275: Holly Worton ~ It’s Samhain! Let Go of the Old & Welcome the New

Today’s Guest

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What You’ll Learn

• How to evaluate your experiences over the past year
• What to look at when reviewing your year
• Things to let go of so you can make space for more of what you do want
• A simple oracle card technique to learn the themes of the coming months and year
• What to do if you want to get outdoors and experience the energy of this season

Things I Discussed

• Cracking the Code to My Weight Loss: Keto + OMAD
• Plant Spirit Healing Apprenticeship
• Weekly Akashic Records emails

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Transcript

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Holly:  Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 275. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode: I do promise that I will be coming back with Joanna Hennon and other exiting people coming soon! This has been a time, as you know, of transition; and I feel like I say that every few months, but I am really looking forward to getting some other people back on this show to join me, not in the form of interviews but in the form of, I think, deep and interesting conversations like I have been having with Joanna Hennon and Jo Casey over the course of this year and previous years. So, I am back with a solo episode for today.

And, today, I am going to talk about Samhain, now I had started out earlier this year, when I was fresh on my druid’s journey, doing some episodes on the year, and the different festivals and holidays, but I stopped because it felt really contrived, for some reason it didn’t feel like it fitted in. But, I am really, really, drawn to this one, partly because Samhain is one of my favourite times of the year, it is a holiday that I have always liked, even as a child, celebrating it as Halloween, the candy was always fun, but I always felt this really deep connection to the energy at this time of year and there is something about fall, and the leaves coming off the trees, and it just gives me just a really, rich, rich, feeling that I, really, really love. And, especially, I feel kind this kind of heightens during this week Samhain is of course October 31^st/November 1st, known as one of the two times of the year when the veil between worlds, or between realms or dimensions is thin, and you can access other parts of this world, parts of the multiverse.

So, without getting too off on a tangent here, I wanted to talk about some of the practical things that we can do with this time of year, because whether you believe in Pagan stuff, or not, whether you feel drawn to these kinds of holiday, doesn’t matter because we are getting close to the end of the year; and this is the time when naturally people start closing down, evaluating what they have been doing over the last year, in their lives, and their business and their careers, with their families, in all aspects of their lives because we are approaching December, which is the time that most people consider to be the end of the year. Well, for the pagan world, Samhain, is the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year. So, it is a time to say goodbye to the old, prepare for the new. It is a time of passing from one place to the next, whether you are working with different dimensions or whether you are just passing into the new year. It is a time to declutter, it is a time to let go of things so that you can move on to that New Year, to that new phase of your life.

And, I have spent a lot of time lately going through old journals from earlier this year and reading things and reading what I thought I would be doing this year, and what actually happened. I have been looking at belief statements that I balanced throughout the year and how those things have come out. And I have just been re-evaluating what happened this year for me, and did it go on track with what I thought? If you listened to last week’s episode you probably have an idea about what my answer to that is. But I wanted to share some of that with you, and give you some ideas for how you can evaluate how your year went, and look ahead to planning some things that you might want to do differently, or what you want to do next year.

So, let’s get started. So, for starters one of the things that I like to do around this time of year is to draw 12 oracle cards for each month of the coming year. And then I started doing something differently last year, well I choose a 13th card as a kind of overarching theme for the whole year. This is something that I have been doing for several years and I really, really, love doing it. So, traditionally I do this around December, this year I actually did it in January; I am just looking at my journal now and it says that I did it on 5 January 2018, which is later than usual. And I have been looking through it and it is really, really, fascinating to see it is always super, super, accurate. So, whether or not you work with oracle cards, you might find this a fun thing to start, I really, really, enjoy it and again, I find it to be really accurate. So, interestingly, for October the card that I pulled was all about initiation, beginnings, ‘something small and powerful is coming’. And October is the month where I dropped everything, and I decided to focus on my writing for real, even though I had decided that earlier in the year. September was ‘healing, inspiration, a period of difficulties over and a new cycle is beginning’. August was, ‘prophecy, connection, death and rebirth; life is cyclical’. July was cleansing, ‘something I need to release or complete before starting a new phase’. So much of the stuff that came up this year was about letting go of the old and making room for the new; and healing old stuff so that new changes could come in and the overarching thing was ‘harvest, nourishment, abundance, celebrate the results of hard work, take time to celebrate achievements’, which to be honest is not something that I am very good at. So, a phase of abundance and generosity and giving back.

