Changes in the natural world shaped by the shifts of sun and moon can serve as sanctuary for our seeking and inspire our spiritual practices and seasonal ritual. Learn more →
Changes in the natural world shaped by the shifts of sun and moon can serve as sanctuary for our seeking and inspire our spiritual practices and seasonal ritual. Learn more →
A mentor is one who has walked a bit longer or further along the seeker’s path. As a mentor, Carolyn Cushing offers support for how to travel, but the seeker determines their own unique soul path. Learn more →
Carolyn Cushing works in collaborative intuitive way with seekers and the Tarot. In both sessions and e-readings, she and the seeker are active, working with the symbols and the images on the cards to engage intuition. Learn more →
Simple steps bring us closer to living from our fullest selves – from our souls – and finding wisdom, solace, beauty, and joy in each day. But the fast-paced world around us doesn’t support our movement in these nurturing directions.
Descent and Return of the Light offers guidance through eight weekly rituals using candles and, if desired, Tarot cards.
This Solstice-hinged ritual has two wings: Waiting with the Dark & Tending the Returning Light.
As the year enters its darkest phase in the 4 weeks before Solstice, we will wait with the dark and see what gifts it has to offer for:
At Solsticetide, we’ll celebrate the return of the light and the time-out-of-time that comes with the end-of-the-year holidays. We will find a Solstice seed of the new to gestate as the light returns.
In January, we’ll tend the returning light by discovering:
Devoting yourself to this seasonal-long ritual can offer you support for:
When my partner John died in a car crash in November 2012, my beliefs about death were a flimsy paper cup, immediately ripped apart. But the practices I’d developed through working with Tarot, nature, and poetry led me through creative mourning to find in grief a “secret medicine for those who hurt too hard to hope” (to gratefully borrow Rumi’s words).
In November 2013, Ellen Lorenzi-Prince’s Dark Goddess Tarot arrived in my life and feeling the energy and support of these fierce Feminine Deities, I asked “What would happen if we waited with the dark instead of fighting it?”
Tending of the dark offered me personal healing and a connection to the Divine, my beloved dead, and the ancestors that makes me feel very supported and loved. This tending also became the gateway for emerging into the light’s energy of creative flow, action, and service.
I offer this ritual for you to use and adapt so that you can find the just right balance of light and dark that you need for walking your unique soul path.
Carolyn has a lovely soothing manner and spending time with her is a joy. I am planning to be part of this year’s Waiting with the Dark! Christine Ashworth in Fall 2020 Cartomancer
Thank you Carolyn, for your rich, inspiring, and loving work! It extends out through all of us, our roots and our branches and our hearts, giving forth what we have gathered. Thank you to this group for your sharing and support. ~ Judith Bird, artist
Carolyn’s writing is exquisite and the ritual processes she offers inspire and support me in my own practice. ~Jennifer Lucero-Earle, Embodied Tarot Counseling | ArcanaDance | Nia
As soon as you sign up, you will receive the 25+ page overview booklet that reviews the whole ritual and weekly themes in detail and includes images from the Dark Goddess, Minoan, and Gaian Tarots. If you are the type of person who likes to prepare, take a look at the booklet. If you’d rather go with the flow, don’t worry the daily e-mails will guide you through the process.
On Monday, November 25th, the first e-mail of Waiting with the Dark will arrive in your in-box introducing the week’s four candle ritual and theme of Gratitude. E-mails will then arrive throughout the week with words and images of inspiration to support your reflection on different areas of gratitude inspired by the elements of fire, water, earth, and air. The Sunday e-mail will invite you to a ritual that can build on your reflections through the week.
E-mails continue daily with Monday e-mails introducing a shift in the ritual and weekly theme. E-mails the rest of the week invite you into a new aspect of the theme. An interactive tele/audio session deepens the exploring.
The weekly work with a candle wheel is inspired by the Christmas Advent wreath but in Descent and Return of the Light becomes a double candle wheel that first spirals toward fewer candles being illuminated each week and then spirals back to full illumination by the end of the season in January.
On the Solstice, we select our Solstice seeds.
We take a little break from Sunday, December 22nd to Sunday, December 29th to join in the holidays that our families and communities celebrate. Through our Waiting with the Dark reflections, we may have found some soulful additions of ritual and connection to bring to our family holidays.
Starting Monday, December 30th the ritual shifts to Tending the Returning Light and now the weekly rituals including the lighting of one more candle each week.
Descent and Return of the Light will conclude on Sunday, January 26th, but the work of nurturing your Solstice seed and soulful plans for 2023 will continue all year.
You can join in the retreat at any time. No need to catch up with what has come before. You are invited to just step into what is happening on the day that you join.
Facilitated by Carolyn Cushing, the Sanctuary’s main inspirations are Tarot tradition and divination tools; poetry and writings from across cultures and time; the natural world undergoing its transformations; and spiritual practices from diverse traditions. Learn more →
The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving on Wednesday, the 12th (exact at 8:54 am ET, time zone converter), and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the January 29th new moon are developing. The new moon, guided by its association with The Star. Five of Swords, and [...] Learn more →