Summer Solstice, New Moon & Manifesting Step 6: Celebration!

This New Moon in Gemini begins a new focus in Essential Arts, on the final Step* in the 6-Step Manifesting Protocol: Celebration! 🥳

Every moonth* this year we’ve woven one of the Manifesting Steps through our Essential Arts programs and practices, even as we’re always using them in various combinations, like steps in a dance rather than steps on a staircase. (See previous posts for more on each Step and the Manifesting Protocol.)

Gemini Sun & Moon

When the Moon is in her New phase, the Sun and Moon are in the same Zodiac sign. This New Moon is Sunday, June 14 at 10:54 pm EDT.

Gemini energy sparkles with quick, sparky communication, connections and inspiration. We’Moon says Gemini Moon “speeds our thoughts and nerves. It’s time to weave words: talk, listen, laugh, sing and write.” You can learn more about Moon Transits, Zodiac signs and their meanings with your own copy of We’Moon 2026 from the Essential Arts Boutique.

Celebrating Summer & Solstice 

What are you celebrating this moonth, this season?

I find this to be a super-energizing time of year, when I need less sleep, feel more energized, inspired and productive. Maybe it’s because my Moon is in Gemini and my birthday is coming up in a few weeks?

Plus it’s summer! Here in Vermont, we try to make the most of it since it’s just one of our many seasons and a relatively short one. 

And Summer Solstice is all about celebrating the early harvest season. It’s a traditional time to gather many above-ground plant parts to replenish our apothecaries, and to get out on the land to dance with the fairies and land spirits after the long winter and straggling spring.

Diane Alves, EA Reiki Student Teacher, and I both love to pick red clover after morning dew evaporates and dry the beautiful pink blossoms for medicinal and magical uses throughout the year. Her garden is a masterpiece, as you can guess from this photo of her lovely irises, especially compared to my weedy beds at the moment, but we love them both.

How about you? Is this a special time of year for you or do you feel most empowered in another season? 

Celebration & Appreciation

Celebration is similar to Manifesting Step 3: Appreciation as they’re both about feeling good, enjoying our Manifesting practice and being grateful. I feel it’s important to go directly to gratitude in the early phases of Manifesting because it’s this feeling of enjoyment that fuels the whole process. Appreciation includes our resources and support, and even blessings and opportunities that are on their way and haven’t even come to us yet.

Celebration is a way of saying we’ve accomplished something, we’ve been blessed in so many ways, and it’s time to take a moment to pause and enjoy those good feelings. While there’s always more to do, Celebration says, this is enough for now, what I’m doing is already working, I’ve gotten somewhere.

Think about hiking up a mountain. Reaching the top is a great accomplishment, and yet it also gives us a view of all the other places we could go!

Enjoy the moment before moving on to the next step on the journey. Otherwise, we can get caught on the treadmill of striving and focusing on how far we have to go, feeling like it’s never enough.

Just like Lindsey Warren, EA Reiki Student Teacher, literally enjoying a picnic on a mountain top in Switzerland!

We literally never finish our journey until the end of our life, and even then, I believe, our energy, consciousness, soul, whatever you may call it, continues our journey beyond physical form. So it really doesn’t make sense to wait to celebrate until we’ve accomplished everything, if that’s never!

Celebration in Practice

I encourage you to celebrate every day, to make it part of your Manifesting practice. In fact, if all you have time to do is one Step, make it this one! Celebrating may be the most important Manifesting Step of all, not Action, which might seem backwards in cultures that prize hard work above happiness or even health and wellbeing.

Celebration adds an air of ease to anything we do, continuing this thread from my recent post on Manifesting Step 5: Action. When you start to lose track of the boundary between Action and Celebration, then you’re Manifesting like a champ!

I hope we’re ready to move past the aphorism “Work smarter, not harder,” and into “Soft work is just as important as hard work.” Hard work can be joyful, can bring rewards we cherish and results we’re proud of, yet it’s a lonely step on the Manifesting journey without pleasure, satisfaction and gratitude, and without imagining, creating, listening for guidance, resting and processing, accepting support and receiving blessings.

Celebration is a natural culmination of the previous five Steps. And here’s a secret worth sharing: don’t wait till the end to celebrate! Not only the end of life, but even the end of a project.

I find it helps to build in Celebration in the smaller cycles of my Manifesting practice, like writing in my We’Moon journal space before bed in my Evening Enchantment practice.

I write three sentences every night. In the first one, I tell myself something I really need to hear, as if I were my own best friend, or a fairy godmother. The second one is something I’m grateful for. The third is an affirmation, usually starting with the words “I claim . . .”

Even on the toughest days, I can find something to be grateful for. Sometimes Celebration doesn’t look like partying, balloons, cake and presents. It’s okay if Celebration is patting yourself on the back for getting through the day, realizing it could have been worse, or focusing on the help someone offered during a painful experience.

In April 2023, I received a diagnosis of cervical cancer.

That night I wrote to myself, “You had some really tough news today, but you’re handling it really well, claiming your healing journey. Relax as much as you can.”

I affirmed “I’m so grateful for my wonderful health care team and resources and Reiki.”

And I declared, “I claim this is a healing journey and much good will come of it.”

