25: Creating New Traditions & Rituals for the Holidays
In this last episode of season one, I talk about why it can be so healing for us to add new traditions and rituals to our holidays. I talk about incorporating spirituality, adding traditions while grieving the loss of a loved one, and how traditions can help when we are adjusting to new family structures.
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Episode References:
The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices by Casper ter Kuile
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
5:21 3 Ways to create New Traditions/Rituals
7:32 #1
11:39 #2
14:54 #3
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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Otter. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher 0:00
Welcome to New View Advice, a safe place for you to ask your most vulnerable questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I believe our fears and traumas are often what holds us back from living life to the fullest. Join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever is holding you back from being your best self. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to another episode of New View Advice. My name is Amanda Durocher. And if you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast. So I offer advice on the healing journey. So today's episode is the last episode of the year. And I think I'm gonna start putting my episodes into season. So I'm going to call this the end of season one. And I'm so grateful to everyone who's listened to any of the first 25 episodes of newView advice. I'm excited to come back next season with a new format. I'm going to keep some episodes probably similar to this format. But I'm also going to start bringing on guests and being a little more experimental with the podcast, I'm finding that I'm ready to start a new chapter. And I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. But I'm excited for you to tune in in 2022, and to find out with me what that looks like. So today, I wanted to record this short episode about traditions and rituals around the holidays. I love traditions and rituals. I think that it helps us to bring intention into our lives. I also have found that through my own traditions I've created around the holidays, that it helps to bring the magic back to the holidays. And I have traditions and rituals throughout the year. So I like to celebrate the winter solstice, summer solstice and the spring and the fall equinox. I also have a ritual I do on every full moon. So once a month, I connect back to myself in a very ceremonial and intentional way. And I wanted to record this episode because I think that though the holidays bring a lot of cheer and excitement and joy and love and connection. They also can be really hard for people. And I think that they can be a reminder of what we've lost. So when we're going through grief, the holidays can be really hard or breakups, divorces, loss of loved ones trauma, connecting back with our families can bring up old trauma. If we don't have anyone to celebrate the holidays with that can be really hard. The holidays are filled with lots of emotions. So both I was gonna say positive and negative. But I don't really believe that there's positive and negative emotion. So it's more easy and harder emotions, ones we want to lean into ones we try to avoid. And I wanted to record this episode for anybody who's looking to bring new traditions and new rituals into their lives. I don't have any questions today. This is just an episode that I had on my mind. And I wanted to talk about today because when I was younger, I really wanted traditions and my family didn't really do traditions, holidays look different. They didn't really bring in this tradition aspect. And what I realized what I was looking for as a child wasn't necessarily tradition, not like I didn't need my grandparents to pass something down, what I was looking for was a way to celebrate the holidays and to bring in that, that greater picture to bring source and spirituality back into the holidays, I have never identified as religious, the whole concept of religion never really sat in my body, I was looking for something else. And I think what I was looking for with tradition is I was looking for that sense of belonging, I was looking for that bigger picture. And so the more I've connected to my own spirituality, my own connection with God, my own connection to Source, I have leaned on tradition and ritual, in order to be intentional, and to continue connecting back to something greater than myself. And I love to do this on holidays. And I love to bring in family around the holidays, I love to invite my partner, my parents, whoever I'm spending the holidays with I love to invite them into these traditions that are new for me. I've only started doing these a couple of years. And each year my traditions go and I find new things that I like to add. And I think that expanding our definition of tradition, that tradition doesn't have to be passed down through the ages, we can start new traditions today. And you can choose the word tradition, you can choose the word ritual, you can choose the word, ceremony, whatever you want to do, but I wanted to spend a little time talking about this because I think that this can really help us especially when we're going through grief. I know that for me, creating traditions around my friend Dolan's death, celebrating his birthday celebrating the anniversary of his death, celebrating both those days has helped me along my healing journey and has helped me to know that I'm not forget hitting him that I'm not ignoring him that I have made time throughout my year to celebrate his life and to celebrate him and to connect with him. And to connect back with myself. These are also times that I take to reflect on how much I've grown. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that today.
Amanda Durocher 5:21
Today, I wanted to share three ways that you could bring tradition or ritual. I'm going to use those words interchangeably here, because the traditions I create personally are very ritualistic. But take the word that works best for you, and the practices that work best for you. If you feel like any of this resonates, and you feel like adding tradition into your life. I recently read the book, The Power of ritual, turning everyday activities into soulful practices by Caspar utter Cooley. And I will link this in the show notes. And I mentioned this book, because it talks about different ways to bring ritual into our lives and how we used to do personal rituals, rituals, in nature, rituals, with community, and how to bring this into our lives. And what I thought was really interesting about the book was it talked about how we used to have more of a sense of community, but because the world has become so interconnected through social media, and through international travel, and through so many people leaving their communities and moving to new places that we've lost the sense of ritual that used to be inherent to everyday life. So our parents, our grandparents, and even generations before that had much more ritual in their lives. I also think religion used to be a bigger part of everyone's lives. And I think I see with at least my own generation, the millennials, that there's a step back from religion. And I feel like this leaves people a little more disconnected from their connection with source. So I think that ritual and tradition is a great way to intentionally bring this back into your own life. And the way you want to, that's what I love about traditions and rituals is that I have found a way to honor my connection with source my connection with his higher power in a way that works for me. And I get to honor my own beliefs, I don't have to take on the beliefs of anybody else. And they are fine. There's no shame involved. So I wanted to talk about three different ways, or three different instances where you may want to start creating a tradition or a ritual for yourself this holiday season.
