Winter or Advent Spiral

This week, I wanted to write a post about making winter holidays meaningful, especially for adolescents and teens. I will focus on the Winter or Advent Spiral, commonly done in Waldorf settings. The principles, however, are broadly applicable to other traditions as well, so extrapolate as necessary.

The Difference Between Children and Adolescents

At puberty, our precious children change. They grow hair in embarrassing places and begin walking like overgrown limb-ogres. Girls start their cycle. Boys’ voices crack and deepen. Everybody begins to stink. If you have middle schoolers, you know what I’m talking about, and we no longer call them “children.” We call them youth, adolescents, or teens.

Nor do they want to be called nor treated like children anymore. They reach a time where all that early childhood stuff – fairies, gnomes, and Winter or Advent Spirals, among others – are too babyish for them. There’s a good reason for that. Young children are almost entirely sensory beings. That is why they are so imitative. They live entirely into their environment and have little if any true soul depth.

Puberty hits, and all that changes. Have you ever wondered why your teen now retreats into his or her room for hours? It’s because their inner soul life is awakening, and it’s a whole new world to explore. Concurrently, their conceptual life is blossoming as well. A 5-year-old really has no idea what it means to “set an intention.” A 13-year-old, however, can grok that.

Why Winter or Advent Spiral?

Before I continue, the reason I keep saying “Winter or Advent Spiral” is because we commonly associate Advent with Christianity. Yet, obviously not everybody who practices the Spiral is Christian. Nor need they be to connect to its profound symbolism. (In my own personal opinion, the true Christianity is actually just the continuation of pre-Christian mysteries, anyway.)

Imagine a maple seed pirouetting down from the tree to the ground. It lands on a soft bed of rich soil. There it waits, patiently, as an idea/intention to become a tree. A seed, one could say, is nature’s purest form of intention. When it’s time next spring, it will burst forth, kicking a leg out to become a root and an arm to become a stalk. Before you know it, this idea comes into physical form as a maple tree. That is the whole Winter / Advent Spiral in a nutshell…or a seedcase, I suppose.

The Light Born in the Darkness

So, in winter we spiral inwards down into the dark where the light shall be born. It’s the same geometry whether you think of the light as the sunlight growing longer, the New Year, the birth of the Christ child upon the earth, etc. Material life is darkness to the spirit. The physical light of the sun, illuminating as it does sensory reality, directs us away from the spirit. If we want to discover the light within ourselves, we have to look into the darkness of our inner lives.

Sensory reality can never tell us fully who we are. It is like a tableau of outer pictures of inner realities. Even our physical bodies are like a picture of us. Imagine looking at a painting of a tree. You recognize the tree through the painting. However, the latter is not the tree. It’s just a picture of the tree. So too is the world we see with our eyes not the real world. It’s a picture of it. Our full understanding can only be completed by adding something inner to the outer sense experience of the world.

Obviously, you’re not going to bring all that to your teen, yet, but they are getting there. They can understand some deeper soul realities now. Therefore, if you want to make Winter / Advent Spiral meaningful for them, talk to them about the darkness and the light. The four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas celebrate the four kingdoms of nature – mineral, plant, animal, and human. We are the culmination of these four kingdoms. The mythos of the birth of Christ on Christmas is the birth of the archetypal human being. That can only happen on the earth. The Light can only be born in the darkness.

How do we do Winter / Advent Spiral for teens?

Whether you are Christian or not, you can ask your teen, “Who do you aspire to be? What are the qualities of your True Self? If you were your ideal person, how would you use your humanity for deeds of goodness, beauty, and truth in the world?” Something truly new CAN be born in them at this time of year. Have them write or draw intentions. Let them carry their intentions into the center of the Spiral, slowly, solemnly, reverently. Not because you told them so but because this is what setting their intention is all about. It’s their life, now.

Have them place those intentions at the center of the spiral. As they reverently walk out, have them imagine it coming to fruition. It’s never to early to learn the art of manifestation (which we work weekly on in our Live Teen Empowerment Class). Finally, perhaps you want to burn all those intentions in a bonfire or Yule log fire.

Those are some ideas. Let me know what you think. Here is our contact form. I won’t say “happy holidays” because it annoys me how people water down the sacred in the name of inclusion. Instead, I’ll honor every winter holiday I can think of: Happy Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Diwali, Happy Kwanzaa, and Merry Christmas!

Teen Empowerment Class

We do a live weekly class with adolescents and teens where we study ultra-inspiring biographies, learn to meditate, and learn how to craft lives we love. It’s appropriate for ages 12 and up. It has become very popular and close-knit. New members are accepted on an ongoing basis. Check it out: https://enkindleacademy.com/teen-empowerment-class.