Having Problems with New Holiday Rituals

There I said it. I am having serious problems this year with making this "holiday season" meaningful and magical for me and my family.

Partly because I am choking on the daily demands of parenting and being a householder, while looking after other people's kids, teaching yoga, working part-time at night, and overall trying to be a decent person, friend, and relative.

Partly because I have spent too much time seeing all the other brilliant Holiday traditions other families are doing.

Partly because I feel completely overwhelmed with Christmas decor and music everywhere I go and want a sacred space away from it.

Partly because I know my son is old enough to remember what happens this time of year, so we need to amp up our "holiday game." I want to make this time of year special for him and start traditions that will bring joy to our family! *Oh the self-inflicted pressure*

Partly because the very thought of Christmas makes me want to run and hide. Christmas  makes me think very ill thoughts about commercialism, over-consumption, and marketing.

Partly because of the stress from the very thought of the very humble amount of buying I need to do for the perfect thoughtful gift (due to my own pressure on myself) and pressure to spend more than I have. Then I have to figure out how the heck find time and energy to actually buy presents. I hate shopping! Thank goodness for shopping online!

I am so overwhelmed by the pressures of our modern "Christmas culture", and bombarded with my own negative associations with Christmas. I want so badly to create new meaningful traditions with my own family, but I know I have to get past my own hang ups.

I know I  need to focus less on the negative, and more on the positive in order to get me through this season without throwing my head in the sand.

For us, this time should be about honoring the everlasting "light of life," like the evergreen tree symbolizes. The sun may be "dying" in the darkest days of the year, but lets celebrate the rebirth of the sun, and honor the light in our lives, and nurture the ever-lasting light within.

It means a time for less work and more play. 

It means a time for connection and honoring of loved ones and friends and community.

I LOVE how others get so into Christmas and gain so much joy out of their family rituals and traditions, and get even more excited when they have kids to share it with. I want that for our family too.

But we are so darn complicated and unique. It going to be a bit of trial and error to figure out what is going to make this family's holiday magical and meaningful.

It means saying no to pictures with Santa in the mall. *shutter*

It means saying no to Elf on the Shelf.

It means playing down the presents part of Christmas, and ramping up the "special day with family" part.

It means not talking obsessively about Santa and watching every television show ever made about Christmas. I really hate lying to my son about Santa, but I do like him to experience the magic of it. So I prefer to not talk   about it so much. Also, Santa is all about presents, and that leads me down a dark hole of materialistic consumption.

I know a lot about what this holiday season doesn't include. But I need to work more on what it does include. For us so far it includes:

Making a gingerbread house together as a family, and as a family, join together in experiencing mad sugar lust and evil thoughts of eating the cute sugar-people. (BTW - cheated and bought the box kit. But it was perfect for us, and cuter than I could do with less work.)

Putting lights up on our house. Maybe, if it ever stops raining. My son wanted lights on our house, and it felt okay for us.

A little real evergreen tree with simple home-made decorations, and some lights.

Creating special moments at holiday parties with friends at school, and our social and work community.

Reconnecting to nature and all that it offers this time of year. Going out together and cutting down the evergreen tree.

Through story, educating the children in my life about how special this time of year is with the sun's rebirth. Retelling a magical story called Raven Brings the Light for children and adults and doing yoga pose to act out the story.

The rest of the traditions I suppose with come. I think first I need to let go of the pressure on myself to make it have to be amazing and perfect this year. I need to just call it a work in process, and do my best with my VERY LIMITED resources.

The Greatest Gift From my Son

Loving his new baby sister

I have a boy, who is very much a boy. He loves is obsessed with playing with cars, trucks or anything with wheels. He loves to be the male macho superhero. He possesses those traits that are culturally associated with being masculine: fiery, confident, strong, bold, and intense all come to mind.

Yet, he is also sweet, sensitive, nurturing, and can get very co-dependent. This is the yin to his yang.

We all have masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. Some are physical traits, others are in the mental or emotional body. It is healthy to have a balance of this.

What I love about this time in my son's life though, is he still greatly respects females, and isn't afraid to explore that female nature inside of himself. 

For example, in his role-playing, he is always mom, and usually pregnant or taking care of a baby. Unless he he is a superhero. But "mom" lately is gaining strength over "superhero". He takes time to explore this character and is, as one of my friend's pointed out, very committed to his characters.

