I’ve written before about Brigid and Dreams, but today I want to write about this time of year. The darkness of winter between Samhain and Imbolc. The time I do my dreaming and planning.
For many of you, this won’t be the first time you’ve heard about my usual annual cycle.
Samhain – Imbolc: dreaming and planning
Imbolc – Bealtaine: planting, fertilising
Bealtaine – Lúnasa: growing, feeding, weeding
Lúnasa – Samhain: harvesting and assessing
What does dreaming and planning look like?
Well, you have to understand, this is just for me. Other folk have different ways of working and doing things. This isn’t the One True WayTM or anything like that.
But it is my way.
Honestly, a lot of the time it can look like random staring into the fire. Or scribbling/ doodling in my notebook. Wrapping myself in a blanket and sitting outside to look at the stars.
It can be more strategic, where I’m putting together goals for the year, but that’s later in the process really. The earlier part is much more fluid and less concrete. For serious details on how the dreaming and planning starts, you can take my Samhain Ritual class over at the Irish Pagan School. But here’s an overview.
Initial divination
I say I start off with an initial divination using oracle cards to determine what’s coming up for the next year. But really, the first part of the divination comes through in which cards I use for the divination!
I have a number of decks (I can hear my husband’s snort of derision as I type!) so this can be a bit of a process. And I have decks that I find more attuned to different aspects of my life. My Buffy Tarot deck is great for general life queries. I have decks better attuned to career/business areas and others that are better attuned to personal issues, health, family etc.
I also have decks I use regularly, because I’ve built up a relationship with them over years, but that I couldn’t recommend now to anyone because of details I’ve found out about their creators. (Ahem Link is to a google search page. There are reasons to not recommend this person, but because of relationships I’ve built with some of their decks I still use them… But this is only one example of such.)
These divinations feed into the dreaming part of “dreaming and planning”.
I usually do an overall card for the year, one for each month and maybe and extra one for clarification.
Dreaming (not planning)
Sometimes the dreaming is strongly linked to the cards I pull, sometimes it’s not. But a lot of the time it is. And dreaming is a time of expansion.
This is the time that all my ideas come out. From the wild and wonderful to the practical and pragmatic. Here’s where I come up with the ideas to launch a full on, six-month, deep-dive coaching program from scratch without warming any of ye up at all… (This is where Brigid’s Path came from basically!!) Or where I come up with the plan to actually create an email list and a blog and utilise bother to help people learn about Brigid and how I work with/for her. (No, we’ve not yet sorted out that preposition issue)
It’s also where myself and the husband will spend nights over a bottle of wine or a good meal and talk, tell stories in front of the fire, feed our visions for the future. It’s great bonding time. Time for exploration of what we want and don’t want in our lives.
I can’t even say this is one conversation, it’s a process where we work together to shape that life. OK, very often, it’s me coming up with wild ideas and Al asking some pertinent questions such as “where will you find the time to do all this?” and “how exactly do we get the money to buy that land?” (I have sensible answers to neither of these just yet, but that doesn’t stop us working towards the dream!
Planning (not dreaming)
The “planning” part of the “dreaming and planning” process comes into play then. This is where my practical and pragmatic side comes into play big time. It’s where I think out, well, when actually will I find time to do this and will the payback be worth the investment I put into place for it. Sometimes that means the planning overrules the dreaming.
But sometimes the dreaming wins over the planning. So, y’know, swings and roundabouts.
No matter how audacious the plan, once I reach planning stage, that’s when the nuts and bolts come into play. If we need to save money, then how much are we saving, when are we starting, and I put the automatic transfer into place to make sure it happens.
If we are looking for a holiday, then where are we going, when, how much as we spending, etc.
When I dream up a new course, the planning stage is when I look to outline the material, decide is it a one-off few hours or a longer commitment from both me and the people who sign up. Sometimes this changes as I work through things, but the planning stage is when the concrete steps come into play.
I also add in things like courses I want to take in the coming year, for work or for Brigid or for myself. Or I might look at people I want to contact, that I’ve been really crap about contacting in the previous year.
That’s the process!
I usually end up with about 10 firm, SMART(ish) goals for the year and I try to make sure they build on each other. So for example, I don’t usually have a goal that will last the full year, I work off the 12 week year principles and try to keep things contained. Well, I try to keep things contained after the dreaming stage of the “dreaming and planning” process…
Yeah, that’s kinda it. Really easy to type up and explain. Not so easy to do and follow through on continually.
Now, it’s not 100% clear cut, in that there will be practical steps (like the standing order for savings I mentioned above) that I will action straight away. Particularly if it’s a quick, easy step to take. And sometimes “planning” is a bit fluid as well.
I could lay out a course outline. I could plan how I tell people about a new course. Maybe look at when I will do all this and lay out a year lookahead.
Or I could book a holiday. Join up to a course that isn’t running for six months. Arrange for time off work in a busy period of my Brigid life. That sort of thing.
There aren’t hard and fast rules here and sometimes, I do another divination later in the year or in the cycle and it comes up differently. Or life happens and I change tack. But it’s really important and comforting to me to follow this process and know I at least have a plan. However well I stick to it!
