The Liminal Season: Connecting With Ancestral Ghosts
A New Autumn Workshop
Autumn has become a popular season—cozy cups of coffee, pumpkins and apple pies, the romance of leaves changing colors, the soft sweaters—and it’s become a time many of us look forward to, where the heat of the summer relents, as does the expectation that we should be out and about, with the shorter days and colder air giving us just a little bit of permission to stay tucked inside under (well, cozy) blankets.
It’s also, like every other season these days, become pretty commercial. Just walk into any Target or Walmart right about now and the selection of plastic pumpkins, electric ghosts, signs that read, Fall, y’all, and so on is overwhelming. The aisles of skeletons, goblins and mummies for your front yard just get more horrifying with each year, not only the amount to choose from, but the actual designs of these macabre and frightening figures that sit out on suburban lawns across America. In the face of all this, I like to find ways to hit pause on the consumption, to find ways to flow with the season, as opposed to consuming it.
Consuming, in the very word itself, has an air of ravenousness. That’s because the devouring never ends; it’s a frenzy that just keeps going, because once autumn’s frenzy ends, the Christmas consumption gets spread out before you. How can we slow it all down? How can we make our seasons feel a bit more like the quality and sincerity you find in say, classics like Little Women or Little House on the Prairie, and a bit less like “The Price is Right” meets “Saw 3”?
If you’re interested in diving into this liminal season, the season where we wait between the warmth departing and the cold entering, where the veil between the living and the dead lifts, briefly, as the earth gets ready for quiet and stillness, much like the dead themselves, then I’d love for you to join me on October 19th for a cozy (ha!) Saturday morning meet up. My new workshop, “The Liminial Season: Connecting with Ancestral Ghosts” is a way to slow down and anchor into autumn by connecting with your ancestors and cultural roots through story, writing, prayer, art and cooking. We’ll spend two hours together talking about various, non woo-woo ways to cultivate a relationship with those who came before you.
Here’s the website with more information: bellafigurapodcast.com/liminalseason
You can register here: "The Liminal Season"
Autumn is the perfect season to begin the project you’ve been wanting to start for years—gathering your family stories and making forging a relationship with your ancestors a routine, every day habit. With Halloween, All Souls Day, and Día de Muertos, it’s the season with a long tradition of honoring and acknowledging the presence of the dead.
When we connect to our ancestry—whether through cultivating and writing our family stories, building small everyday altars, being the stewards of ancestral objects, or whether through prayer, art or cooking—we enrich our daily lives. We move past the mundane tasks of living and become unified with the timeless. We become part of something greater than ourselves. In this is a bit of liberation from the worldly, as well as a deepening. Life becomes imbued with more meaning, we draw closer to the mystical, and, with the strength of our ancestors at our side, the small things that in the past rocked our little personal boats no longer have to toss and turn us.
Here are just some of the things we’ll touch on in our time together:
Practical, everyday ways to honor your ancestors
Using dreams, signs and prayer as a way of listening to your ancestors
Using the kitchen as connection to those who came before
Ancestral ingredients—what to use, how to use them and why
How to gather and organize your family stories
How to write about your ancestors
How to write your own story for your descendants
Participants will also receive three thoughtfully made digital PDF booklets, complete with inspiring photography and bursting with useful information:
A copy of my “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors” digital PDF, which includes writing assignments, exercises & prompts to get you started on writing your family stories from a fresh perspective. It also includes a curated collection of writing examples to demonstrate how other writers have written about their families, and guidance on ways to organize your writing, along with an overview of how to write well.
My 30-page digital PDF booklet, “Ten Ways to Honor Your Ancestors,” which includes ten practical ways that require no purchases or consumerism to honor those who came before you.
And finally, a third digital PDF booklet, “The Ancestral Kitchen,” giving an overview of ancestral ingredients—the top ones I use, how to use them, and how to use them to connect to your ancestral roots, as well as how to use your kitchen as a meditative space.
Paid Substack subscribers receive 10% off the workshop! If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, and are interested in this workshop, this is a great time to join me as a paid subscriber. You can do that by clicking the button below.
Again, here’s the website with more information for the workshop: bellafigurapodcast.com/liminalseason
You can register here: "The Liminal Season"
And you can always reply to this email with any questions! I’m happy to hear from you!
Thanks for being here with me, truly.
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