Wishing everyone many blessings of the season. May your Imbolc be bright with inspiration; may your Lughnasadh harvest be sweet! /|\

For a presentation on Imbolc with more on the festival, see:

The event on Feb 14 I forgot to mention is this:

Love and Grief in the Shadow of War

The Pychedelic Society and ACER Integration are hosting Love and Grief in the Shadow of War – a Global Online Gathering for Valentine’s Day and Fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, tending to humanitarian crisis all over the world.
~Wed 14th Feb 2024, 7pm – 10pm GMT (UTC +00:00)
~ Online
~ https://dandelion.events/e/love-and-grief

Join Dr Gabor Maté, Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, Sima Basel, Sulaiman Khatib and Dr Rosalind Watts for an evening of sharing our grief and our love on Valentine’s Day 2024. Come alone, come with a beloved, come with friends (over 18s only).

Western culture often leaves us alone with our grief, yet when we come together in our honest vulnerability we realise that grief and love are two sides of the same coin. Our feelings of heartbreak can teach us what we care about, and what we want to stand for.

At this time, individualistic consumeristic visions of romantic love fall short of the communal kindness, compassion and cooperation that we need to build together. Often we feel that we want to alleviate the great suffering that we witness and do not know how. We lack structures and spaces for coming together to share how much we are hurting, how the hurting of others devastates us, and how much we care for each other and want to help.

The ACER integration community meets regularly for facilitated online circles where we share our grief and love in a safe container.  These experiences can help us feel held, seen, connected and open-hearted. For this event, many experienced circle facilitators from the ACER family and beyond will hold space for small groups to share their hearts’ truths with care and kindness. This event is a chance to connect together in what unites us, our longing for all beings to be safe and free.

Attendees will be asked to commit to an agreement of appropriate sharing circle conduct beforehand. If you don’t want to share more than a few sentences or even a few words yourself, that is fine. We ask that you remain in your breakout room to hold space for others while they share.  This commitment to listening to the grief, love, and longing of others is a significant act that helps re-weave a fabric of care.

THE OFFERING

• The event will begin with short talks on love and grief from Dr Gabor Maté, Natalie Ginsberg, SIma Basel and Sulaiman Khatib
• We will then move into breakout rooms for the sharing circles, where all attendees will be invited to share what our heart burns for right now.
• The event will end with a guided imagery Tree Journey from Rosalind Watts, with music by Finn Petcher, to help us feel the power of our heart’s deepest longing and connect to a source of strength, support, hope and guidance.

  Proceeds will go to Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)  who are on the ground supporting people in the world’s most harrowing crises: they are turning their grief into love-in-action, and we can do the same by supporting this charity, and offering each other a bit of our time and presence.

Book your ticket now  – tickets on a sliding scale from £5 to £150 depending on how much you are able to donate).  You will be sent a recording of the talks afterward (not the sharing circles which will not be video recorded).

So, don’t go out for an over-priced cringey dinner this Valentine’s day!

Instead, spend some time in a community of people dedicated to being agents of connectedness in a disconnected world.  Rumi said that ‘grief can be the garden of compassion’: we plant seeds in the cracked earth of our broken hearts.

May the sun’s light, warmth and healing joy rise within you! Love and Solstice Blessings to all! /|\