He isn't afraid to wear pink, or "girlie" looking clothes. In his own words he has told me that pink is for girls. I corrected him by saying a lot of girls like pink. Whether he believed me or not I don't know. But he is a very perceptive lad, and almost four, so I am sure he has noticed what girls wear in this culture.

He has taken to wearing this necklace (below) that he made and will not take it off. It has pink and purple beads (and blue and green), with a white and pink pony charm in the middle. It looks rather "girlie" don't you think?

He doesn't do it all the time, but has found some hand-me-down clothes for my daughter in his size and wants to wear them out.

I do not encourage any of this, nor do I discourage it. I just observe and let him explore if he wishes. 

Upon asking if anyone said anything about the blue barrette in his hair at school the other day - there didn't seem to be much reaction. I wonder if there was.

The thing is, my son seems to be a bit of a subtle alpha dog. The other kids like him and respect him, as much as they can for that age. So he probably wouldn't of got picked on too much if any because of it. In fact, one of the other mother's asked where I got his necklace because her son wanted one. Go figure.

My son loves to roll with the boys, yet I find it so touching that I am raising a boy whose biggest role-model, so far, is me, his mother. 

I love that I am raising a boy who sees the beauty and power that comes from girl's and women's more subtle  inner strength. I know he basks in the compassion and love that seems to just pour out of mothers. For the most part, he instinctually trusts other mothers.  He instantly will warm up in a new environment as long as there are female role-models.

Men, however, he doesn't always trust. He hasn't quite figured them out yet.

I remember being completely blown away when I found myself in a corporate banking job on Bay Street (the Wallstreet of Canada). Here I was working in a very masculine-type yang pressure power-hungry environment for a renowned short-tempered shark of an investment banker. But what I found, after a while, was this shark I was working for, was in fact, the first man I have ever known who had so much respect for women and females-alike. It wasn't a sexualize or obsessive devotion or anything. Just a very genuine loving gratitude and respect for the mothers, wives, and women in general.  It just made me respect him even more.

Perhaps this speaks more to the environment that I was raised in. I was raised to believe, like most girls growing up in the 80's, that girls could do anything boys could do, and maybe even better. My parents certainly echoed this notion for me. However, the biggest male role-model in my life, my dad, didn't truly believe this about the already grown up women in the world.

My prayer is that my son can hold onto this love and respect he has for women and girls for the rest of his life. Especially if he becomes an influential man in the world.

What a world we could create that has a more balanced "power" structure.  There would be less war, fighting, and need to possess things and dominate them. Instead more love and compassion, and listening and getting to the deeper truth.

This reminds me why my role as a mother is such a powerful one. This, my friends, is how we change the world, one mother at a time.

Sundance and The Loss of Ritual in Western Culture

Our marriage ceremony in the Sundance arbor

This week, my household is packing up and getting ready for our family trip to the woods for a Lakota Sundance. It is a week long camping adventure my husband and I have been doing, apart or together, for about a decade. It is an important part of the year for us, perhaps the most important.

I always leave the Sundance feeling reconnected again- reconnected to myself, my family, to others, to nature, as well as to that "great mystery" out there. It has become like our yearly "tune up".

There are many native american tribes through out Canada and the USA that still surround the cottonwood tree for a Sundance, usually done around the time of the summer solstice. There is an intense preparation time to get ready for the ceremony, then it is a time of purification, prayer, healing and renewal for the participants.  

It is a bit weird, I will say, to participate so deeply in something (to the point of being married) that is so outside of  my own culture. I was brought up, and still identify with "western culture." I will never exchange my culture for the native american one, but I seek to learn from their ways and honor it as much as a full-blood Westerner can. 

I have tremendous respect for the ways traditional people create opportunities to mark the seasons. I am fascinated by their use of ritual and ceremony. I have always felt the loss of the absence of this in Western culture. 

Recently, I had the privileged of listening to a talk on the summer solstice by Storytime Yoga founder, Sydney Solis. In this talk she hit it home to me about the significance of ritual and the importance of celebrating the seasons. I have transcribed and edited her talk below:

Traditional peoples mark [the summer solstice] as a time of renewal. Western culture just keeps marching on like the past has happened, and marching on towards the future. But there is a eternal return, a continual cycle, and to mark it with ritual, such as with summer solstice time, creates a very powerful psychological shift.

