The Sacred Pause - a holy invitation

Plus: A simple solstice fire ritual 🕯

Good morning everyone! Today is solstice. A day when the pale blue dot (click through to the video if you want to dose yourself with gratitude) upon which we are hurtling through space reaches the moment that has captured the imaginations of humans for thousands of years: the moment where we celebrate either the shortest day or night, when the poles of earth either lean toward or away from the life-giving Sun. Even during difficult, chaotic times, connecting to earthly events can offer an anchor: a way to anchor into ourselves and the earth; to anchor into the magic of our interdependence—the truth that, no matter how much seems to divide us, the same sun and moon rises and sets equally and without discrimination on each of our heads; and to anchor ourselves, as encouraged in this weekend’s Animas Valley Institute’s newsletter, “into a lineage of imaginative humans who, millennia ago, began shaping astonishing monuments that honor Earth’s journey around our nearest star — monuments that took generations to create, projects nearly unimaginable in our era of quick obsolescence.”

Today’s inspiration:

Yes, I know, there are gifts
to wrap, meals to plan, dusty corners
to clean, items on the very important list
still waiting to be checked off. And
as always, there is a holy invitation
to stand beneath this open sky moment,
to do nothing but enter
all the way—no strand of you
anywhere else. A holy invitation
to pause all that pulls and listen
to the poetry inside your pulse.
I have laid out a blanket of softness—
please, won’t you join me?

A Holy Invitation
Julia Fehrenbacher

Photo by Ben Mirzaei on Unsplash

Dearest readers,

Today, winter solstice 2025 (summer solstice for my friends in the southern hemisphere), I extend to you an invitation to consider a Sacred Pause.

A Sacred Pause gives you the chance to experience little sips of freedom, of what and how life could be and feel, at any moment, no matter how chaotic or busy or difficult your current circumstances—or the world’s current circumstances—may be. With practice, these simple pauses offer deeper, and more readily available, access to a way of being that enables you to respond to life, instead of continuing to react from patterns you long to disrupt because they perpetuate pain for yourself and others.

As you barrel toward the end of the year, it can feel impossible to press pause. You might feel a sense of being split: you want to slow down, and you’re told that this is the time of year for both retrospection and forecasting, but the demands on your time seem unabating. Right at the time you most want to rest, everything is moving faster and clamoring for your attention harder than ever.

Then there’s the background frequency of this moment in history, and what it means to bear witness to, and experience, the collapse of structures, institutions, and even nature itself, all that felt foundational to basic societal and human existence. No matter how directly impacted you are by the immediate effects of this collapse—whether you live somewhere with shifting weather patterns, or you’re losing important benefits, or you’re figuring out how to support yourself and your family in the face of rising costs of living, or you’re terrorized by masked agents swarming around, kidnapping people who don’t have the “right” papers—this background frequency and its effects on the collective are unignorable.

A Sacred Pause connects you to the opposite of collapse. When you pause, you connect to the inner light that unites us all as humans—the light of innovation, creativity, adaptation, that part of you that, when attended to, will light the way toward all that is emerging on the other side of chaos.

And there’s no better time to connect to the inner light than when the light outside is darkest.

A Sacred Pause can happen any time. A Sacred Pause does not require much time, let alone an empty calendar. It’s something that can be invoked at any moment you catch yourself overly saturated with information, overly stimulated by the too-muchness of the season, or at any moment you catch yourself operating from your default programming.

A Sacred Pause can be:

• Noticing your feet on the floor.

• A brief body-scan, letting shoulders drop, belly loosen, forehead soften.

• Ten slow, easy, connected breaths.

• Moments of awe with a wild animal or beloved place in nature.

• Connecting with gratitude: the wonder of this body, these people, this land, this planet.

