Samhain Season: Seeing Beyond

Samhain time is probably my favorite time in the wheel of the year. It may be because it’s my birthday, so I resonate with the energies at the time, but I love richness, depth, and allure of what’s beyond the physical world. I love the opportunity to more easily pierce the veneer of this physical world, to peer into the mystical, unseen realms. In Celtic language, we call this the Otherworld.

This Otherworld, that overlays our physical world, feeds this world, and we feed it. There is a reciprocal recognition and honoring that happens in order for the balance to remain. And yet we’ve slacked on our duty in this realm for many years. Decades. Centuries even. We’ve neglected our soul work, the honoring of our ancestral lines, the feeding of the spirits. We’ve cut ourselves off from the root system that allows our physical reality to sustain itself. We’ve closed the door on the recognition of the consciousnesses that share our Earth with us.

We can perceive this Otherworld as the world of the Soul. We can view it as the location of the faeries, the spiritual guides, or the ancestors. Or we can see it as the world of the unconscious mind that holds our shadow. It doesn’t necessarily matter how you perceive it, but what does matter, is the recognition that there is so much more beyond our sight. Beyond this dimension of reality. I believe that a healthy, sustainable life must include the honoring of this depth and mystery, whether that simply means acknowledging your own inner shadow. Otherwise we're only allowing ourselves to see and experience a partial reality.

Samahin is not a day, but a season. It is the time that lingers right between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice. It marks the swath of time where the threshold between worlds can open more easily. Where spirits cross over. Where our psyches are more open to seeing parts of ourselves that need healing, recognition, or honoring. Where the ancestors can speak with us with more ease. Where we can commune with the nature spirits more profoundly.

Samhain invites us to acknowledge the unseen mystery, to dance with it, to pray with it, to be open and curious about it, to feed it, to sing to it, to nourish our relationship with it.

This is of utmost importance in our collective spiritual work right now. To shift the tides of destruction and devastation. To remember. To remember we’re not alone. To remember that the landscape around you is animated with consciousness. To remember that we're not the only spiritual beings on this planet, and that we all feed and learn from one another.

To remember that the Otherworld, that Soul, creates form. That everything you see comes from an energetic blueprint. That everything expressed in physical form is an expression of a spiritual force. Samhain helps us remember this. Helps us honor this. And asks us to feed this relationship.

Last year I made a video about Samhain, ways to celebrate, and plant medicines to work with. Check it out if you’re interested in a few ritualistic ways to dance with the energies right now.