Halloween dates back some 2,000 years to the Celts who celebrated the New Year on Nov. 1st. So Halloween began as a New Years Eve, so to speak!
With summer having come to a close and the harvest for the year collected, they prepared to enter the time of year marked by darkness, death, and bitter cold. They believed that on this night the boundary between the earthly plane and the spirit world was thinner, and they could encounter spirits and ghosts returning to Earth.
It’s interesting to note that their new year BEGAN with darkness, death, and cold.
We tend to view times of darkness and death as times to be feared, dreaded, and avoided at all costs. Yet these people were so connected with nature and its cycles, and knew that you must enter the darkness before a new cycle of life can be born.
Today we dress up like ghosts and demons and various other frightening characters, and we run around collecting candy and enjoying the pseudo-comfort of laughing at and making fun of our fears and our darkness.
As if they didn’t really exist.
Underneath the fun and celebration, what we most deeply fear is that we are these skeletons, these demons, these ghosts. We fear that we are just an empty shell of bones, the overwhelming cruelty and evil of our hidden demons, or a collection of thoughts that are dissociated and disconnected from our bodies.
Because we have hidden behind masks and pretenses of who we’d like to believe we are, and who we’d like others to think we are, we are afraid of the darkness inside us and have become enslaved by an individual and collective Lower Self that is wreaking havoc on our world and in our lives. We project blame outward and attack that which we fear lives in ourselves.
At this point you may feel like this post is too dark and depressing, and you may be ready to stop reading and go in the kitchen and eat a Snickers. But there is light underneath our darkness, I promise.
The Pathwork invites us to take our masks off, to consciously walk into our darkness for the purpose of encountering a new reality, and create a new life. The Guide says that we need not fear our evil, but we should not ignore or deny it either. When we face our distorted beliefs, emotions and attitudes, we see all the way through their illusory nature to our Real Self, our divine essence.
We don’t have to fear our evil. But if fear is there, we don’t have to submit to it.
We can embrace fear compassionately as we walk through it and dissolve it. We can reeducate our immature aspects and become willing to face any pain and negativity we have been repressing.
But we don’t have to walk alone.
Spiritual support of the benevolent kind is always available to us for the asking. And when the path appears dark and challenging, we can open to the support of our Pathwork brothers and sisters who walk this journey with us, encouraging and challenging and reminding us of our true destination, our true identity.
So this Halloween, I invite you to ring in a New Year. A year of aligning with truth, love, courage, and humility. A year of facing your darkness to discover the “treat” that awaits beyond all illusion. It’s so much more nourishing and fulfilling than Snickers.
Take off those masks. The world needs your Light!
You can begin by signing up here to receive my FREE workbook, entitled “Treasure in the Depths: Identifying Hidden Obstacles to Fulfillment.”
