HIRAYA: Envisioning the Year Ahead
For ten years, I have gathered people in the dark months of November and December to dream toward the year ahead. What I have learned is that we cannot dream well from a braced body. Dreaming expansively is also an indication of our healing. Our inner state shapes the stories we tell, and those stories shape the strategies we choose. So this retreat does not begin with goals. It begins with settling, with remembering who we come from, and with listening.
The year end usually asks us to produce: a plan, a list, a vision board finished by midnight.
Hiraya asks something different.
The invitation
Hiraya is a Filipino word for a vision born from the heart: the felt sense of aspiration alive in the body. It is also the name of a yearly ceremony, a three hour gathering online for leaders, changemakers, and systems weavers at the turning of the year.
You are invited to arrive as you are. To set down the worries you have carried through these months, and to be with yourself for a while. You will not come alone. Each of us brings an ancestor who dreamed big, someone whose courage to imagine still lives in us.
Together we will weave the threads of this year: where our hearts were given, what we celebrate, and what we grieve. From that ground we will dream radically, sensing the many futures that are calling us. Using pakikiramdam, the Filipino practice of deep sensing, we will tune in with a one-word intention to anchor us on how we want to show up for the coming year. We will look honestly at what might stand in its way, and at the resourced ways we can meet it. And before we close, we will listen for a message from our ancestor to carry into the year ahead.
As we move through the ceremony, each of us builds an altar, gathering an object at every threshold. By the end, it holds the story of your year and the seed of the next.
You leave with more clarity, confidence, reassurance, and awareness. You also leave with an altar that keeps your hiraya close.
Hiraya manawari: may the wishes of the heart come true.
The ceremony at a glance
Five thresholds over three hours, with one break. In each middle threshold, we will journal for 10 minutes and then share with one other person for 20 minutes. The pairs change every time, so by the end each person has been witnessed by three different people.
1. Arriving - We begin by landing. Nothing is asked of anyone yet except to settle in our shared space. |
2. Weaving the threads of the year - This is where the year is honored, both what we celebrate and what we grieve. |
15 minute Break |
3. Dreaming radically - After the break we enter the dreaming space, with our ancestor beside us. We cannot imagine new futures with only the lenses that built the systems we are living in, so we will use the Entangled Time Tree in this space of dreaming. |
4. The word and what stands in its way - From the dream, one word rises. It becomes the anchor for how we want to show up next year. |
5. The ancestor's message - We close the circle where it began: with the ancestor we called in. They have walked beside us through the weaving, the dreaming, and the word. Now we listen for what they want us to carry. The altar. Before the gathering, you are asked to clear a small space near them: a corner of a table, a windowsill, a cloth on the floor. At each threshold we'll pause to find an object from and place it there. Five objects, five layers of the ceremony. Before the ceremony, please prepare: a candle, a small cleared space for your altar, a journal and pen, and an hour either side without rushing if you can. Allow as much spaciousness as possible. |