Sunday, January 17, 2010

Vision Seeding Ritual

I'm reposting this from a myspace blog I wrote before I had this blog. I referenced this ceremony in my Recap of 2009/Wishes for 2010 blog but failed to go into detail, so here it is. I'm beginning to see a trend in my wishes....

For the third year, my daughters and I have performed a 'vision seeding ritual' to effectively plant our seeds or wishes and send them out to the universe. We like to call it our 3 wishes ceremony. I took the idea from a book called Moon Mother Moon Daughter, which I highly recommend to anyone with coming of age daughters. The book suggests ways to reconnect our daughters to the lunar cycle and goddess myths that have been lost in our consumer culture. It celebrates the girls' approaching womanhood and focuses on a community of women.

We have our ceremony between Christmas and New Years, any night that it is just the 4 of us and we have some time to ourselves. The first year the girls were resistant and pretty weirded out, but as soon as we got going they amazed me. Now they are used to it and I start reminding them a few days prior to begin thinking about their wishes for the new year.

I light a candle in the middle of the table and we all sit around it. We each have a pen and paper, and beforehand we cut out 'seeds' from construction paper. We take about 10-15 minutes to write out our wish lists on the paper. Once that is done we share them and identify our 3 favorites, or the 3 that mean the most to us. The best part of the ritual comes next, we find the word that signifies the essence of our wishes. Every year I am amazed at the words they come up with.

We then go round the table and take turns 'planting' our seeds in a brown paper bag. I've used the same bag since the first year, so its been fun pulling out our wishes from previous years and discussing how and in what ways they came true. I should mention that often the seeds are decorated with all sorts of doodles, drawings and phrases appropriate to the wish. When each of us sends out our wish to the universe, we all hoot and holler along, giving that wish much emphasis and power!

This year I went in knowing the essence of my wishes, much to the girls chagrin because they wanted to help in finding just the right word. Next year, I may leave the essence in their hands.

So the purpose of this lengthy blog is to state my wishes for 2008, even though I feel corny as hell in doing so. Here goes anyway: my wishes for 2008 are romance, joy, and abundance.

Hopefully it won't take me until the end of 2008 to blog about my progress..

2 comments:

Chrys said...

OMG Leo, do you remember that you actually first did that ceremony w/me and D? I remember because I was hoping you would remember to take them out of the bag before doing the ceremony w/your kids b/c all of mine were dirty! That was at the end of 2005, omg, so long ago. It was during the same week as "mancakes" - oh, the memories!

I really love this ceremony and think it's awesome that your girls have come to love it too. And I remember when you first got that book, and I just think it's so cool that you are still using it and drawing from it.

One idea is that things are still really formative at this point in the year, and that when Candlemas/Imbolc rolls around, it can be a really good time to really put specific visioning around any wishes. It's a good time to get specific, and maybe put shape and image to the essences.

I am kind of all about manifesting this year.

Stargazerleo said...

Yes, I remember that first ceremony very well, and "mancakes", lol. That was a hysterical time!

I feel pretty strongly about this year too, not exactly that this will necessarily be a great year, but I feel prepared, which will make whatever comes my way easier to handle.

I've been exercising, I've been reading this book that I want to blog about, and I've been thinking a lot about defining what it is I want. I'm making plans, and I feel on top of things. I even have an appt. for a free massage next week!