So, that was all really, really, relevant to how my year actually went. And, I am really interested to see how things go with the remaining two months we have still got: November and December. So, this is a good thing to try, if you have an oracle card deck, if you have one already, I have already done, because I am starting to feel more like Samhain is the end of the year and the start of the New Year, I have already done my cards for next year. The themes for next year are all about perseverance, detoxification, chaos leading into transformation, lots and lots of stuff around healing, lots of stuff around saying farewell to things, letting go, letting go of the past; and I am really excited about this because this is very aligned with the work that I have been doing in my personal life, in terms of healing and letting go of stuff that no longer serves me, and making space for new things. And, it is also very much, I think, in alignment with a course that I am doing next year that I have recently signed up for. I am going to share the link in the Show Notes in case you happened to be interested in it; so it is this plant/spirit/healing apprenticeship, it is about connecting with plants and learning how to work with plants and guide people on this journey. Now, I have done a series of plant initiations with my friend Suneet Goomer over the last year and I have really, really, enjoyed them. I have got some massively deep healing out of them. So, I am really excited to learn how to facilitate these experiences for other people and I am really, really, excited about working in-depth with plants in this way. So, again, I will share the link to this in the Show Notes, but it is all about working deeply with the plant spirits and calling on their powers to help other people heal deep stuff. So, very excited about that, and I think I am going to get a lot out of this personally, but also it will enhance my ability with other people on this stuff. So, 2019 looks like it is going to be a time of continuing to let go of stuff and continuing to heal from stuff, and transformation which is always really exciting.

Now, looking over my journals from this past year, one of the things that really stands out in my mind is the work that I did mindset-wise in terms of physical well-being. So, I have done a ton of work on thyroid, on my energy levels, on weight loss, because I felt like almost my low energy levels were restricting my freedom and freedom is one of my top three value in this life. So, to feel like my freedom is restricted has been really frustrating, I do my kickboxing, I do my walks, I do lots of physical stuff, but I felt like I couldn’t do as much as I wanted to, and I felt like when I did those things it was more difficult than I wanted it to be and more difficult than it had been in my past. So, I was looking forward to finally improve my energy levels and I have; so, if you have read my recent blog post on cracking the code to my weight loss, I have expanded on that a little bit since I wrote that post, which was two or three weeks ago. I will link to that in the Show Notes but basically, I found kind of the secret recipe to not only improve my sleep, increase energy levels, improve my stamina and endurance with exercise but also losing weight. When I started on, I took these actions and made some changes because I wanted to lose the weight, but I am getting so many other benefits that I am just so pleased, and it is such a relief to have finally figured out what I needed to do. So, that’s all on the blog post and if you have any questions about that feel free to ask me, but I feel like these are issues that I have been working on for so long and I have done a lot of work, not just with myself but with other people. And I feel like that cleared the path for me in actually taking the action and seeing the solution and taking action on that solution and creating the changes that I wanted to create in my life. So, this is huge for me, these are two very personal issues that I have been working on for a long time, and I am very pleased to finally be seeing the results.

So, I also wanted to mention that this mindset work, work with the stuff in general. Doing the mindset work and taking the action, sometimes it gives you immediate results and sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes there are a lot of lessons that we need to learn, and a lot of mindset stuff that needs to be changed, and a lot of stuff that needs to be healed. I first started on this mindset journey in 2013, five years ago, and I have been working on energy and weight loss all that time. I am not saying it is going to take you five years to get the results that you want, but for some reason it has taken me that long. I am very grateful to have found the actions that I needed to take, and I feel like a lot of things paid off, not just excess weight, I am letting go of a lot of things in my life that have nothing to do with the new path forward. So, these are the kinds of things that I think about when I am going through my annual review and looking at: what’s the work I did, what are the results I have seen, and having all this stuff written down in my journals is massively important to this process. Unfortunately when I first started working with PSYCH-K® and I first started changing my beliefs I would not record the beliefs that I was changing. I would write them down on a piece of paper and as soon as they were balanced, I would crumple it up and throw it away because they were done, I didn’t need them. I really like having them because it shows me what I have done and what I have changed; the things that I was worried about and the things that have completely transformed. So, I find it really useful and I just include this stuff in my regular journal. I include all this stuff in my regular journal. Some of you may know that I get weekly akashic records readings from Vickie Young, I will link to her in the show notes. Those are a very important part of the work I do with myself every week, I print those out and I put them in my journal, and I work on the stuff that I get in those messages and record all of that in my journal.

So, my suggestion for you, at this time of the year, if you journal and look through your journals over the last twelve months, looks at the work that you have done, look at what has been happening in your life. Think about what you want more of, think about what you don’t what more of. Think about what you would rather have instead and plan that out for your next year. Think about what kinds of experiences you want to have and how you want to feel and what you want to experience and then do more of that, get that in the calendar, make sure that stuff happens. Another thing that I had written down in my journals was that I wanted to do a lot of outdoors classes this year. And I ended up completing that, so I ended up doing my lowland leader course, my lowland leader assessment, I did my NNAS straight-to-silver navigation course and I am going to do the gold in just a couple of weeks. I did all the stuff that I wanted to do in terms of outdoors stuff, so think about that, think about the things that you wanted to do this year, did you do them? Can you put them into your calendar for next year and make it happen? One thing that I haven’t done for the last two years is do a long walk, so one of my national trails, like the Ridgway, that I did in 2016, or the South Downs Way that I did in 2015. I haven’t done one of those in the last two years, I absolutely want to make sure that happens next year. I get so much out of those experiences, not just the walking and seeing new places, it is so much more than that. So, one of the things that I am going to start to do from earlier in the year is book it into the calendar. For some time early in the early, maybe Mayish, and get it into the calendar before the hot summer begins. So, that’s the plan. Look at what you did, look at what you didn’t do, and look at what you want to experience instead next year, in 2019 and book it to make sure that it happens.

