Use of the festive ritual to manage complaints
Digital MarketingDuring the holidays, many people’s past losses surface with a resurgence of sadness, anxiety, isolation, and feelings of regret. If 2012 has been a year of loss or change for you, these feelings may be even more overwhelming or intense.
As difficult as the holiday season can be for some, it is also a powerfully meaningful time to harness by creating personal rituals to help heal and make sense of those painful transitions and losses.
Creating a personal ritual can mark milestones and life transitions that spiritual communities often don’t address.
A personal ritual could be creating a meaningful candle lighting ritual to honor a deceased loved one, for example. People naturally create rituals in their lives, from routines to how we celebrate achievements; we do it quite naturally actually. This season, it can be helpful if you are dealing with a difficult life transition or personal loss to think about intentionally creating personal rituals.
Here are some examples of personal rituals that one might use around the festive time.
candle lighting
Candles and their lighting are often used to create personal rituals and are also often part of many significant spiritual traditions. One could start by lighting a candle on Thanksgiving night, for example, and continue to light it every night until New Year’s Eve. The first night the candle is lit, one may read a meaningful prayer, reading, or poem. The last day of illumination may include a different reading along with a prayer intention for healing and hope in the New Year. It also makes sense to find or even make the candle. I have known clients who made their candle in early November to create the perfect representation of the meaning of the ritual, just to make it more personal.
I find that many people focus on the holidays of Hanukkah, Kwanza, Christmas, and Thanksgiving just to minimize the effect of New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. The importance of the New Year is not in whether or not you celebrated it in a meaningful way in recent years. The New Year is important because it is to enter a new year; a new year without your loved one, or a new year that seems full of uncertainty. The following example of using a journal to achieve emotional balance can be particularly helpful in paying attention to the transition into the new year.
New Years Reflection Journal (particularly useful after the first year of grieving)
To use your journal, you can review things from the past year and reflect on goals for the coming year. If you are participating in a candle lighting ceremony, such as the one mentioned above, you can continue journaling after lighting the candle. Here are some suggestions for questions you can ask yourself to stimulate the journaling process. Let these be a springboard for your planning, understanding that some of these questions may not resonate with you. Use what you can and think of others that fit your unique circumstances.
1. What was the most important thing I learned last year?
2. What new things or experiences did I try for the first time this year?
3. What was I able to do this year that I thought I couldn’t?
4. What was the hardest thing I accomplished/learned about myself?
5. Where/from whom did I find blessing, grace and support when I needed it?
6. What do I wish I had done differently this year/what will I change in the future?
7. What new things or experiences do I want for myself in the next year?
8. What new knowledge or skills do I want to develop in the coming year?
9. What is my most important personal goal for 2013?
The benefit of combining journaling and ritual is that it provides a written medium for reflection in which you identify and define an approach to developing strengths. Building on the things that inspire hope brings balance and resilience, rather than focusing solely on sadness, anxiety, and the unknown ahead. The most important thing is that it has meaning for you.