Welcome to the Inner Year...

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3.1.



The Inner Year relates personal soul development to the festivals of the Christian Year and to the cycle of Nature. I work with an esoteric spiritual understanding of the festivals. Esoteric perspectives reveal the deeper universal mysteries of things.

Whether or not you are Christian in your beliefs and your practices, you will find personal and spiritual relevance, insight and possibility in these posts.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

What a difference a year makes?

Your year made a difference - to you, to others, to the world and to the future. What was the difference? 
It was not just the same routine, the same gestures and activities, the same rhythms of sleep, meals, work, relationships. It was different and it was powerful. If you don't believe it, register for the Inner Advent teleseminar and do the work.  If you don't discover the powerful difference, I will give you your $47 back and include a one-hour private session with me to talk about why your year didn't make a difference.  
This is my third message and final message about Inner Advent and it is my strongest.  I really want you to participate in my Inner Advent teleseminar series.  It will make a difference in your life, both of your lives - the inner and the outer.


If you have decided you want to participate in Inner Advent, register now.
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm
The Sunday afternoon (4PM Eastern, 1PM Pacific) sessions begin tomorrow and the Thursday evening (8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific) begin in five days.

Remember you do not need to be on the calls or be on every call. You will receive recordings of all the sessions and all the written materials within 24 hours.

Inner Advent
  • shows the differences this year made
  • makes sense of your year
  • gives you a feeling of completion
  • provides a surprisingly objective awareness of your truth.
  • liberates you from limiting identities, stories and reactions
  • reveals the lessons of the year
  • increases your ability to creatively design your future
  • celebrates who you’ve been, who  you are and who you are becoming
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm



“My soul and the world are but one.”

There are seven billion people on this planet who have lived another year.  How many of them will do the inner work of recollecting, reviewing and releasing their inner past so their inner future can be met with real possibility and real responsibility? In our increasingly challenging world with the growing difficulties of our political, economic and environmental crises, self-knowledge is the first step to resolution. Self-knowledge leads to freedom and love - the freedom to make new choices and the love for others, the planet and the future.


Inner Advent is an embrace, a conscious embrace, of your unfolding life. It’s a responsibility to your self, maybe even a spiritual or moral duty to your self. 
We are different from animals in that we have the moral ability to be self-conscious and self-creative. We are not just about drives for survival or desires for being happy, we are about freedom and growth.

Freedom comes from knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is a spiritual practice.  Rudolf Steiner teachings guide me to a right relationship to my self.  He writes in his book, How To Know Higher Worlds, “You can only sacrifice that which you have fully possessed.” Self-knowledge is self-possession. Possess your year so you can let it go.

Know how you survived this year. Know how you emotionally experienced the year.  Know how you grew and evolved over the year.

Know your year to know your self!

Possess your year so you can let the stories go and find the meaning, the sacrifice of your 365 days, your 29000 breaths, your efforts and struggles, your dreams, your joys, your sorrows.

How do you begin to do this? How do you organize your recollection of the year? How do you analyze what happened? How do you intuit the meaning? What are the questions that will lead to the insights, the self-knowledge, to a new you, a wiser you, a freer you?

I want Inner Advent to be a relaxed and aware experience for you. I will guide the process, but you will do the work.  No one can do it but you. This is the gift you give your Self.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Celebrate the Past and the Future

Celebrate the Past, Celebrate the Future

I am writing about the fifth and sixth celebrations of the soul together, because they go together as sweetly as they stand alone. These two celebrations are one in the intimate flow of your lifetime - your past and your future. I was, I am, I will be is the hymn of this combined celebration. 

Can you celebrate in the stream of time? This is a real question for your soul to ponder for to do it you must slip beyond time to the moment.

Below is the celebration of the past and the future expressed by one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, who I once kissed on her cocoa cheek.


i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me.


What did you say to yourself ten years ago? ten months ago? ten days ago?  Did you make promises? Did you keep them?

What do you say to yourself today about tomorrow? next month? next year? ten years from now?

Do you have the compassionate courage to forgive yourself?  Now that is something to celebrate!

If you resonate with these questions and take them to heart, to attention and to action -
can’t believe what I just wrote here as it makes me realize:
I make many promises from my wishful and loving heart, some from my genuinely caring attention, but what are the promises from my will to act, which are the promises I’ve kept and will keep? Should these be called deep promises?
Look at these questions with wonder, not judgment. 


Back to what I want to urge you to do if these thoughts resonate with you.  Register for my Inner Advent teleseminar.  Let’s gather together (on the telephone) once a week for four weeks to discover the meaning of 2010.

I will guide you through a creative and powerful process for recollecting your year.  You will learn ways to review your year and discover what it was all about.  You will then release the perceptions and energies of 2010 like a sweet celebratory exhale and a kind forgiving sigh.

Celebrating Inner Advent prepares the soul, cleanses self-doubt, cultivates self-awareness, nurtures self-discovery in a way that allows us to enter into the mystery of the twelve Holy Nights with real openness. Working with your past year is working on your future year.

Inner Advent will need your heart, your attention and your action for 2-3 hours a week.  The call is 60 minutes and your personal process will ask for another hour or two or more. 

If you live outside the US you can join the calls using skype.
Sign up here for Inner Advent.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Celebrate Relationships in Your Soul

Celebrate relationships.

Just a reminder that I am asking all of us to experience inner celebration as an honoring of being human, of the daily success at incarnating self into the unfolding of your life. Celebration done consciously becomes a consecration, a making sacred. Our lives are filled with little, simple, sweet, yet profound acts of consecration. We need to pay attention to them. We need to more consciously engage in self-celebration.

The first three of the six celebrations of being human - the celebrations of nature, nativity and riches - are celebrations that feel safe.  What do I mean by “safe?” I mean they are relatively free of personal shadows and dilemmas.  Yes, we can be scared of spiders or lightning, be a little clueless about sensing the divinity in all things, and we can be a bit out of balance when it comes to sensory delights, but overall these celebrations do not confront us with the messiness of our karma and the pain of our desires. 

The next three celebrations focus on our connections to others, our own early biography, and our own inner development. These celebrations ask us to attend to our inner experiences with interest, compassion and objectivity.  To fully celebrate we need to notice and attempt to release any sentimentality or shame, pride or regret, resentment or resignation as these feelings will cloud and distort our celebration. We can honor and revere without conditions and judgments. Maybe we can begin to feel a little inner freedom through conscious celebration in these challenging intimacies .

I do realize that the last paragraph is a doozy and feels like it needs at least several pages of development and explanation and a lot of inner contemplation to really “get.”  Basically, if reading and contemplating the Celebration of Relationships, the Celebration of Childhood and the Celebration of Selfhood cause squirminess of soul come back to the third sentence in the above paragraph and notice! and do your best to release!

Relationships are the joys and agonies of our lives. Relationships are the great teachers  of our lives. Life is all relationship, even avoiding relationships is relationship.

One simple dictionary definition for relationship is “the way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.”

What are the ways we relate with regard and behavior? Here are some possibilites:

We relate in a whole range of closeness, from fusion to utter separation. 
We relate in a whole range of duration, from a brief passing to our entire lifetime. 
We relate in a whole range of impact, from superficial to deep and life/soul-altering. 
We relate in a whole range of feeling, from indifference to love/hate. 
We relate in a whole range of responsibility from being cared for to taking care of. 
We relate in a whole range of reality from fantasy to the manifest, from the spiritual to the practical.


Celebrate Relationships in all the different ranges, consider regard and behavior, and discover the sweet and bitter and always meaningful lessons of the heart.