Why I hold Circles celebrating the 8 Festivals on the Celtic Wheel of the Year.
Re-Orienting Rhythms
Dropping out of our minds into our innate connection with nature can feel like a tug of war between the ego, the part of us that is braced for the eternal challenges of modern life, the part of the brain that is trying to hold the myriad strands of our life together and doggy paddle through the waters of practical demands, and our emotional landscapes and spiritual lacks or longings, to name just a few things.
In the barrage, I cannot always distinguish if my choices are based on what is best for me and my family or if I am responding to the magnetic pull of another distraction.
Sitting with a wise old oak, he asks me to ask myself to bring to consciousness this inquiry into my motivations.
I am so grateful for these intermittent moments, where I allow myself the time and space to talk to a tree or flower or blade of grass, I am so grateful for the wise women in my life who have taught me to stop and to listen and to trust in the wisdom that unfolds from those conversations.
I find all sorts of distractions to minimise my connection to the natural world. To turn aside from the vast ocean of love and support and no-nonsense advice all around me.
The complex ecosystems that amaze and inspire me continue to feel so separate from me. The teachers who have held my hand as I allow myself to be absorbed the loving arms of the universal matrix, can seem so far away.
During lockdown I could taste the true medicine that natures loving hand held out to me. And still I could not drink deeply. Big emotional dramas tossed me and my nervous system about until I could not tell up from down. I could not trust my own inherent wisdom or the true medicine.
My nervous system had been bouncing between fight/flight and freeze/collapse for a few years.
I had been there before and been on the journey back home to myself a few times before being blown off course again. So off I set.
Experience means I now have deep trust in the journey and the process and the invaluable gifts to be found along the way.
One of the biggest healing processes for me over the years has always been to sit in circle with other women. I have sat in sweat lodges, and spent 3 years in apprentice circles studying the Native American medicine wheel, I have spent a few years in a shamanic drum circle, a few years sat in circle studying the nature wisdom teachings of the Inka. I have sat in Meditation circles and done a shamanic yoga teacher training. And many other wonderfully nourishing female led spaces.
The most profound support for me has been following and marking the festivals on the Celtic year of the year in a group of women, which I have been doing for over 13 years now. We drew our inspiration from the work of Starhawk’s reclaiming wicca and Glennie Kindred and from our individual experience and our collective passions for being out in nature reclaiming ourselves and our connection to each other and an intimate connection to natures rhythms as experienced in the Pennines in West Yorkshire.
Now I am based in South Buckinghamshire and I am running regular circles for women to mark the 8 festivals of the Celtic year. My nervous system loves this practice, as I re-orient my own Rhythms in connection with the turning of the wheel. Stopping with Sistas every 6 weeks to reflect and re-orient.
There is great healing to be found in noticing our earth mothers’ rhythms, the subtle and more obvious ones. Leaning into those rhythms and reflecting on how they are showing up in ourselves and each other.
Great healing to be found in noticing how the earth expresses the innate rhythm that resides in all things, that of expansion and contraction. A dance we have moving through every cell of our own beings and a dance that can feel so complicated and at times dysfunctional, in a world that demands we honour only the phase of expansion, blindly ignoring the burnout this creates in the quest to keep fuelling a capitalist machine at all costs.
So why when we are inextricably woven into the fabric of our earth mother, do we feel so disconnected from her?
How can we go about mending our relationship with her?
By gently bringing our attention to what is happening within and without ourselves and our busy lives and by dropping into vulnerability with our own process and with each other.
Thankyou
Sam
