Here, in the Southern Hemisphere, Easter is a time for retrospection, resurrection and rebirthing ourselves anew. It is the time of the Phoenix—that is, a time for re-evaluating where we are in our lives and what needs to die so that we can be reborn within ourselves in order to see things from a different perspective.
It is a time to rise from the darkness, burning away what no longer serves us to leave it behind like a phoenix rising from the ashes of our experience.
At Eastertime, I often see the Goddess Ostara celebrated. This honouring is perfect for those living in the Northern Hemisphere because she is associated with new beginnings, fertility and Springtime, a time when everything is awakening. In the Southern Hemisphere, however, this is only the final aspect of what Easter represents. When returning to nature’s cycle, we need to consider where we live in the world and apply it to our lives for greater meaning and connection.
Living in a commercially dominated society, we have come to adopt this aspect of the celebration into our culture, driven by the need to purchase presents and chocolate. (Much like Halloween, which would be more appropriately celebrated on 31 April here in Australia).
I invite you to take this time to look beneath the surface and discover what Easter means to you.
A Return to Tradition
The commercial side of this celebration makes it easy to avoid going within. However, Easter is a period for introspection. In Hebrew, this time is called Passover. I liken this word to a time of passing from one state of consciousness to another. In Christianity, we see Jesus who took three days to be resurrected. We can take these teachings about what Easter means in our traditional belief systems and see how it is appropriate to the celebration of this time.
In my tradition, in the region of Bela Krajina in Slovenia, Easter was a special celebration when we prepared ham, baked cookies, homemade bread, a beautiful dish called potica (which was a rich walnut role to symbolise Jesus’s crown of thorns), homemade sausages to represent the nails used to put Christ on the cross, five red boiled eggs representing the five wounds, and we created beautiful offerings. We took our traditional meals to church to be blessed and we would not eat until they were blessed.
Friday was the day we did not leave the house. It was a time of contemplation and quiet introspection. Saturday was the day we prepared the food to take it to church. On Sunday, we came together with a big feast in celebration. We had taken that time to realise what we needed to let go and be reborn. It was a time to celebrate
Slovenian tradition was to keep the family together, to keep the peace, and honour that time. Ever since they could walk, my sons carried little baskets to church decorated with white carnations, which is Slovenia’s national flower. We decorated the church with special arrangements and came home with an olive branch to keep in the house for the entire year so our house was blessed and protected. (You can read more about Slovenian tradition here)
All cultures have beautiful traditions we can draw from. In my tradition, no-one was talking about presents and chocolate. Everything was symbolic. Easter offers a time for retrospection, a time for peace, and a time for realising that something needs to die if you want to have a better future.
That, for me, was the teaching of Jesus – to save ourselves, we need to let a part of us die.
As we go through life, we carry our burdens and as they become too heavy to bare then something must die. Otherwise, we simply cannot be resurrected into our new form. But, you cannot transform from one state to another overnight.
Like the three most potent days of the full moon each month, Easter is one time each year to go even deeper than we do on the lunar cycle. It is a time to clear your deepest fears and lingering limitations. Fear is holding you back. It can be painful and scary to let an aspect of ourselves die off. But without dying, we cannot be resurrected into anything other than the same old person with the same belief systems. We are unable to ascend into the higher states of consciousness.
Easter represents a spiritual death.
When we go through life, we see through the lenses of our personal experience but we don’t see the lens themselves. We only see what is projected to us. People become reflections of what we don’t want to look at. They mirror the experiences of our past, so we feel our past pain, past experience, uncertainties and fear. Fear, grief, regret and sadness are all reflected back at us over our lifetime. Easter is a time to switch the lenses we choose to look through.
It is a time for all the aspects of ourselves that no longer serve us to die off. This involves sitting with yourself for a while—sitting with the loss, the pain, the separation and sadness, and after you sit in that darkness, in that space of nothingness, you come to see the bright light of your soul calling you back. This is the rebirth—the resurrection—when you can again see through clear eyes and start seeing the world anew.
Make today, Good Friday, a day of quiet reflection. It is a day without media or devices or distraction. Reflect on the times when you’ve felt really sad. What is underneath those memories? When did you first feel that sadness?
It may have been something as seemingly innocent as a memory from your childhood when you were unable to go to the circus, yet the emotional memory is being replayed in your life today. Perhaps you see something you really want and can’t have so you feel a wave of sadness. The buried emption comes through, though you don’t connect it to the source so it never goes away. When you take the time to look back and understand the source of that initial feeling, you can also understand what is different between when you were a child and now you are an adult. And now, as an adult, you have a choice.
It is also similar when we lose a loved one, either as a child or an adult. The grief of their loss weighs heavily on our shoulders because their death represents something we’ve lost and will never be seen again. The grief of being left behind alone is huge. And then anytime somebody leaves us in life, the same feelings of loss and helplessness are replayed. Spirit is everywhere. So too is the person who transitioned. When we understand death from a spiritual perspective, we understand that we are all one and always connected.
Perhaps it is a pattern you’ve been repeating. Maybe as a child, you were told that you couldn’t do anything right and now as an adult, you keep trying to finish projects or commitments, but you get frustrated and it reaches the point where you don’t think you can do it, so you cut your losses and walk away. Where is this frustration coming from? What makes you not see it through? Was it that single sentence you heard once, that you can’t do anything right?
These are all things that commonly hold people back and can stop us from growing into new perspectives. So, this Easter, what are you going to let go of in order to be reborn?
We can always learn a lot from any tradition we follow, but we must take from it what it means to us without someone telling us what we need to do. When you go into the meaning behind it, you see it is something really beautiful.
This Easter, I am going to honour the concept of having a second chance because that’s what Easter represents to me.
If you feel you need extra support or inspiration to rise from your ashes this Easter, I invite you to consider a powerful lifepath reading or inner child healing.
