Are you dressing up for Halloween?
I'm torn between going as a tarot card (which might be a little more involved than I want to take on this week), and Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, which feels easy, if less exciting. My 7-year-old is going as Taylor Swift, and my 9-year-old is going as Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. Michael might a wizard, might be Nathan Fielder. We'll see.
Some faves from years past. Pretty proud of those bats, narwhal, and duck!
The thing is, I actually don't care a lot about Halloween, but I do love to celebrate Samhain, and it's no mistake that they coincide.
Samhain (pronounced SOW-win) marks the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, and in the wheel of the year, it marks the start of the new year. People often say that at Samhain the veil between worlds is thin, which we see in many different cultures, as with the Día de los Muertos.
That more permeable barrier makes it a beautiful time to connect with and honor your ancestors. Mine have been particularly present in my consciousness lately. Maybe this will be the year I finally go through the bins of photos in the basement and add pictures of my beloved dead to the makeshift ancestral altar I have in the corner of the dining room.
All of this has me thinking about Descent, one quadrant of the Get More Everything™ framework. This is Descent season. It's Scorpio season, it's Samhain, and the days are getting shorter.
And that means this is a beautiful time to go beneath the obvious, do some excavation and see what's actually running the show. A time to meet what we've been avoiding, what we may have buried or suppressed, what we may have outgrown.
Why is this such a valuable part of the work? As the wise Carl Jung wrote in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."
If you’d like to delve deeper, here is a Samhain ritual for this weekend.
1. Make a little space. Your desk, a windowsill, or the corner of your kitchen table. I like to add a candle, something that smells good (like a cinnamon stick), and some beautiful leaves I've collected from outside.
2. Pause. Take a few deep breaths and ground yourself. Maybe imagine tree roots growing out from you, descending deep down into the earth, creating this beautiful cycle of releasing what no longer serves you into the earth to be transmuted, then pulling up the energy and nutrients that are so nourishing.
I also offer up a simple prayer at this time, and mine goes like this, though of course you should do whatever feels true to you:
"I welcome in my angels, my well and wise ancestors, my spirit guides and Great Spirit. Thank you for joining me in this moment and offering your guidance as I move forward. Please help me see and receive what it is I am meant to know."
3. Pull out your journal. You may want to pull a tarot or oracle card if that's in your practice, and ask what's running the show right now. If you're not sure where to start, here are some questions to get the creative juices flowing:
- Where does my body feel constrained?
- What have I been calling good enough?
- What am I carrying that I inherited and never chose?
- What have I outgrown?
Then journal about it and see what flows through you. You can either leave it there for later reflection or you can tear it up and compost it. You can also burn it safely. (My daughter always picks this option.)
4. Put on a song with a strong bassline. Move your body however it wants to move, and let any residual stickiness move through you and get released from your body.
This is going to create some more space: space for possibility, space for stillness. You don't have to know what grows in its place yet. Right now, the work is the descent, the excavation, the curiosity, the clearing.
If you're afraid of what you might find, I'll tell you what I tell myself in this situation. I'm not going to find anything that isn't already there. This will not generate something that didn't exist in my body or my psyche before. So we may as well meet it and see what has been steering the way.
If you'd like a guide for the way down, that's a big part of what I do with women in private coaching. We descend, we explore, we rise back up. We build lives that are richer than we could possibly imagine.
P.s. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, and I'm imploring you: vote. Every race on your ballot, all the way down. If you're in the DMV, early voting is still open: Maryland through today (Thursday, October 29), Virginia through Saturday, October 31, and D.C. through Sunday, November 1.
Anywhere else, vote.org has your polling place and hours. Make a plan, bring a friend, and go.