• A ritual (see below for a suggested solstice ritual)

It’s a “Sacred” Pause because it’s in the pause that you get to connect to your higher self, your higher nature, that part of you that not only yearns to be more free, but knows that freedom is possible. This is the part of you that keeps showing up and knocking on the door. This is the part of you that not only knows a different world is possible, but is also oh-so curious about your unique place in this life-sustaining (and probably far more fucking fun) new game.

Ritual offers structure for this pause. Solstice is a meaningful time to practice it. Regardless of how spiritual or not spiritual you consider yourself, the human psyche is wired to respond to ritual, and by enacting your own, you participate in the type of action that human beings across all cultures have incorporated for millennia.

Step out of the madness of a holiday hijacked by capitalism, the madness of having a packed-to-the-gills social calendar during the time of year when the mammalian body is meant to be at rest. Give yourself the gift of planting seeds of your truest longings, intentions and desires, both for your own little life and for the whole damn terrible beautiful world, setting out what you’d like to create, and seeing what bears fruit come spring, and beyond.

The following is a simple ritual you can do solo or with others.

🕯Solstice Fire Ritual 🕯

Tools:

• Paper and pen

• A vessel you can safely burn paper in

• A candle/match/lighter

• A fan/feather/piece of paper or cardboard.

• Something else you can light but that won’t burn as quickly as a match. You can use sage, palo santo, a candle. I use wooden/bamboo skewers:)

Step 1: Take the paper and pen and make a list of everything in your life you’d like to release, let go of, be free from. Get it all out. Include everything. This can be things in reality - like, say, an obligation you’re burned out on, or something immaterial, like, say, self-doubt.

Step 2: Rip or cut each item from your list into its own strip of paper

Step 3: Use the safe container to burn each strip of paper, one-by-one. As each strip burns, use whatever you’re using as a fan and be sure to fan away from you all the smoke that’s generating from the burning, sending it on its way. If you’re practicing this ritual with a friend, you can ask them to fan the smoke away from you.

Step 4: Take the skewer (or whatever else you’re using) and before you light it, sit quietly and presence yourself to all you would like to create, all your dreams and wishes for spring. Cup your hands around the item and breathe your wishes into it. Once you are complete, light the item and allow that smoke to drench you. I like to use a hand to wash the smoke over me, and then I finish by allowing the smoke to hover for an extra beat or two over my heart ❤️‍🔥

Step 5: Finish by burying the stick in the ground, or making sure to wait until whatever you’re using has fully burned itself out.

Step 6: Sit quietly in the after effects of the ritual. Don’t rush. Let yourself linger until you are complete.

Here at Self Made, with social media (hopefully) a thing of the past, and with my increasingly attuned creature-body laying an ear to the ground, I hear deeper calls for meaning, connection, magic, and nature.

Again, from this week’s Animas Valley Institute missive (emphasis mine):

The world that is coming is right now gestating in our aching grief and in our wildest and deepest imaginations. The world that is coming is forming underground like the fruiting bodies of fungi whose fantastic possibility is nurtured by dark, fecund decay. The world that is coming is being called forth by innovation and imagination

My particular focus here at Self Made is supporting the journey of people designing unconventional life paths—those willing to step outside their programming and into the territory of their truest longings. I work with worldview interrupters, pattern breakers, and people committed to responding to life rather than reacting from old conditioning, to participating in creating what’s unfolding no matter how scary it is to let go of the way things were.

Our world is changing so fast. The old scripts don’t work anymore, and yet the pull to keep following them is relentless. Meaningful community—however you find or create that—holds the heartiest resilience in uncertain times. A truer way of being is struggling to be born through the cracks of your conditioning, taking form in the depths, from sacred pauses, ancestral wisdom, outlandish imagination, and intentional actions on behalf of your most authentic self and the future you’re building for all generations to come.

At December Solstice and always, I send you heartfelt blessings for all the ways you show up in this world—unfiltered, imperfect, and exactly as you are.

And if you give the Fire Ritual a try, I’d love to hear how it goes <3

Note: I have 3 coaching engagement opportunities open for January and February 2026.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, and it’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

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SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

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