In western culture we consume ideas. We do a lot of thinking and watching, but when you physically get out there and participate, when you move your body and dance and honor the life, when you eat together, then this conscious act becomes so powerful.

Traditional peoples would say, if you do not do a ritual, if you do not participate, then things go away. We see in our modern society extinction of animals, depletion of resources, depression, suicide. We have kind of of lost our way. Not to revert to old ways, but to find new ways to bring it into our current lives. We live in a sophisticated society that never going to be the old ways. 

It is essential for humans to have connection and meaning in their lives. We are to identify ourselves with that mysterious force that moves in cycles, and we are to move in harmony with those cycles.  Myths and rituals guide us to that inner world and depth of our being.

Old times, there was a season for everything, cycles, festivals for everything. Everything had a rhythm, and everyone participated and had a role. But our culture has alienated itself. We don't directly participate with nature, and therefore we are alienated from ourselves.

Our modern society has less nature and more technology. There is a mechanical loss of humanity, or soul. 

[During the summer solstice time] focus on slowing down and enjoy life. Focus on the simplicity and beauty of nature to awaken inside.

Because everything that is on the outside level is within you as well. When we really connect to things, we begin to influence it. We live in harmony with it. And it becomes what we want it to become. We influence the outside. 

Our dreams influence things, our positive thoughts influence. So does your joy and celebration when you honor things. You effect change.

About Sydney Solis:

It was after settling down with married life and raising two children that Sydney Solis discovered her love of storytelling in 2000. Since then, Sydney has been spreading the joy and wisdom of yoga and story with classes, performances, trainings and workshops internationally. She taught a Children's Yoga Teacher Training at the Omega Institute, and hosts a Kids' Yoga Camp at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. From her children's show on PBS to The National Association for the Education of Young Children to the Estes Park Yoga Journal Conference, Sydney enchants audiences of all ages with Storytime Yoga™.

Sydney has more than 375 hours of training in the Anusara tradition. She completed a 200-hour Anusara training with her teacher Bhakti and Level I teacher training with Anusara founder John Friend. She studied yoga therapy with senior Anusara teachers Jeanie Manchester and Anthony Bogart, Ashtanga yoga with Richard Freeman, and Yoga Nidra with SreeDevi Bringi.

Check out Sydney's site, www.storytimeyoga.com, to learn more about how you can find her award winning book: Storytime Yoga: Teaching Yoga to Children through Story, or subscribe to the Little Lotus Storytime Yoga Kids Club.

Portrait of a Mother on Mother's Day



Motherhood Has Been a Blessing
Thank you my children for blessing me with your spirit and presence, and trusting me to be your mother and raise you in this lifetime. Thank you for teaching me many lessons, and allowing me to work towards being the highest being I can become in this lifetime.

Honoring the Mom in Our House

Homemade waffles, card and flowers make this mom feel super special.



A Mother's Day Mandala: Honoring Mothers in All Directions

It is wonderful to be appreciated and honored on Mother's Day, but for me, I like to honor all the mother's in my life, all mother's everywhere, and the Divine Mother.  Creating this mandala/alter helped to connect me to all three. 

The act of building the mandala brought me into the moment and generated great joy in my heart. I offered food, flowers, light, precious stones, love (from my heart and a visual purple heart I drew), cedar and burned sage.

I also offered a geode (bottom left). I love the symbolism of the geode. They are brown, hard and rather plain on the outside, but on the inside they are hollow and filled with crystals. It reminds me of the essence of motherhood. We offer so much of ourselves to our family. It isn't about using your energy to become the most stunning beautiful thing on the outside. That doesn't benefit our children. It is about being full of pure light and wisdom and shining that to our loved ones so they can flourish.

A bouquet of flowers and card to be delivered to a special mom-friend who lives down the road from us.

Listening To Intuition

When visiting the neighbour's pigs in the barn, my son intuitively did this with his hands. The sound and smell of the pigs was a little too much for him, so he instinctually found a way to dull his senses so he could brave going in to see the pigs. (It reminds me of a pranayama technique - sanmukhi mudra - where you cover your eyes, nose, and ears and try to breath with your senses covered)

Sherpa mom trekking home from our flower delivery. 

Up next: a butterfly hunt in our long grass and sunny sun shining.





