Music

Drums, rattles, tankdrums, crystal bowls, or any music which tunes you into a higher frequency will raise the vibration of your ceremony and deepen your sensual memories of the experience. Hearts open with the right music.

I’m currently spinning a lot of The Human Experience, Rising Appalachia, and Nahko and Medicine for the People.

7. Prayer, Meditation, Blessing, Invocation

Share your sacred intentions with clarity and reverence out loud, or silently to yourself.

Honor the gods, goddesses, Earth, Moon & Stars + the special forces coming together on this momentous occasion.

Love this book of blessings. And this one.

8. Friends

You know who your real friends are when they respond with an enthusiastic YES to your invitation to attend a sacred ceremony with you.

Dress for the occasion!

Create small tokens of appreciation for them.

9. Feast

No ceremony is complete without a feast, especially when it follows a cleansing ritual fast in honor of the transition at hand. It’s all about seasonal foods and gratitudes.

Autumn and winter ceremonial faves ’round here are vegetable soups, curries, venison stew, roots, berries, salmons, pine nuts, and… carrot cake.

Sing over your food to raise it’s vibration and show it the love it’s about to impart to your grateful body.

10. Fun

Ceremony can be a serious business, as well as seriously fun. Be sure to include movement, dance, frolic, games and festivity. Nothing binds the medicine like the kicking up of heels and the letting down of hair.

Or fur.

Awroooooooooo!

Fox Medicine: Regenerating Our Sacred Tails

Soulfooting600sqsml Soulfooting, 2010.

Our dreams are full of unconscious material from our experiences, past lives and gathered from the collective. They’re a call, and an opportunity to understand what’s working inside of us, showing us our relationships to our inner masculine and feminine, and their confluence.

A number of years ago, I had a dream which has stayed with me. It speaks to my connection with Fox, to women, to Fox’s uncanny likeness to women (ever read about Kitsune?) and to the restoration of balance so needed in our dominant-model world today.

In the dream my home and garden are flooded with unexpected people, but most notably, an affluent man, who brought with him many, MANY daughters. All are playing with their children on swingsets and with toys. Upon closer inspection, I discover that they all look rather ill, with boils on their faces, and in pain. Their eyes are, in some cases, almost swollen shut. They were all sisters, and they all bear resemblance to one another, they even seem to be about the same age.

Down the garden path, happily putting some distance between myself and my numerous odd guests, I see a red Fox pop up near a bright green tree, standing out in my visual field on a dismal landscape.

She comes near me and I see that her tail has been removed. It’s ragged, stubbed and brushy, having been removed in a haste, perhaps. More and more distressed foxes of all colors, some wearing dog collars, come around wanting to follow me out the gate to escape their captor: the gentleman with all of the daughters. I am unsure of what I’m seeing, and it takes me some time to come up with a plan. I whisper to them that their tails WOULD grow back, but I will have to come secretly in the night to let them free so that they can get a good lead on him, as he will be coming for them. They seem disparaged in their hopes, not unlike shelter dogs, but I am able to provide a hope for them to cling to.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a Fox or it’s tail, you know that it is her shining glory. It is FAT, FLUFFY and by far, one of the most beautiful and cozy tails in the animal kingdom. She uses it to curl up into, and keep warm, to navigate with like a rudder, to strut her stuff. Her tail activates instinct, kundalini, sensuality, self-sanctuary, mystique, camouflage-the feminine Mystery embodied.

Under the light of the moon, it is time to slip our collars and regrow our tails. The inner dictator, passed down through all of the various outdated systems, is dying. He lives within us, in our unconscious, and we alone are responsible for overthrowing him. His daughters cannot see, and the last organ in line to detox, the skin, has begun to show it’s buried anger and irritation.

The promise of my dream is one of regeneration, for me, and for all women. We live the ancient myths forward, by continuing to write them.

If you’re currently in the process of regenerating your soul from the outdated model, imagine a vision of abandoned collars on the streetcorners, and tails up proud, heading for the forest.