Some thoughts on The Soul and Traditions

The holidays are the perfect time to think about creating, celebrating and maintaining traditions, whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or even if you adhere to no religion, this is the time of year to think about the idea of traditions and rituals.  Rituals and traditions are soulful - they bring people together and remind them of their shared humanity, their shared life together.  We get together with our families, our friends and our loved ones and recreate, as best we can, the traditions and rituals that have meaning for us as soulful beings.    

Once a few years ago, after my divorce, I was dating a man who had no family near by and my daughters had gone off to live in California and he talked me into going skiing and then to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner  Although I didn't have a bad time, nothing horrible happened, but nothing meaningful or soulful happened either.  It was a totally forgetable experience.  It was like any other skiing and going out to dinner afterwards - it was of no consequence.  I told myself then that from that point on, I would find a way to be with family and to do thanksgiving and other holidays, up right.

Now I find myself living out my Gypsy for a Year and will not be doing my usual Christmas Eve dinner for my family.  Although I had asked about doing this when I moved in with my friend and she agreed, it turns out no one in my family wants to come out here.  I now live about 25 miles from my daughter and about a million miles from where I was up until this year.  My daughter who lives here in Denver volunteered to have the dinner at her house.  But I feel sad about this, not because she is having it, but because I am not.  I feel I have interrupted something important and soulful, something others counted on, including, of course, myself.   I feel I have messed with a family tradition and this doesn't feel right to me.

My book, Second Act Soul Calls is about re-inventing your life based on the call of your soul, but what I know is that your soul will always call you back to family and friends and even though when I moved out here, I felt I was answering my soul's call, I think I may have forgotten that the soul calls us in many ways and sometimes this does not become evident until the window of opportunity has already closed.  I will not be having Christmas Eve dinner for my family this year and that is an opportunity I feel bad about. But what I know is that next year, I will make sure I can do my thing on Christmas Eve because my soul is reminding me that this is important.  . .

So, as you think about the various traditions and rituals of your family or your friendship group make sure you remember that the soul is about connection and ritual and not simply doing your own thing.  Yes, we need to honor the soul's call to individuality and uniqueness but we also need to honor it's need to be with people and to come back, again and again to those traditions that make you part of a family or a community. This, then is the time to honor your traditions and rituals and to create new ones if the old ones are no longer available to you and to go back to them if at all possible the next year as I am going to do.

Blessings, and Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Feliz Navidad and Happy Hanukkah.  Lorraine