Butterfly hunting while testing out the mai tai wrap with baby on the back.

We both liked it! It is easier on the back and nice to feel more range of moment than having her in the front.

First Real Lesson on Death

I went inside for a moment and came back outside to find this. My son looked up at me with tears in his eyes. Daddy was just finished saying a prayer for a butterfly. They buried it near the lilac bush. Apparently my son had tried to pick it up once he caught it in the net and had accidentally killed it. 

It touched me that my son felt truly sad in his being for the butterfly. He said he didn't want it to go back to the spirit world. He felt bad he killed it, even by accident. Teaching compassion and respect for living things is one thing, but you can't make someone feel it. What a beautiful Mother's day gift!

The words killing and die have been used all too easily in my three-year-olds play time. We role play fight scenes because that is what he loves to do. But it troubles me that he doesn't understand more about what it means. I am so thankful for this little lesson. 

Ending in Yoga

As wonderful as it was to spend a joyful day with my family, I also know the importance of taking care of myself. For me right now that means taking a break away from my family to connect one-pointedly with my body and breath without any risk of interruption. So I had the privilege of attending a good sweaty vinyasa flow class where I could just show up, breathe, and do what was directed. Sweet! The teacher, a new mom herself, kindly gave up her time with her family to teach us. What a blessing!

Reflection

Last year's Mother's Day started off without the men of my house showing a whole lot of respect for the women in their life. It was disappointing. However, after going to a sacred ceremony with a few other moms, I felt renewed, empowered and connected again. It made me realize how utterly important the feminine energy is to maintain peace and balance, and that although the feminine can subtle, it is just as strong. Rather like water burrowing pathways through solid rock to create beautiful caverns.

Last year I realized how important it is to gather with other women to help remember our own feminine divinity within and to unite so we could all become stronger. I had another female growing inside of me, and feeling especially hit down in a male-dominated world, I realized how important it was to me to share with my daughter in the future how special and beautiful it is to be a woman today in this world.

As you can see, this Mother's Day brought a lot of "gifts" just mindfully observing (and recording) the ebb and flow of my family as they go about the day.

A year ago, we had just moved to a new state and a new town in hopes that it would help us grow into the beings we needed to become. This year, we are definitely more settled and feeling like we found our tune.

Honor thy Mother

It's Mother's Day, and I am brooding. Perhaps, I am just expecting too much: a little breakfast, a little hand-made card, a flower picked from the garden? Nope, nothing. "You are not my mother," my husband said. True, but I am carrying his child, and caring for his two-year-old. This is my day. Mother's Day. But I am not feeling very honored or even especially loved.

That said, there is also a lot of chaos and change going on in our home. We just made the big move two states north to Indiana a week ago. There are boxes to be unpacked, endless social calls to return, friends to see, and a billion and one things we need sort out.

I do have one special thing planned today though. My friend Holly is hosting a "women's group." I have no idea what it is, or what to expect, but I do know that I am going to get a break from being a mom and wife, and get out of our up-turned home. Whoopee!

Holly lives 20 minutes out of Bloomington, at a sweet house on a hill with acres to roam. When I arrive, Holly and Rachel are down at the teepee. Trudging through the brush, making my way over to the teepee, I can't help but think this may be a serious spiritual gathering, and I can't help but to dread it. I have been through so much the last week, including narrowly escaping flooded Nashville. I just want to laugh and have fun with my girlfriends.

Within minutes, I am deeply focused inside the teepee making prayer ties with Holly, while Rachel is outside singing Lakota prayer songs while attempting to light a fire. I instantly serrender to the sacredness of this moment. I realize, that in fact, this is exactly where I need to be. This, is what I have been missing back in my "old life" in Nashville.

Holly has created a sacred space in the middle of the Teepee, including rocks and little trinkets important to her, as well as a picture of India's living saint "Amma," who is known as the mother of India. Cedar and sage are flowing, and just approaching the teepee I could feel the sacred power she intentionally created.

Eventually the women of this circle converge within the circle of the teepee, making five women, all mothers. Holly sings the beautiful Lakota song invoking and thanking the sacred four directions. This song sung amongst my sisters, instantly transports me back to my earlier days, sitting amongst 20 women in a sweat lodge. Years ago, with Hollie by my side (another newbie), I was being introduced to the Lakota ways at the Saltcreek Sundance.

