🕯️ Lessons from the Ancestral Hearth Fire

Published: Sat, 12/10/22

Hello sweet witch.

We're almost halfway through December, and the Winter Solstice is fast approaching. Energetically, this is a time of indulgent rest — outside, the trees are showing us how to slow our pace, allow our old selves to fall away, decompose, and transmute into nourishment for our roots. Winter is a deeply reflective time, but it's vital that we remember the ancestral hearth fire is still alive and burning inside us. As we glide towards the renewal and celebration of the Solstice, we're called to turn our attention towards this inner fire.

Flame is the facilitator of our dreams and visions, and during the winter dreamtime, we journey backwards and forwards in time to weave mythic meaning alongside this elemental ally. Here at the hearth’s edge, with fire as our guide, we can pause to rest our tired eyes, warm our bones, set aside a world of worries, and let our soft gaze fall on fire. Time spent hearthside is sacred time, because our rest is sacred — and without deep and nourishing rest, our dreams wither.

The hearth reminds us that guarding our ease and pleasure are not only worthwhile pursuits, but that making time to dream for dreaming’s sake is necessary to our survival. The hearth fire is, after all, a heart fire.

If the medicine of the hearth is what you need to support you through this season of reflection and intention-setting, come and join us next Wednesday for a ritual space led by Becca Piastrelli. Together, we'll be:

Journeying into a community space of deep reflection
Setting aside the frantic pace of modern living and slowing down, allowing us to feel our grief and pleasure
Reflecting on the last year — from last winter's dream to seed to flower to fruit as we harvest the lessons from it all
Honoring our ancestral connection to fire and the hearth with a candle ritual to hold us through the season ahead

If your body is urging you to slow down and nourish yourself with rest, if you’re curious how you can call on the power of flame to guide you on the path towards your wildest dreams for the new year, or if you’re just beginning to tend this relationship with the ancestral fire, come and join us. If you can't make it live, the recording is available for all who register for a full 30 days. And as always, free tickets are available for our BIPOC community members — just respond to this email and we'll get you registered, babe.

Gather round the hearth with us!

Activating the Wild Within Us All, a guest blog

In my time on this earth, it has become abundantly clear to me that re-engaging with the ancestral and natural rhythms of our bodies is the way of rewilding—the healing path through all of the harmful systems we have been brought up in. And it is a potent journey to reconnecting with the self. Many of us aren’t even aware that the sense of failure, falling behind, and burnout we experience have nothing to do with our capabilities and capacities as human beings, but rather are a function of a system created to treat us like assembly-line workers (literally, this is the origin of the nine-to-five work lifestyle—having your value determined by how many widgets you could put together on a factory line born of the industrial revolution).

We were never meant to operate like robots, producing the same level of output all year round without care or mind to the temperature outside, where the sun is in the sky, or the way our bodies are responding to the season. We were meant to slow down and sometimes speed up and other times bleed and howl and then get silent and internal, and all of this happens as our bodies and energy levels are shifting and changing. Though we live in the modern era, our bodies’ processes are ancient and deserve our respect. If this feels inspiring but is also a tough concept to implement in your life, know that I really get it. I’ve been there. Integrating these ideas into your life starts by simply listening and noticing what makes you feel the most grounded, at peace, and joyful in your body. Even in this modern technological era when we have real deadlines and busy schedules, intentionally slowing down and opting out of a culture of urgency is the key to feeling at home within ourselves . . .

Read "Activating the Wild Within Us All"

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