How This Course is Structured + Ways to Engage

Listen to the audio of How to Engage with This Course below (8 mins).

If you would like a transcription of the audio, click to download the PDF or scroll down to read along.

How This Course is Structured + Ways to Engage

So, how do you engage with this course, and, kind of, what's it all about? The brass tacks and housekeeping details are this: this course runs anywhere from five to six weeks. You can give yourself about a week or a day, however long you want, to go through some of the welcome messages and then the little preamble before the journey starts–some insight and some thoughts about the symbology, and stories, and meaning of shepherds and kings, and an invitation to look for animals and animal guides, and any other kind of member of your communion of saints that might want to travel with you in this Advent reflection time.

After that, there are four weeks of “official content”. They're divided into the traditional arc of Advent. Week one, for us will be Bear in hibernation. Week two will be Snake and molting. Week three will be Caterpillar/Butterfly and metamorphosis. Week four will be Hen and brooding. We will go through each week with the same kind of invitations with each animal. We will look at how the animal experiences change and transform in their own life cycle and their own biome. So, we'll look at some of the science of all of these transformations, and the animal itself.

You'll be given a Love + Hope story, a comic that I write on a regular basis featuring Love, who embodies the Sacred, God, Spirit, Universe. Love, in this comic represents Love–whatever that place of Sacred Source is for you, and however you name it. That is, Love, the heart, in the story. And then there's Hope, the little human being. Hope represents each one of us, the human experience, the tenacious will, the lived question, the frustration and confusion at existence. Hope and Love are both filtered through my own spiritual experiences, my own lived questions, my own conversations with my soul, and the Sacred in the content of this course. 

Each one of their little comic strip stories will focus on Hope experiencing a kind of change or transformation in life that may be a human equivalent to hibernation, or molting and release, or metamorphosis, or brooding. It's just there to give you one touchstone of what that invitation towards change could look like from a human perspective.

There will also be an audio reflection for me around how this theme of transformation and the lens of the animal and then the lens of the human being all integrate with the Christmas story and the Advent journey in general. There will be art and pictures you can download, journal with or collage with. There are also several pages of journal prompts and reflection questions.

You do not need, nor would I suggest, that in advance of doing this course, you pick a particular way that you're going to engage with it, and absolutely stick with it. Journeys are unpredictable. Spiritual journeys are unpredictable. Human beings live with waxing and waning energies, capacities, interests, abilities, and all of  this gets heightened at the holiday season. So, if some weeks you really want to sit with every single thing offered in a week, and reflect on it in your journal, and write about it, and collage about it, and give yourself audio reflections on it, fantastic. If other weeks, you just want to take a walk, and let it move through your head and heart and spirit, fantastic. If you want things to just settle in your bones and invite yourself to dream about them, fantastic. If you want to talk to others about this and chat with them about your experience, fantastic. Trust what you're interested in, what you're capable of, what your capacity is, and what your human experiences are from week to week. I've tried to offer lots of opportunities for engagement every week with this material, so that there's something for you regardless of how you're feeling. And I hope you honor your own human experience and inner wisdom, as you go through these four weeks.

At the end, there is a reflection opportunity. I do this anytime into the first week of January and just give myself a few moments, one morning or one afternoon, to look back on what I wrote, what I drew, what I thought of the conversations I had in the Advent course and in the Advent experience and ask myself: What wants to come with me going forward? What is content to stay in the past in my Advent experience? And what are my invitations that I think I might be coming forward for the rest of the year?.

This course, fundamentally, is about the fact that a journey as a precursor to Christmas changes us, because it is about something coming to greet us that we are longing for and trusting and expecting. And in our expectation, we get excited and anxious. And we take a journey of our own towards the light, towards the thing we are awaiting. And both of these movements of something coming towards us and us going towards it–our journeys–that involves lots of personal change and transformation. And it can be hard to embrace change and transformation because, even if it's coming from the Source we trust and love, even if it's coming from Light and goodness and in Spirit, it can be scary, and challenging and provoking, and hard.

And so this course is designed to ask us to look at how we respond to invitations of change and growth. It is not going to ask you to weigh, measure, or judge how you respond to these invitations, but to simply observe them, listen to them, learn from them, be stretched by them and respect them and the work that they do in your life, in your soul in your heart and in your mind.

All right, I am so excited about these next few weeks–can't wait to share more. I hope this gave you an idea of what to look forward to. In the first week. The download with all of the printed materials will be available. Same thing with weeks 2,3, and 4. Everything else is going to be just audio and image. Take care!