Samhain: All Hallow's Eve

Spooky blessings and an abundant final harvest! Samhain has come again and we are here to embrace the magic and medicine of yet another festival of the turning of the wheel! At the time of writing this post, we have just woken up to the first frost of the year, and Samhain is only a week away!

The intensity of Scorpio season has arrived, the veil is thinning and a time of honouring our own personal cycles and relationship to death is here.

Samhain, pronounced "saw-when", fall on October 31st. It is perhaps the most well-known of the festivals of the wheel of the year, and I believe this is for a good reason. Our fascination with other realms, our complex relationship with death and the constant desire to have certainty around who we are, why we are here and what our real purpose is comes into close proximity with the above mentioned energies.

There is not quite any other festival that has been transformed so much over time into what we know today as All Hallow's Eve, Halloween, The Day of the Dead and many more. This spectacle is honoured and celebrated in so many ways across the globe, and yet holds within it immense fear, fun and mysteries...

(My husband and I are Jack and Sally in this photo, Halloween party 2015)

I personally have always loved Halloween. Being born on October 13th, and having a Grandfather I am very close to who's birthday falls on Halloween, this holiday has been widely celebrated in my family every year. I've always loved dressing up and doing makeup too, making this holiday an extra-fun excuse to just go ALL OUT. 

When my husband and I got together and I realized how much he also loved the spooky, scary, fun and enchanting energies of this holiday, it made me love him even more! We had several big halloween parties over the years and always made the funnest treats and dressed in theme according to our favourite films. Of course, Halloween is but a small slice of the true roots of this ancient festival, but it is still super fun!

Not everyone has the same fascination with this time of year, this "holiday" or this festival though. Many people share how they just don't do halloween, they don't like the decorations and they just don't fancy all darker details of it. I believe this comes down to many reasons, but the most prominent being our relationship to the darker, deeper more shadow aspects of life, as well as our extremely misunderstood and complicated relationship with death, dying and beyond.

Wherever you stand with this holiday, know that your feelings are valid and I respect your desire to go all out or avoid it all together! What I will share with you within this blog are some ways you can connect with the true energies of Samhain as a festival of nature, honouring that you are nature as well.

Ancestral Reverence

Naturally, the most common thing we hear about with Samhain is related to ancestral reverence. This has likely grown over the years as a result of the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, but I think it is one of my favourite aspects of this time of year.

When we say the veil is thinning, we are speaking to the veil between the living and the dead. The veils between realms are always thin - you can literally tap into them whenever you desire with your intentions and practices, but specifically speaking the veil between the living and the dead comes into focus for Samhain, and the occurrence of tales, ghosts and spirits roaming our world grows in number. This is because we are shifting to the darker, more feminine, half of the year and as a result we can tap into our more intuitive, sensual and deeper selves.

To honour your ancestors at this time, I recommend you have some photos of them printed out and framed in your home. You can also make an ancestral alter, cook with the foods, spices or flavours your ancestors used, light a candle to honour your ancestors or even take the time to journey to meet them. I have a free journey on this here on my YouTube channel.

Honour the Dead

This might sound similar to the above, but is is quite different in how I'm sharing it with you. Honouring the dead can mean honouring those you have known and loved who have passed on, but it can also mean honouring what is dying in you. Since this is a time to embrace death, and we known that the cycle of birth, death and rebirth is always happening, you can tap into your own energy and recognize what is dying, has died or need to die in your life.

Many people find it difficult to use the words death, dying or die for the reason that it is so finite and complete. This is exactly why I encourage you to use it. If you truly want to cultivate change in your life and fully release things that are no longer resonating with you or serving you - then you must let them die.

Taking the time to own what has left you also honours what has bloomed inside of you, or what you now have the capacity to hold that you didn't before. Whenever we let go, and let something within us die - such as a habit, a pattern, a relationship, a cycle or otherwise - we create space for more of everything that is naturally aligned and that we truly want in our life.

Reflect on the last 6 months

If you haven't yet noticed at this time (depending on where you live will dictate this) the days are growing darker and the night is truly setting in! This is because with the festival of Samhain, we now enter the darker half of the year. From October 31st - May 1st, we rest and embrace the darkness of the wheel, and from May 1st (Beltane) to October 31st we are in the lighter half of the year.

This means that you can now take the time to reflect on what the masculine / light half of the year has blessed you with. What have you welcomed? What have you released? What did you do for yourself? What did you accomplish? There is so much wisdom to be found in reflection. The reasons we look back are to own our story, to cherish what we loved and what we are grateful for, to continue to integrate the lessons we received and to keep walking that path of evolution, expansion and growth rather than just watching life pass us by.

In reflection we see our wins and our losses, our greatness and our falters, our successes and our failures... and we learn from all of it. Take the time to reflect on the last 6 months and how much has changed or not for you. There is no self-judgement in this practice, instead I encourage you to witness it all and self-assess and see if you are in a natural flow of your own making that resonates with you and what you desire in life.

Samhain is a special time of year for me, as I share the annual opening of one of my most beloved courses - The Celtic Wheel. This course takes you deeper into all 8 of the special festivals of the wheel of the year with ancient wisdom, ceremonies, rituals, stories and so much more to invoke and inspire your own path of nature connection and cyclical living.

The waitlist is open here for you to join whenever you fancy. 

I'm wishing you and yours the most blessed Samhain / Halloween / Day of the Dead this year and in every year to come.

Blessed be,
Emily