Lammas Ritual: Transforming Fear into Hope | Online

Reconnect with the sacred cycles of nature through ritual.

So often, modern life has us constantly moving, with so little time to stop and notice the changes happening all around us. Our ceremonies are a tool to help you carve out the time and space for honoring, celebrating, and integrating the external wisdom of Earth’s cycles. Through guided trance journeys, seasonal rituals, and internal reflection, these online ceremonies hold a container for your personal meditation and transformation through the seasons of life.

In this turn of the wheel, we celebrate Lammas, or Lughnasadh, the ancient festival of the first harvest. The summer crops are getting ripe, haymaking is underway, and the first grain is ready to reap. Lughnasadh was also a time for rituals to protect the herds, for fairs and markets, for law-giving and the settling of disputes, and for general celebration.

When we adapt these ancient festivals to our lives today, they often take on new meanings. Lammas is a time when we are poised between hope and fear: the harvest has begun—but there is still so much that could go wrong and spoil it. So for this season’s ritual, we will examine fear.

There is so much to be afraid of, right now! Most of us probably don’t have cattle to protect—but we do have things that we have worked for, values that we care about, institutions we want to see preserved that we see crumbling all around us. Fear can alert us, focus us on an issue, but it tends to push us into adrenalin overload and we go into fight, flight or freeze mode. That can be useful when we need a quick response to an immediate threat—but it doesn’t help us actually observe, plan, and make strategic decisions. We need calm, grounding, and determination in order to act, rather than react.

In this ritual, we’ll work to release fear and go behind it to liberate the life-loving impulses it represents. What does it mean to make a commitment to land, to place, to community? To take on the responsibility of being a guardian and protector? What can we give in order to receive back joy, abundance and nourishment?