Amanda Durocher 7:32f
So with that intro, the first one would be adding and infusing spirituality into your holidays. So I talked to a lot of people who do not have a religious connection, so they don't go to church or temple or identify with a religion, even if they grew up with one. And I think this is true for a lot of people my age, I bring this up, because I found for myself that reintroducing spirituality into my holidays helped to actually bring that magic back that love back helped me to really tune into why holidays existed. Now, adding spirituality to my holidays is not adding religion. So I don't go to church, I have no judgment of anybody who's religious. This is just for people who may be feeling a little lost spiritually. And I think the holidays is a great time to remember that we are protected to connect back to source. Most people I talk to believe in God, but they don't connect with God on a regular basis. So I think that the holidays are a great time to create a tradition around that. So one way you could do this is if you have a spiritual book that resonates for you, it doesn't have to be the Bible. For me, it's the SOFIA code by Kira. This was a book that opened up my spirituality, and it's a book about the divine feminine. And each holiday, I spend time with this book, spend time with this Codex, and I invite my partner and my family to read it with me. And if they don't want to do that, that's just fine. I make sure that I spend time with this book, though. Because that's important for me in order to feel that love and that connection around the holidays. So like I said, a religious text is one way I think that infusing gratitude into your holidays could be another way. So spending time with friends and family, whoever you're spending your holidays with, and sharing what you're grateful for. I know a lot of us do that around Thanksgiving. But I think that infusing this into every holiday is a way to come back to love. Because I think the holidays can be an overwhelming time and we can get so overwhelmed by the things we should be doing or have to be doing. And it's important to bring in that spiritual element. I found that that, as I mentioned really brought the magic back to my holidays because it helped me to refocus on what's important. And what's really important is love, connection, faith, trust, love of self love of others, communion with myself. And I think that as I mentioned the Holidays is a great time for this. And I also think that for some of us who grew up with religion, but don't identify with that, now it can feel like something's missing around the holidays. So I invite you to create a new tradition that doesn't have to be going to church or reading the Bible, or whatever your religion may be that you no longer identify with, that I invite you to bring that spiritual element in a new way, what feels good for you, this can be a walk in nature on every holiday, I find that connecting with nature can be such a spiritual experience, because you can see how small you are, where I'm living right now, there are these massive mountains, and they just constantly remind me how small my human body is, how small my problems are to be in the face of such beauty and such grace as nature. So finding the time to connect back, however that might be for you, and finding a way to ground and connect to that spiritual essence of the holiday. So as I mentioned, connecting with a spiritual texts around the holidays with yourself or inviting others to do it as well, gratitude, connecting with nature. And another thing I like to do is I like to create beauty around the holidays. So for me, I love doing floral arrangements. This is something I've really discovered over the past year. And creating a holiday floral arrangement is so fun for me. So finding a way to bring your creativity and your love into the holidays. So I like to create floral arrangements for the table. And spending time intentionally connecting to the season that I'm in and creating that beauty to bring into the space and to share with others. So that's one way to create traditions this holiday around spirituality.
Amanda Durocher 11:39
Another reason you might want to create new traditions is you may have experienced loss over this past year or over the past couple of years. And you may be looking to infuse your loved one who you have lost. So this could be a parent, a child, a family member, a friend, a spouse, the holidays can be a time where we reflect on those we have lost over the past year. So I invite you to find a way to honor this person and to create a tradition where you remember them throughout the holidays. As I mentioned, I like to honor my friend Dolan on his birthday, and on the anniversary of his death. So I have created rituals and traditions on those days that I do each year on those two dates. And though I am no longer grieving that loss, I still take those days to drop in and to connect with him and to connect with myself and where I'm at and how much I've grown, because that has become a tradition. And I look forward now to connecting with him. And connecting with that energy of those days. And those are days, I just realized how much bigger life is than me. And that's why I really still enjoy those traditions. Even though I'm not swept up in the grief, I really created those because I needed to make sure I didn't forget him at the time. I felt like it was so important for me. And it really was because it helped me to heal, to have these intentional days where I really did heal, where I allowed the grief to come up where I allowed myself to cry. And on these days, sometimes I still do cry. But I just let those feelings pass through me. So I invite you if you've experienced loss recently, to infuse tradition in your life, to create something around these holidays that help you to feel like you're not forgetting that person or that you're bringing them into the holidays with you. So this could be spending time as a family reflecting on your loved one. This could be just taking a time in the morning, to check in with yourself and to allow yourself to have these feelings of grief up. It is normal to experience and to feel that grief around the holidays. No judgement, allow yourself those feelings. The Holidays do not have to be happy for everyone and they don't have to be happy for you every year. We go through ebbs and flows and just allow yourself to be where you're at this year. You could cook this person's favorite food for the holiday, you could play their favorite game, you can make sure you intentionally play their favorite music. But create a tradition for yourself where you feel like you get to honor this person, you get to honor your relationship with this person. Because life is fleeting. And so many of us do experience grief. And it's important to not rush over it or to suppress it and to just allow yourself to feel it. And I find that bringing these people bringing these souls and these loved ones who we've lost into our holidays is such a beautiful way to remember them and to honor our connection with them. So there's so many different things you could do. But as I mentioned, you could cook a food you could meditate. You could light a candle and honor them. You could say a prayer for them. You could ask everybody to share their favorite story. There's so many different things you could do. But I invite you to reflect and to not just yourself if you do want to include them in your holidays because I think it's a really beautiful way to remember them.