I remember being completely overwhelmed by the immensity of being surrounded by such strong female energy in such a sacred, pure, and real manner.  Sweats are intense. They are hot and make you suffer, and bring you directly in touch with the great spirit, should you wish to open up to it. There is a sense of connection with the others you sweat with. When they sing or speak, you don't see them, but feel their souls flowing as they sing or pray with their entire being. Something wonderful happens in there.

As a society, we are constantly bombarded with male energy. Men are typically stronger. By nature they are more aggressive and externally focused.

Female energy, in contrast, is more subtle and internal. "Some people confuse such subtlety with weakness; in truth, it is stronger than the most aggressive physical force imaginable. True human dignity does not shout; it is a strong, steady voice that speaks from within. The nature of a woman, while subtle, is not weak. And the nature of a man, while aggressive, is not brutish. For man and woman to be complete, they must each possess both energies."*

As a female, in a man's land, it is tough to stay solid and true to yourself. I have been sweating and praying with my own family, and other friends, which naturally is dominated by men. Not to say that I am not thankful. I am very thankful. I have learned so much about the native ways from my husband and his male teachers. But, hearing the female voices lift up and join together in Lakota prayer songs, it instantly put me in line with the divine mother, and her very powerful energy. Flowing in that teepee was the Divine Mother, as well as all those great female forces that did Her work, and who are doing Her work:

Athena, Ceres, Demeter, Devi, Durga, Gaia, Ha Hai-i Wuhti, Hecate, Ishtar, Isis, Juno, Kali, Kuan Yin, Lakshmi, Mother Mary, Persephone, Sarasvati, Shakti, Tara, and Venus. Goddess forms are many and beautiful.

As women, as mothers, we joined together today, Mother's Day, to honor the divine mother, as well as honor the divinity within each of us. We told her of our struggles, gave her our heart-felt thanks, and made prayers for ourselves and our loved-ones. We are connected by our human struggles and efforts to find our way through the daily muddle. Sometimes we forget the way, or forget that we are wise and holy, and possess that divine spark from the Mother within ourselves. We forget what an absolute beautiful, powerful creative force She is!

Coming together in this way helps us women to remember. It helps to keep us humble, but helps us to remember our own inner strength and essential power.

We pray to the Spirit for help in creating a stronger feminine alliance to balance the male-ego-dominated native gatherings happening around our area this summer. Without the female energy to balance, we are worried about the "tornadoes" that may be released from the imbalance.

As a mother, I can't help but to think of how I want my children to have something pure and holy left to "hold on to" in their lifetime. Keeping the native ways alive and pure is seems especially poignant today. Not just the native ways, but any other way that we connect to our spirit and to the Great Spirit/Void.

From personal experience, no one "way" has been perfect for me. They have all taught me so much about myself, about this world and how to connect with spirit. It is only because others have perservered their ancestors ways, that we can benefit from the power of ritual and tradition, and from the wisdom.

I am pregnant, perhaps with a daughter, and am reminded about how much I would love  to have special female rituals to pass down to her. I would love for her to feel empowered to be a female, and embrace it. I want her to have strong female role-models that are not just power-hungry-corporate-super-moms, or cookie-baking-stay-at-home-soccer-moms. I want her to be surrounded by multi-faceted, creative, emotionally and mentally intelligent females who are passionate about bettering themselves, their communities, and the world.

How wonderful would it be to surround a growing girl with such female gatherings as today, and make her realize the struggles that may come with being a women, but how ravishing and important it is to be female at this time and place. I would love to honor her first monthly menstruation cycle, and spend time with my sisters, in a fun and creative (but sacred way) teaching her all it means to be a women. How wonderful for her to be around elders trying to become better people, better wives and mothers; women who hold high respect for each other, and honor each other.

I have already learned that you cannot always expect to get the respect and honor from the men in our lives. But we can come together as women and honor ourselves.

Women gatherings are important.

Today's gathering is especially important for me. It has reminded me of where I came from and where I am going. I am thankful for the opportunity to give thanks out loud to the Great Spirit, my spirit helpers, my internal divine, and my "sisters", for a successful transition to my new home. It was perfect way to shed my "old skin" and transition cleanly into my new one.

Namaste. Wopila.


*http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Roles/186149?topic