The Energy of Beltane: Abundance, Growth & Gratitude

Today is lunar Beltane, falling on the full ‘flower’ moon on the 12th May. Beltane is a Celtic fire festival celebrating the peak of spring, the peak of the fertility of nature and the lush greening of land. Everywhere plants are growing and flourishing and the trees are coming into their full green leaf. The bird eggs are hatching and the next generation fledging, the lambs are growing up; everywhere is burgeoning and full of life, beauty and abundance.

If you’re following the Wheel of the Year, it’s a good time to check in on any intentions you might have set at Imbolc and see where you are with that. Check in with yourself and see what you might need more of, or what you need to release, and if you have any adjustments you need to make in order to bloom and thrive through the rest of the year.

Have you noticed how purely responsive nature is? Flowers and plants turn towards the sun during the day; many flowers close up at night and droop when there’s not enough water; the trees bend and flow with the breeze, and respond to temperature and send messages to other trees for help when they need it. Nature knows how to attend to its needs, moment by moment and we can follow that lead, remembering we are nature.

We can prioritise self-care where we can and listen to our bodies and intuition, and make tiny adjustments and realignments to attend to our needs. This might be cancelling a social engagement and prioritising rest, it might be running a bath, it could be making sure you leave enough time to make a healthy meal or putting down your phone and going to bed earlier etc. Gently, little by little these small movements and adjustments of self-care, add up to creating a greater sense of well-bring.

Beltane is a beautiful, abundant time of year so it’s a good time to practice offering gratitude. Gratitude practice can be misunderstood as something that can bypass difficulties and difficult feelings and messages, but it’s important to embrace the both/and – feel and fully acknowledge any difficulties and practice gratitude.

There is always something to be grateful for however tricky things are. The act of finding things to be grateful for retrains the brain away from negative bias. It can be as simple as being grateful for being alive, for having access to running water, safety and shelter; enjoying a cup of tea, seeing blue sky and hearing birdsong etc.

These small acts of gratitude can affect our mood and how we feel, and how we feel is our vibration. When we talk about how to ‘raise our vibration’ we’re actually talking about changing our emotions, changing how we feel, although it’s rarely put as simply as that. As we begin to focus on the ‘glass half full’ we change our mind, our feelings, and we attract more of those higher vibrational thoughts and feelings. This is the law of attraction. We often see and experience this more strongly in the negative – negative emotions and feelings spiral downwards and attract more negative thoughts and feelings. We’ve all been there!

Here’s a simple gratitude practice connecting to and working with the elements. Take a few deep breaths, feel your energetic roots traveling deep into the Earth. Feel held and rooted and recite:

I am grateful for the sacred element of air that is my breath & the gift shared with all living beings.

I am grateful for the sacred element of fire that is the self-love & compassion that I’m tending within me.

I am grateful for the sacred element of water that is flowing like rivers within me & guiding my way through my feelings & intuition.

I am grateful for the sacred element of Earth that is also my form. The sacred Earth holds me & grounds me, loves me unconditionally, with patience & without judgment.

Spend time feeling gratitude for the beauty and abundance of nature at this time of year and gratitude for the elements within you, feeling that connection and gratitude for being an integral part of nature and for the infinite web of interconnections. You may like to journal other things you’re grateful for, as well as journaling ideas for how you might honour your gratitude and connection to the elements. Whether that’s in the form of a simple ritual (such as taking a nice deep breath, lighting a candle, drinking a glass of water, making offerings to the earth etc,) and/or through gentle readjustments aligned with self-care and self-compassion that also honour yourself and your needs as a nature being.