With the song of the morning
Remember the Light you are
Kia Ora, Hello friend.
Thank you for meeting me here again on this full moon. And thank you to those of you who wrote back to me after receiving the first newsletter. Your words touched my heart. Again, I hope to honour your time and continue to inspire you. And saying this, just a quick word about the links I share with you here. I am not an affiliate of any teacher I mention here. I love and genuinely respect those men and women I include here, but I am not in any way paid to link you to them. I do it because these wise Souls and their work have enriched my life. I hope they enrich yours as well.
Sunrise over Mount Morrison, Wairarapa, New Zealand
Full Moon at 09°08´Aries
A dear friend, who I call my Polish Amber Sister, asked whether I would share my morning ritual in one of these newsletters. She has, for the second time, been directly affected by the fires in the Pacific West Coast. I breathe for her during the day, and I hold her in the prayers I share here. Please know, gentle reader, that this newsletter comes with no shoulds. There are mornings when I only do a few of these sacred and grounding acts. I share them here because, especially in these turbulent times, I know that if I set down an anchor to the day, to the horizon, to my body and my breath, I am earthed more and more in my Soul.
I try to wake naturally, before the sunrise. In the winter this is a little tricky. Instead, I’ll wake in the dark, and often pad to the window to look at the stars. My favourite time of year is when the Pleiades, Matariki, rises in the East. It is usually around midwinter, and at that time of the year, Venus rises in a parallel line with her Seven Sisters, Orion, and Sirius. I go to the window to remind myself of the larger universe I am intimately connected to. A turning night of stars and planets. I stand and watch in awe – vast countenances with glittering eyes, light years away. And yet here, on the retina of my eye. I remember the Serbian proverb,
Be humble for you are made of Earth.
Be noble, for you are made of stars.
It is my moment of awe. I become a child, rapt, in a silent, wordless prayer. And I remember I came from these stars. I first experienced this starburst at three years old, when I felt myself infinite in a near death experience. More is revealed here.
Entering the Pure Land
Sometimes I will do a formal meditation – Thich Nhat Hanh has led me to The Pure Land on the breath many, many mornings. He has said, “If we want to enter Heaven on Earth, we need only one conscious step and one conscious breath.” This gives me hope for each moment I forget, yet can begin again to be fully here, on the inbreath and outbreath, hear now. Sometimes I will chant the Gayatri Mantra (again silently) with Deva Premal and Miten, feeling the ancient Sanskrit hum its course through my body, connecting me to the Source, illuminating a joyful presence. Sometimes I will just listen and breathe. And in this quiet attentiveness to the fullness of Life, I open up what Spiritual Teacher Thomas Hübl would call a window of listening. Here I can hear the Voice of my Soul.
These practices are all done within 15 minutes of my waking. They are not hard. They are my Sacred to-be list. They help me be and become more of Who I Am. When I do them, I know what 13th Century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi says is true. I wake up awake. I don’t fall back to sleep, either then… or during the day. The day becomes, by way of this beginning, more mindful. More heartful. More sacred. More secret. More revealed.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
Don’t go back to sleep…
At Sunrise, I recite another short prayer called the Holy Incantation of Solace, with accompanying mudras – sacred hand gestures. I learned this from Richard Rudd, another of my teachers. I stand barefoot and hands held out for all of us, interbeing. It takes only a few minutes. And then I say another of his to Our Lady – our Divine Mother come to dwell in the Earth.
Prayparing to begin the day
I make a lemon tea, I scrape my tongue – an Ayurvedic practice I learned from Kirstie Cleary at Essensual. It removes the toxins that have arisen from the body during the night, so they don’t get reabsorbed on eating. Then my feet, and my slightly twisted pelvis, lead me to the yoga mat for 20 minutes of life-aligning stretching and breathing.
And after yoga, my Beloved, bless him, will have made us a breakfast of purple porridge.
This is a daily ritual on rising that has taken me 54 years to fully come into. If you’re interested in crafting your own morning ritual, amid kids, coffee and traffic congestion, email me for a free hour together. We will find the beauty to begin your day, and your very own way to kneel and kiss the ground beneath your feet. For me, more and more, day by day, these acts of dedication and gratitude help me navigate these turbulent times with grace and flow.
Aroha Nui, Much Love,
In my next newsletter
In my new moon newsletter on October 16th-17th, I will continue sharing how I move through my day. And again, please let me know if you find these words helpful, or whether, like my Amber Sister, you would like me to speak specifically to something that you would like to know more about. I would love this to be a conversation between you and me. My response to you, with heartfelt reflection. Please also let me know if you’d like me to add a little more about each new moon and full moon. Each moon I am guided by the stars. Astrologers Virginia Rosenberg and Chani Nicholas are eloquent and wise counsel. They both help me to understand how I am connected to that vast Cosmos I look out at each night, and to our own galaxy’s precious planets circling around our inner and outer sun.
p.s. I want to honour a Wonder Woman in my life. The exquisitely talented Catherine Adam, of Wonderbird. She not only designed these love letters to you, but also her hand and eye has graced and blessed the graphic design, web design and photography you find on my website. She also gifted me the photograph in my first newsletter. From now on, I will add a photo credit. They will mostly be taken by me, and if you follow my Instagram feed, you will know how much I love sunrises, sunsets, moonrises and sets, sky, clouds and rainbows, and green, growing things. Offset by Catherine’s exquisite gemlike graphics, they reveal the Light that we are.