Creating a daily healing ritual
I came across this tip for restoring balance in your day and thought it was such a beautifully simple ritual, worth sharing with everyone. Even taking just five or ten minutes to do this, will be wonderfully restorative and healing.
Light a candle and pray, meditate or reflect. You don’t have to believe in any particular deity to make this work. Just silently reflecting in front of a lit candle is extremely nurturing and healing. This may be the one time of day when you feel connected to your own soul…
Beautiful! And I love the symbolism of a lit candle – a light in the darkness – a light of hope, peace and faith.
Source: Beliefnet
Rushworth Kidder in his book Moral Courage has a wonderful parable about the candle and the closet.
“Find a closet somewhere in your home that’s been closed up for years. It’s been shut so tight that no light can get in. If there’s any place darkness could grow thick and rich and ugly, this is it.
Now turn off the lights in the room outside the closet and light a candle. Open the closet door, and watch closely. Does that appalling darkness gush forth with such virulence that it extinguishes the candle and plunges you into utter blackness? In the entire history of the world, that has never once happened. Always, unfailingly, the candlelight illumines the closet and dispels the darkness.
But why should it be so?
For one simple reason: light is not the opposite of darkness but the absence of darkness. If light and darkness were opposites, we’d be playing a zero-sum game with the forces of antilight every time we opened a closet. And about half the time the darkness would win. Maybe, if we pulled together a thousand candles, we could just barely defeat such a grisly accumulation of blackness – but only for a while, until the closet forces regrouped and came roaring back to defeat the candle.
Put that way, it sounds silly. Yet notice how our language works to persuade us that darkness and light are equal but opposite powers. We’re so used to thinking in terms of opposites – positive and negative charges in electricity, north and south poles in magnetism, up and down, left and right, yin and yang – that we let our metaphors overwhelm us.
‘Oh, yes,’ we assert, without examining our premises, ‘the world is made up of opposites.’ And then we take the next logical step. ‘Light and dark,’ we say. ‘They’re opposites, too. Even night and day are evenly balanced – in the course of a year, there’s about as much of one as of the other. Therefore darkness is the opposite of light.
The mistake might be relatively harmless, were it not for one final logical misstep. We seize on light and dark as our principal metaphor for good and evil, right and wrong. We imagine that they, too, are opposites. We think of ourselves as locked in combat with the powers of wrong that are balanced on a knife-edge against the forces of right. What will it take, we ask, to defeat such a terrible force? Surely all the goodness in the world, if we could scrape it together, would barely be enough to overcome the equal and opposite power.
But what if we’ve missed the real message of the metaphor? What if wrong is not the opposite but the absence of good? Wouldn’t it seem odd, in fact, if wrong ever seemed to prevail in combat with good? Wouldn’t it seem bizarre in the extreme if an absence of something could defeat its presence?
Just as a single candle can destroy a whole closetful of darkness, so a single life, lived in the light of goodness and moral courage, can make an enormous difference in overcoming the reverberating void that calls itself evil, blackness, doubt, cowardice, fright, or mere bravado. If wrong really is, in some fundamental way, the absence rather than the opposite of right, is it any wonder that each of us – expressing our highest sense of moral courage, living it to the fullest, and passing it along to others – really can change the world?”
I, too, love the symbolism of a lit candle – a light that can destroy a whole closetful of darkness – a light
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Denis, I am so honored that you would take the time to enhance this post by sharing this wonderful story – thank you! I just loved reading it…and it has given me even more reason to go light a candle now 🙂
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LOVE this post and reminder! Also really appreciates Denis’s response. May the light shine brightly in both of your lives!
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Wow! thank you Denis for that wonderful elaboration of the original post – I’ve been really inspired today to take this one simple step to bring some more light and hope into my life.
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Wonderfully simple yet effective aid to relaxation
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I have been trying this simple ritual since reading this post last week on your blog and I would just like you to know that it has been working really well for me since 🙂
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What a wonderful ritual!
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I really like this simple idea..I am going to try it out
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