for Individuals of All Faiths and Traditions
During the Twelve Holy Nights of the Year
December 25 til January 6
The Sixth Holy Night - December 30
Warming and Cooling
After the profound work of Freedom and Lawfulness last night, I hope tonight’s polarity of Warming and Cooling brings some gentle calming to our souls. And I’ve kept tonight brief.
Warming and cooling are such comforting gestures. To comfort is to restore strength. There are draining situations in life when find being warmed or cooled provides new strength. This is the strength of the temperate middle. There are times when we find strength in the warm light of day. Other times strength comes in the cool of night.
We warm or cool to restore the harmony in the body’s temperature and to the soul’s temperament. “Temper,” as a root, means to mingle elements in order to moderate.
Temper also means to tune a piano as Bach reminds us in “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
Warming and cooling are the ways we:
Comfort our bodies and souls,
Harmonize and moderate our bodies and souls, and
Tune our bodies and souls in order to make beautiful music with our individual humanity.
As we imagine warming and cooling, we need also to imagine being too hot or too cold. We only need warming when we have become too cold and cooling when we have become too hot.
Bathing and breathing are the two most natural ways we cool down and warm up our bodies. With both bathing and breathing we can restore our perfect temperature. With breathing no matter how hot or cold the air is as soon as we inhale the air conforms to our body temperature. Depending on our need, a few moments in a warm or cool bath will bring our bodies to a comfortable temperature. Through soul breathing we can alter the temperature of our environment. Through bathing our soul with the ideals of truth, beauty, goodness and compassion we can warm or cool our thoughts, our feelings and our intentions.
Does your soul respond to physical, emotional or spiritual stress by turning cold or getting overheated? What spiritual comforting do you seek to warm up your coldness or cool down your inflammation?
As a personality do you tend towards the heated emotions of happiness and anger or are your impulses chilled by fear and sadness? How do you temper or moderate a one-sided personality?
If you were to imagine yourself as a piano, do you need tuning? Do your tones need warming or cooling? What will allow you to strike the right tone on your life path?
How do you tune your soul? How do you moderate your personality? How do you create the right soul temperature to allow you to thrive as a spiritual being and an earthly being? Who in your life warms you up? Who in your life cools you down?
During the Holy Nights do you desire warming or cooling? Do you sense the Holy Nights as a time for bathing or breathing or both. Can you spend a few moments imagining your restorative metaphors for soul breathing and soul bathing?
Some additional thoughts on the Work of the Holy Nights…
The Holy Nights ask us to think, think deeply and openly. During this sacred time, we think with our hearts, not our heads. Our hearts maintain the perfect temperature for calm thinking - a balance between spirit and matter.
Here is the verse Rudolf Steiner wrote for this week in his book, Calendar of the Soul. I find it expresses the purpose of our Holy Nights’ experience and the gift of the heart’s thinking.
I win back the light of cosmic being.
It grows and grows,
enlightening me,
to give my self back to me.
And this feeling of my self---
awakening ---
unravels itself
out of my strength
as a thinker.
Translated by Tom Mellett.
Did you do a little unraveling around warming and cooling tonight?
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