A Calling Home To Self & Sacred Self Care
Scorpio Season, Wintering, The Final Harvest, & Inward Movement...
Yesterday, November 7th, we moved through the powerful portal of the meeting point between Equinox and Solstice. While not all of us live in the Northern Hemisphere where we approach Winter Solstice, all of us are saturated in Scorpio energies, supporting us spiritually and otherwise. My invitation for everyone, no matter where we are in the world, is to take what feels perfect and leave what does not.
Scorpio asks us to deepen...
So, we will deepen...
We will take advantage of the energy shift away from balance and toward dormancy, and do so in a way that supports our individual and collective growth, healing, and transformation.
***My private community has an incredible call coming up on Sunday the 12th at 9 pm EST that has been created to help us with this deepening. "Scorpio Dark Moon & Soul Harvest Gathering". If you can make it LIVE, that would be incredible! If you can not, there will be a recording. If you would like information on how to join this call or check out my online community, please find the link below.
In the meantime, here is an article that I wrote for a seasonal online magazine back during this time of 2020. It is an invitation for us to carry forward into the coming weeks and months.
"We have arrived at summer's end and stepped into the start of winter's path through the second half of the year, where we allow what is meant to die away, to do so; so that it might create fertile soil to grow what is new to come. My mind goes to the time and space that allows us to enter darkness, let fall away what no longer serves us, and reemerge closer to our Divine wholeness.
Do you have a sacred self-care practice? Do you reemerge in a more intimate relationship with your divinity?
Come along with me... let's unpack the beauty of now.
This time of year is a time when we are invited to tap into our deepest knowing, our ancient instincts, our mystical wisdoms, and our cosmic connections. The natural pull is to descend into the symbolic underworlds of our psyches, where we tap into our archetypal Persephone.
Like the Goddess Queen Persephone, leaving barren lands covered in fallen leaves, she descends onto the throne of her underworld. Here is where she spends the dark half of the year, nurturing and guiding those who pass into the next phase of their life, death, and rebirth cycle. We too, do this as we nurture the dying parts of ourselves. Here, we are to truly embody the wisdom we have collected during the light part of the year. Perhaps we reconnect to sacred sexuality, ancient magick, Priestess initiations, or cyclical medicine.
As we enter the dark half of the year, we are reminded of the value of intentionally entering our symbolic death. Death is required before we can enter the phase of healing and renewal that comes with spring. A time of darkness, stillness, and cold. A time when colors fade and we retreat so that parts of us can fall away.
Are there parts of you that have served their time and are ready for fading or falling away?
The red and golden leaves on the ground tap us into a remembrance of the blood harvest times. The true last harvests of the year. When the tribes performed their ceremonial livestock slaughters. Slaughters were made to ensure the survival of the remaining livestock and the tribes throughout winter. This too happens within us. We are required to shed and release what might otherwise interfere with our reemergence at the end of winter.
This, Divine ones, is the most sacred of self-care. Using our literal, symbolic, spiritual, and mystical winters to dream of the futures in which we will be reborn.
There is something deeply fulfilling about being in tune with the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth; and there is something exquisite about instinctively moving inward toward renewal so that we might start the cycle again. This renewal is a time of decomposing what was in order to nurture and regenerate what will be.
Our grandmothers (foremothers and forefathers) knew the way. While practicing ancestral reverence privately all year long, they took the days of late October and early November to celebrate life using reverence of death within their communities. All Hollow's Eve, Samhain, Day of the Dead, All Saint's Day, and Allentide are some of the ancestral festivals they celebrated.
Are you able to tap into remembrance? Is it stirring in your blood? The deep reverence for the ancestors of your blood and bone, the ancestors of your land, or perhaps the ancestors of spirit?
I invite you to consider the deeply personal and transformational self-care that is only possible in the solitude of introspection and reverence. I invite you to consider what truths you'll find in the womb of your underworld. What sacred truths would be found there, along with the parts of you that are dying away, making room for rebirth.
This beautiful time of darkness and retreat, introspection, and radical honesty, is much like the personal practices of Shadow work. Where we challenge ourselves to sit in the truth of what we are, despite what stories we might want to continue to believe about ourselves.
Coming into companionship with who we really are and... who we are becoming. The type of becoming that is one of remembrance and reunion with who we have always been. Our ancestors knew of this magick.
It's natural this time of year to go inward as the energy slows, the Sun retreats a bit and leaves Grandmother Moon more time to watch over our ceremonies of shedding, healing, and renewal.
When was the last time you emerged fully renewed? When was your energy last aligned with your passions and purpose?
Energy cannot be destroyed... it simply shifts from one form to another, and that is exactly what we are called to honor during this sacred time. Allowing the parts of us that serve us to nourish the birthing of new creative energy, and allowing the parts that do not serve us to fall away and become something else... With honor and respect, we nourish and birth... with honor and respect, we release and rebirth.
Do you see? Can you see the beauty of now?
Can you see how the dark half of the year runs parallel with the New Moon phase... where we enter the caves of our Souls in introspection and intention setting? Using this time of year for sacred self-care is like sitting under the moonless Dark Moon sky and writing out our intentions. It is like laying in a candlelit milk bath as we prepare for our New Moon medicine.
The darkness lends us stillness and privacy to unearth and unpack all that is inside of us. No movement, no fiery Sunlight, and no fire festivals of Earth harvests. The darkness lends us the loving arms and cool embrace that builds the container to hold us during our Soul Harvest.
We enter the cave under the watchful gaze of Grandmother Moon so that we might gather our harvest, leaving the lands barren all except for the red and golden leaves on the ground.
We then descend, we enter the sacred waters of our own underworlds, washing the wounds left behind in place of the things that have died. These things will decay into rich fertilizer for the soil of our Souls, and will nourish our creative wisdom back to life when the darkness passes.
Do you see? Do you remember?
I invite you to follow my lead. Retreat inward, descend downward, and call out to the deepest most truths of your Soul. Nurture and usher along the parts of you that have served their time and are ready to enter back into the cyclical nature of growth, through the sacred initiation of death. Wash yourself with the sacred waters of honesty, compassion, and love. Rest in the bed of your passions, lessons, purpose, and dreams, weaving them into the creation story of the you that will reemerge when the darkness comes to pass."
Mary Szenasi, October 2020
Excerpt from ~Belle's Misadventure-Living Wild with Purpose & Passion Magazine, autumn issue.