Renewal Starts Within
How rituals can help
So here we are again, at the beginning of a new cycle. The sun stood still for a short while, but now it’s reborn and rising higher day by day.
Regeneration. Renewal. Change. New start.
How can we mirror what nature unfailingly does at this time of the cycle? Caught as we are in the mesh of our artificial world.
I wrote last summer about a ritual for letting go and saying goodbye. It was meant as do it, if you want it to become real. You want to gain distance, or detachment? Walk away — literally.
So now, do we want to regenerate, become renewed, change something in our lives? Let’s enact it.
What have you tried this New Year? Have you started anything new? Have you made any commitment?
I’m still working out what exactly I want my commitment to be. On New Year’s morning I went out hiking and made a point of bringing something back home from the forest. Whatever called to me.
I came home with a lovely little twig of evergreen, with a tiny cone perched up at the top, and two twin chestnuts, still locked within their spiky bur.
But here’s the rub: the bare doing, without the mental work, will hardly do the trick. The new gym subscriptions, diets, haircuts, resolutions, or to-do lists will end up on the junk pile of the past years, unrecyclable, and biologically non-degradable.
The point about walking away, in my saying-goodbye story, was that the protagonist was talking in her mind to the person she was going to say goodbye to, and repeating to them: I’m taking you to the harbour, and leaving you there. She was focusing on her walking away and leaving that person behind. She was focusing afterwards on the distance she kept adding with each step she took, away from the harbour, to the station. If she hadn’t done the mental walk-away, it would have been just a plain walk from A to B.
So for these renewal rituals to work, let’s put our minds to them. Let’s spark off a sensation, and then anchor it in an action, so feeling and doing may reinforce each other.
A sensation of renewal. A sensation of something we’d like to have around in this new year.
There’s a German family / medical TV series set in the Alps, called The Bergdoktor. I watch it for the gorgeous landscapes. I always liked a particular leitmotif of the camera gliding above the peak of the Wild Emperor (Wilder Kaiser), but I somehow chose it these days to be the anchor of the feeling I’d like to nurture this year:
What does it make you feel? It could be freedom, trust, confidence, letting go, safety, euphoria, being on top of the world (whatever that may mean to you). Or maybe you shudder away from it, with the vertigo, the fear of falling, the feeling of being crushed by the broad spaces?
Me? It makes me feel — as if I’m landing, landing smoothly, being carried, being held, so I can glide off to the horizons.
(Or something like that. Attempting to put these things into words is a sure way of killing them.
Well, not exactly killing them. Just, maybe, turn them into — poof!)
But I guess there’s one other thing.
We need to carry on with it, nurture and nourish it. Otherwise, it’s just a spike, a fad, a delusional jump to action (the Germans call that Aktionismus). That’s why new year’s resolutions are typically forgotten and dumped before even January’s over. The subscriptions will be cancelled within three months, and the haircuts will grow out of shape and return to the old style.
The point of enacting renewal after the Twelve Days of Christmas is to become renewed. It is not to go back to what we were doing before.
So now. If you followed by prompt above and called up a sensation of the new start you’d like to make: what about that feeling do you want to keep and nurture for the rest of the year, to see what it grows into? How are you going to tend it?
I mean no goals as in goal-setting, just a commitment.
Make a mental note of I need to get back to it, I need to not forget about it.
I want to hold on to that feeling gliding over the Wilder Kaiser, and watch what happens, where it takes me, what it grows into: new freedom, new journeys, new views. I want to tend to the evergreen twig a few more days, and then I’ll lay it outside on the flower bed until spring. I’m going to glimpse at the twin chestnut bur and feel the closeness and warmth of being together with like-minded people.
I only still need to work out what action I could take to marry those emotions to. But let us trust this: renewal, as a mental state, will lead us to the necessary actions.
In Biodanza*, there’s a so-called dance of the seed. Each participant is a seed: at the start in the child pose, head and shoulders bent over the floor, letting the music guide their movements. It’s up to them how to move and grow, as seeds. There’s no goal to reach, no list of steps to take. The music creates the feeling, which prompts the body to generate the action. Together, they embody growth.
Some participants need longer, and the dance is over before they can do a lot of “growth”. Others are quick to raise their heads, stand up, keep swinging, and open their arms to the sky.
If 2024 was a musical piece, and you a tiny seed: can you feel something growing inside you that is soon to start stretching out, rising, getting bold?
Next Christmas, when the Yuletide sets in, sit back and examine what this seed now will have grown into.
Biodanza (a neologism jointed the Greek bio [life] and the Spanish danza, literally “the dance of life”) is a system of self-development utilizing music, movement and positive feelings to deepen self-awareness. It seeks to promote the ability to make a holistic link to oneself and one’s emotions and to express them. Practitioners believe that Biodanza opens the space for one to deepen the bonds with others and nature and to express those feelings in a congenial manner. Biodanza — Wikipedia
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