So, as I said earlier, part of this time of year is saying goodbye to the old, preparing for the new, and letting go of stuff. So, think of all the stuff you could let go of and that means decluttering. My office is a mess, I have piles of papers on my desk that I keep kind of going through, throwing stuff out and then not doing anything with the rest and then I need to go through that, and absolutely get rid of it, because it distracts me and is annoying. My bookshelf is a mess, I need to put that together as well. And, I really want to declutter, not just my office but every part of the house and get rid of some stuff. We have done a little bit of that but there is more that we need to do, and my husband even expressed an interest in decluttering stuff that we have up in the loft. So, I was really excited to do that. Hopefully we are going to do that later on today.

Worries, is there anything that you have been worrying about that you could let go of? The stuff that you have been worrying about, is that stuff that you can take action on and make it different or is that something that you have no control over? If so, just let go of it and do any healing that you need to do to let go of this stuff. Let go of unwanted aspects of your life, unwanted people in your life, unwanted responsibilities and obligations in your life. Make a list of all the stuff that just feels really heavy, and doesn’t bring you joy and just think about: could you outsource that stuff to someone? Could you get help with it? Could you just let go of it and have someone else do it or just pass it on to someone, does it actually need to happen? So, think about all the stuff that you can declutter and let go of in your life. Because, that just makes such a big difference, I know that every time I declutter something it has massive ripple effects on the rest of my life.

Is there anything that you have been putting off that you need to do? Any people that you have been meaning to email or contact or whatever, you can get in touch with and get that out of your head and take action it? Things that I have been meaning to do and haven’t done and it has been festering in the back of my mind and I need to just do it. Clean out your inbox, declutter that. Whatever you need to do to clear your life of stuff because that can also help you see new paths forward and new places to go and things to do and people to see and stuff to transform. So do your review, let go of all the stuff that you need to let go of and start planning what you want your new life to look like? What do you want to be doing differently? What do you want to heal? Where do you want to travel? What do you want to experience? The other thing you can do is write all this stuff down on a piece of paper, all the stuff that you don’t want to experience any more, the people that you want to let go of, write it all down on a piece of paper and burn it, that’s a ritual that I did last year, particularly with some relationships with people that I wanted to heal and transform. I did some work with them energetically, and then wrote a bunch stuff on a piece of paper and then burned it out on the grille, in the garden.

So, that is about all for today. If you want to do more work than this in terms of evaluating your year and planning your year ahead and you really do feel a deep connection with Suneet and the energies I would suggest that you go to a sacred site or somewhere that is meaningful to you, get outdoors. Do whatever feels right for you. So, last year around this time of year, I went to Avebury, I stayed at the house and really, really, enjoyed being there. I think I was there for just two nights last year. Now, I am getting ready to go there for three nights at the house which is still around, hasn’t left yet to its new owners. And I want to really spend a lot of time outdoors, reconnect with the energy, it is going to be really cold there, but I look forward to just being outdoors and just getting some new stories from trees for the tree book and really tapping into the energy of the place and doing a lot of inner work with myself. I am about to finish my current journal, so I am bringing a brand new journal that is fresh and new and empty to do some work and I will probably be doing some mindset work and some energy work and going to all of my favourite places and favourite sites.

Patreon

So, that is all for today. I also wanted to invite you, I keep talking about my Patreon group and would love for you to join me there. I was originally offering extra goodies for the first ten people to join, but what I am going to do for everyone listening to this Podcast who is interested, and for everyone in the Facebook group which I will be closing down, no matter what price point you join me at I am going to give you the extra mindset work and energy work that I do on a weekly and monthly basis between now and the end of the year. So you will get extra goodies, even if you sign up at the $1 a month point, so you will get that, and people are really responding well to this I just had someone email me the other day saying that she had felt a lot of energy in the heart centre and then later I had an email pop in saying I had done the heart-centred energy work for the group earlier that day. So, it is really good to be getting feedback from people. I really like the Patreon platform and I am loving what I am sharing in there. So, if you feel drawn to do so I would love for you to join me in there, again I will be closing the Facebook group so there will be no place on Facebook to engage with me and discuss stuff from The podcast and other stuff that I talk about. So, Patreon is the place to go, I post stuff there that I don’t post anywhere else.

If you head to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you will get exclusive access to content that I don’t share anywhere else, including a monthly Q and A.

That is all for now, I hope you enjoy the energy of Samhain this week. If you are listening to this and need some ideas on what to do, drop me a line and let me know, I don’t know how much I will check email between Monday/Tuesday, but I will pop in and see if I can give you some ideas if you want to do know what to do and where to go.

I will be back next week for another episode and thank you so much for listening.

Remember to visit: https://www.hollyworton.com/275 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.