Friday, November 15
Shadow

New Year’s Eve Ritual

To successfully manifest your new intentions, experiences or desires, you must first create space for the new. Every year on New Years eve, I perform a sacred letting go ritual where I write down everything that I am willing to release, to make space for the magic of the new year.

Here is an example…..you would like to have some new clothes however all your closets are filled with old mostly outdated, some too big, some too small ones, however you keep them mainly because they are comfortable and you know how they feel. You are getting older and you realize as you begin to mellow that you aren’t happy in your life and you really want to have new clothes however you no longer have any space, every closet in your home is stuffed with outdated clothes and shoes and they aren’t allowing this new chapter in your life to begin…it’s time to “let go” and you find you don’t have the skills to accomplish this simply because no one has ever taught you how to do this.

Well that is where I was several years ago. I have always been blessed with what seemed like angels just walking into my life just when I needed them the most. My best friend for life, Sister Carol a nun in the order of St. Joseph entered my life. I was teaching a class in a massage school and she along with many other nuns were granted the choice to live out of convent and out of habit. Sister Carol became a massage therapist and her and I changed places of teacher and student, even to this day 30 years later. Sister Carol taught me how to “let it go”

In “letting go” I learned to a create a space to let go of unwanted (negative) baggage that was holding me back. It was closet cleaning time….time to purge. Once you start to purge old feelings start to come up and you say…..WAIT!!!!! this is really uncomfortable…I need to stop and leave these clothes right here. If you are as lucky as I was you will have a Sister Carol in your life and she won’t let you stop, she will push you on and on and you will tell her to go away and she won’t and you will thank God every day that she wouldn’t leave you alone. Through the years I have purged my closet many times and each and every time I will be honest with you it doesn’t get any easier.

This past summer I can rank among one of the hardest I have had to do….and in some ways I am still going through those small pieces that keep holding on. As I approach my 70th year on this plane of existence I will let everything that is lingering go on New Year’s Eve…..and start the New Year fresh.

So with plain paper and only a pencil since this paper will be returned to ashes we begin to write, (I have been writing since June) all that I want to leave my life all that is not that which we are born from the Creator (joy, love, peace, all the positive attributes) and letting go of all the negative ones (worry, anger, resentment, jealousy etc). I use to have a pretty firepit that I used for many years and stood under the stars and offered up my written work, now I use a lighter to burn the paper and let it go…..it all works…..

Holding on to the past and being worried about the future ages you inside and out. I am very fortunate that I have had angels along the way to help me through the rough times, and there has been many of those more so in the last 7 years and as I enter a whole new decade I will enter with a closet free of old clothes.