That day was a New Moon also, but in Aries, the sign of new beginnings and renewal though often characterized as the god of war, and there was a Total Solar Eclipse which can portend a time of upheaval. I was mostly in shock that day, not feeling like celebrating, yet because it was my habit, my practice, there it was, ready to hold me in that moment.

Celebrate this Moment

Celebration includes accepting the moment as it is, your Manifesting practice as it is, and yourself as you are. You can always celebrate just the fact that you’ve made it this far, and you’re not out of options, opportunities, support and resources - even though it can feel that way sometimes. We can’t possibly know what the next day or even moment might hold, so we need never give up hope.

I obviously survived that diagnosis, and the hysterectomy that followed, and in the coming days I’ll share more of my healing journey along with the results of my three-year check-up, which I expect to be a clean bill of health like all the previous check-ups since the surgery.

And it’s been true that much good has come of it, along with the difficulties of recovery and other huge disruptions and challenges in my life that year. Neither one negates the other. They are both real.

Celebrate Anyway

We can celebrate anyway. It’s a cultivated practice, so if it doesn’t come easily to you at first, be gentle with yourself and develop it slowly. 

It may start with an affirmation that it’s safe to celebrate inside yourself where no one else will know, if you have painful memories of celebrating with others.

You may begin by noticing what’s good in this moment. Even if you’re struggling, is there some part of your body that doesn’t hurt, something you can see out the window, one pleasant memory, a dream you hold dear? Anything you can think of that feels good is worth celebrating.

Do you have favorite traditions of Celebration? They may take place at certain times of year, but why wait? You can have a cake on your Un-Birthday like Alice in Wonderland. My darling husband, Phil, would play Christmas carols all year long if I could tolerate it, which I most certainly cannot. However, occasionally on a really sweltering summer day I'll permit a song or two from the Glee Christmas album that can just about frost the windows!

Quiet Celebration & Renewal

Besides the active ways we celebrate, this Step wouldn’t be complete without rest and reflection.

It’s often in the stillness that we can receive the blessings of our Manifesting practice most deeply. After the party’s over, we still have that profound inner sense of wellbeing and joy that honors all we’ve achieved, all we’ve been through, all we’ve even attempted and all we’ve received.

This is also a sacred time to once again allow the boundaries between the Manifesting Steps to blur and let this Manifesting Cycle blend into the next. For in reflecting on the cycle we’ve just completed we can already find the seeds of the next one beginning to take shape.

In the Essential Art of Manifesting, the end is only the beginning. 

Stay tuned for exciting news about the future of this blog . . . and a journey onto Substack!

Let’s Celebrate!

Meanwhile, I’d love to celebrate with you, and there are so many ways you can join me in Celebration this moonth!

• Reiki practitioners of all levels are invited to enroll in Find Your Reiki Path, a 4-week class designed to help you discover your unique calling to bring Reiki into your life more fully for deeper self-care, supporting friends and family, volunteering in your community, or even infusing Reiki into your work or business. Class starts 6/24, 12-1:30 pm EDT.

• Sharing Reiki with Clarity & Confidence is a 3-day retreat in beautiful Wilmington, Vermont, July 21-23, where you can develop your skills and grow your comfort zone, empowering you to talk about Reiki with anyone and offer healing sessions you can believe in. We’ll practice on each other so you’ll receive Reiki too!

• Join me every Monday 7-8 pm EDT for Manifesting Moondays, an online Manifesting practice circle. We start with a brief centering meditation and discussion on the Essential Art of Manifesting 6-Step Protocol. Then for half an hour we work independently on our own Manifesting practice, whether in meditation, journaling or other ways that help us Manifest our Intentions. Finally, we come back to share and support one another. And it’s all charged with the power of Reiki! 🙌

• If you’re new to Reiki or you’d like to recharge your practice, Quickening Reiki includes an Attunement, personal guidance for your Reiki self-healing practice and a Reiki Practice Circle membership with 2 monthly gatherings and a Reiki Resource Library.

• 6/15 New Moon and 6/20 Summer Solstice are free online ceremonies offered by the Priestess Presence Temple and School of Sacred Arts, where I'm studying in the Enter The Mystery program. Look for more on the Dean of this Temple and School, Elayne Kalila Doughty, and her new Midlife Maven program coming soon.  

• I’ll be hosting a 6/19 Summer Solstice women’s gathering at my home temple, where we’ll enjoy potluck and live-streaming the Living Temple ceremony. RSVP to connect@essentialarts.net to sign up for this gathering. You don’t need to be a member of the Living Temple to attend.

*Bonus Fun ~ Word Play!

I use the word “moonth” to describe a complete lunar cycle from New Moon to Full and on through Dark Moon. This takes about a calendar month, but not exactly. Lunar months are generally shorter than calendar months, being about 29-30 days. The common word “month” does come from “Moon” yet I like to use “moonth” to distinguish between the two.

Etymology

The historical mists of language suggest a sense of large numbers flocking in religious devotion to traditional festivals.

Conscious Capitalization

I capitalize Manifesting, Intention and the other Steps in the Manifesting protocol to show that they are specific to this practice and not the general terms.