It’s interesting this feeling of ending we play with and attempt to bypass each year, instead of meeting it.
We have turned Christmas into a death-defying ritual don’t you think?
It’s a time of year when nature goes to sleep, hibernates and we may feel the call to stop, to rest deep within and renew yet we do the exact opposite.
We stress, put pressure on ourselves and tense up. We are on the verge of overwhelm pretty much all of December.
In cranio biodynamics speak this should be a time of letting go, stilling and flow, recuperation, taking stock and deep relaxation.
Instead we’ve turned it into a time of contraction, resistance against, and hyper dissociation in my opinion.
Why? Sure look at what we do: we fly about the place over producing and consuming, binge partying, eating and drinking. It’s as if we relished in kicking and trampling over our bodies and our environment, testing them till they cannot take it anymore.
Have you noticed the eruption of gastro enteritis, gut-related problems and viral infections over Christmas? That's without counting the rise in loneliness, depressions and suicides...
It is quite staggering but not surprising at all.
The planet feels it too. This massive over production and consumption takes such a toll on Earth’s limited resources.
We are blind to our saturation game and this apparent death-defying exercise brings us ever closer to the edge of extinction!
We urgently need a radical re-invention of this time of year, to revert to the resourcing ritual of respect and honouring of nature and ourselves it once was: gather in community and stop to rest, share and show gratitude for, reflect on what the year past has brought and retrieved, prepare for the year to come.
No need for over the top feasts and gifting of artificial, superficial stuff.
How about rituals of mindfulness and embodiment instead? Perhaps a shared circle of life dance as in the Sufi traditions and many others.
How about collective meditations, spoken recollections of major learnings over the past year, shared explorations of how we truly are emotionally and physically, renewal of our deep interconnectedness with our environment and fellow living creatures, with all that we are and could be through story-telling, walking and just being in nature?
Christmas is supposed to be a time of togetherness and love, resting in the quieter fold and soft holding of mother nature yet it ends up being the extreme manifestation of a story of separation we keep on re-enacting every year.
Can you stop now and listen to your breathing, listen to the Earth, the universe breathe in unison?
Instead of experiencing the Christmas rush I'd personally just want to spend time in a cabin in the woods and listen to the weather.
I know I'm not alone.
