New Years Ritual

My friends and I made up a ritual for our new years party this year.

It's really influenced by what happens on New Years Yoga retreats with my teacher Alaric Newcombe.

Here's what we did.

Reflection
We were closing off one year and creating space for the start of the next.

A few days before the party, in the downtime we created between Christmas and New Year, we made some time to ask ourselves some simple questions. Those of us who wanted more depth got help from Chris Gillebeau. But basically we asked ourselves:

What went well this year?
What went less well?
What are we glad of in this year?
What do we want to leave behind in this year and not take with us into the next?
What do we want to create space for in the new year? What do we hope will emerge?

That created the fodder for the ritual elements we folded into the party.

1. Marking gladness
On new years eve we gathered things to represent what we were were glad of. I don't know what anyone else gathered or made. We kept things private. I walked around the winter garden gathering one thing for everything I was glad of. A bunch of red berries for Michael. Some pretty white things for my job. Ivy leaves for my health. A big bunch of winter sage for my friends. And so on. Somehow I even found myself gathering things in gladness of the still-healthy atmosphere, the water cycle, the natural systems I barely ever think about and totally depend on for life.

By the end I had a pretty big winter bouquet bound in long grasses. It looked beautiful and felt kind of brimming with how nice it felt to dwell on all that I love.

We went to the sea, spaced out along the shore and took our time. We gave the things we were glad of to the sea.

Like a little offering somehow.

Like something to recognise that we have a 50-50 relationship with life. Some things we make happen, and some things happen to us, stuff like our births, our gender, our names, people we meet, important stuff like that sometimes and sometimes smaller stuff. So I guess that was a way to mark our gladness and bring it to the front of our minds, and also it was a way to say hi to the chaos that we're always dancing with, whether you want to call if chaos, or life, or god, or whatever. I've come to call it the Rivermaker; that which makes rivers. And a way to say thank you.

After that we took all the time we needed to stand and look at the sea and think and feel anything.

Then we gathered and went for a walk and came home and cooked up a feast.

...

Then we feasted and drank copiously and laughed uproariously and jabbered and generally had fun.

2. Letting go of the things that weren't that useful this year
At about 11 we lit the fire that had been made in the back garden earlier, slicing up turf and laying it aside for replacement the next day.

Then we took a little time to privately write on pieces of paper all the things that we wanted to leave behind in 2011, and fold them up.

When Alaric does this, he does it with a load of sober yogis who've been doing deep spiritual and physical practice together for four or five days. He gets us in a circle and gets us singing a really simple chant of some sort, and when anyone is ready they get up and go to the log burner and burn what they're letting go of and watch it burn. And he instructs the group to give this person their attention, energy and support while we chant.

I'd wanted to create something similar around our garden fire and somehow what actually happened is that suddenly it was five minutes to twelve and we were hopping around drunkenly going 'holy shit!' it's almost midnight! Burn things! Burn them! And we all jumped in and threw things in the fire and looked at each others and talked and laughed about them and sometimes tried to stop people burning things by saying "but I like that about you! Don't be perfect..." And then suddenly is was midnight and we popped champagne and crossed arms and sang auld lang sine at the tops of our merry voices and fireworks went off in the gardens of lots of neighbours and it was great.

3. Welcoming our hopes
After a little while it felt like time. We each grappled with and finally lit a big white flying lantern and watched it float, with our hopes and dreams and simple wishes for the year, up into the sky.

The coolest thing of all was that this seems to be The Thing that people do now at new years because the  sky was full of these things. Hundreds of people across the town setting off candles into the sky in the start of the brand new year and we couldn't help but gawp at that black sky full of wobbly floaty little flames and feel that the sky was full of hope, our hope mingling with everyone else's.


Gradually we went inside and drank more and played games and did ridiculous things until collapsing into bed about 4.


I had given it really careful thought and talked a lot with people about it beforehand because I wasn't sure that the stuff of a yoga retreat, led by a respected teacher, would work in a regular party. Indeed, when I sent out the email with fuller preparation guidelines to the guest list a lot of the people - tellingly all of the people who I hadn't discussed it with personally - made their excuses and pulled out.

We nearly cancelled the party and I'm So Glad we didn't because what we found was that adding ritual elements to a regular party made it more fun, more personal, more good-natured, wove in some meaning and personal tenderness with the funny rombustuousness of a regular party. I'll do it again :)