Amanda Durocher 14:54
The third area you may want to add tradition or create new traditions in is if you find yourself In a new family this year, so if you find yourself with a child this year with a child old enough to understand it's the holidays, or if you're recently married, or if you're recently divorced, and you find yourself having a new style of a holiday, I invite you to create new traditions, because so many of us become aware that we're in New chapters of our lives around the holidays. Because if you have a new family member, or you're part of a new family, or you have a new child, or you're recently divorced, or you're in a new city, you just become very aware around the holidays when your holiday doesn't look the same, because we do have these traditions and these rituals and these ways our holidays usually work. And when we find ourselves in a new place, it can be scary or unfamiliar, or it can feel overwhelming. But instead of it feeling like that, I invite you to invite this new feeling and this excitement that you can create a new tradition. And I invite you to really reflect on what would feel good for you. And if you're at a new house this holiday season, with a new family, I invite you to think ahead of time of what would feel good for you and what you would like to include in your holiday, for it to feel good for you. You don't have to just go to somebody else's house and just adopt their traditions, you can infuse your own, feel free to bring your own traditions there as well. Because I think that as I mentioned that adding tradition and ritual is a way to honor ourselves. And I really find that for me, it helps me to connect back to that higher power, it helps me to connect back to myself. And the holidays are a time that most of us have off. Not everyone, of course, but we have off from work. And it gives us the time to really connect back to ourselves. We live in such a fast paced society, that it's so easy to disconnect from ourselves and to check out and to numb and to be so busy that you don't even check in with yourself. So I invite you to take this holiday to create a tradition where you do get to connect back to yourself. And I think that if you find yourself in a new environment, it's a great way to embrace that new and also to infuse a bit of yourself, it's a great time to infuse that you're allowed to create your own traditions, you're allowed to start fresh here to create new rituals at any point in your life. And you're allowed to have them evolve and change, mine are always evolving and changing, they're always getting bigger and better. And I love that I love that they don't have to look the same, that my life doesn't have to be in a rigid box, that my spirituality doesn't have to be in a rigid box that my relationships can ebb and flow. And I find that the holidays are a great time to remember this and to connect with ourselves and connect with others. And I've found that these traditions are a great way to honor ourselves and our relationships, but also to look forward to the holidays can be stressful. But creating these fun memories through these traditions and rituals can help us to feel safe and excited this holiday season. So that was just a short episode about rituals and tradition this holiday season, and how it is safe for you to create your own rituals, a new traditions, I know that it was uncomfortable for me at first because I thought that they were things that had to be passed down. Or for me, I had to really deprogram myself, I really had to embrace my own version of spirituality, my own connection with God. And one way I did this was through these rituals and this tradition that I created around the holidays. And I just wanted to share that with you because that was on my heart. And I hope that this is helpful for someone. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of new advice. Thank you for any of the 25 episodes you've listened to, I am so grateful to every single one of you. This has been such a growing experience for me such a healing experience for me. And I'm really excited to continue creating new episodes in 2022. And to start trying a new format and to spice things up. I am always evolving. So it makes sense that this podcast is looking to evolve as well. And I just wanted to wish you a happy holidays and a happy new year. And I invite you to reflect around the new year around the end of 2021. About anything you'd like to leave behind and to write a list of what you're willing to leave behind in 2021 And what you're looking to bring forward and 2022 and I invite you with the list of things you're willing to let go of and to leave behind in this year. I invite you to do something with that list. So either to light it on fire I find that fire really helps us to transmute and is a great way to remain intentional about what we are looking to let go of or to bury it in Mother Earth or to throw it out in your trash can rip it up throw it out and say I am done with this. And I find that the new year is a great time to let go of things that are no longer serving us. I think that So many people focus on what they want the next year, and can forget that it's also a time of letting go and releasing what no longer serves us. Before I end this episode, I just also wanted to mention that I will be doing a sober course come this January for anyone who's sober, curious and like you to do dry January. And if that sounds like something that interests you, send me an email at newviewadvice@gmail.com and I will send you all the information. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this will be the last episode of 2021 but I am so excited to come back and chat with all of you in 2022 and I am sending you so much love. And thank you again for tuning in to another episode of New View Advice. As always, I am so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. See you next year.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
