Candlemas
When the Light We Have Carried is Offered
Candlemas comes forty days after the birth of Light. In the Christian calendar, it commemorates the moment when Mother Mary brings Yeshua to the Temple, an event known as the Presentation. But beyond historical and biblical event, Candlemas is an initiatory threshold in the life of the soul.
Forty days is the sacred measure of gestation, transition, and inner preparation. It is the time required for what has been conceived in mystery to gather strength in silence. Light is first carried in the womb. unseen and protected. Yet nothing born of Spirit remains forever hidden. A moment arrives when what has been growing quietly within must be brought into the sanctuary of awareness.
Mother Mary enters the Temple not to display the child, but to consecrate the life she has carried. In the ancient law, the firstborn belongs to the Holy. Mystically, this means the first fruit of awakening is not ours to possess, it is ours to offer. Candlemas teaches the humility of illumination. Light cannot mature where the ego clings.
What we grasp contracts. What we offer multiplies.
Her purification is not about a fault that she carries, but about transition. Birth alters the fabric of being; so does spiritual awakening.
After profound openings — moments of awakening, healing, or deep spiritual experience — the soul cannot remain in the intensity of that state forever. Something in us has shifted, but our daily life, habits, and patterns may not yet reflect that change. So there is a gentle returning.
To re-enter sacred order means allowing our inner realization to settle into our life in a grounded way. It is the process of letting the nervous system calm, the emotions balance, and the body adjust so the experience becomes integrated rather than overwhelming.
To become realigned means our outer life begins to match our inner truth. Our choices, relationships, boundaries, and actions start reflecting what we have seen or learned. We stop living in ways that contradict our deeper knowing.
To become transparent means the ego is no longer trying to control, claim, or dramatize the experience. The light can move through us without distortion. We are not trying to prove, impress, or hold onto the experience — we are simply living from it naturally.
It is like clear water after a storm: the movement has happened, but now the waters settle, and light can pass through without resistance.
This stage is not less spiritual than the opening itself. It is what allows the light to become stable, embodied, and trustworthy. Without integration, awakening remains an event. With integration, it becomes a way of being.
The Temple is not only a physical place, it is the inner chamber of the heart. The Holy of Holies is the secret womb of consciousness where Divine Presence dwells. When Mother Mary enters the Temple, Light returns to its dwelling place. The body becomes Temple, the heart becomes altar, and what was hidden becomes living presence.
This story is not only Mary’s. It is ours. Each of us carries insight, healing, or awakening in the hidden chambers of the soul. Candlemas asks: Have you brought this light into the Temple of your life? Have you offered it through the way you live, love, and serve? Illumination becomes wisdom only when embodied.
Mary now mothers in a holy way through guardianship. She protects the becoming of light without controlling its path. In this way she models a deeper motherhood: tending what is growing without claiming ownership. When we release the need to own our illumination and allow it to move through us, it returns in deeper form, as steadiness, wisdom, and quiet presence.
Candlemas, Imbolc, and St. Brigid
Candlemas stands in deep alignment with the Celtic festival of Imbolc and the feast of St. Brigid, and this is not accidental. All three fall at the same seasonal threshold, the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and between Aquarius and Aries — when light is visibly returning, though spring has not yet arrived.
Imbolc, meaning “in the belly,” marks the stirring of life in the womb of the Earth. It is the quiet quickening before visible growth, the same hidden movement Candlemas honors in the soul. St. Brigid, keeper of the sacred flame, midwife of becoming, and guardian of inspiration, carries this same current of tending life that is not yet born. She represents the feminine presence that protects the inner fire during its most vulnerable stage.
Candlemas expresses this mystery through the image of Mother Mary carrying the Light from the womb into the Temple. Imbolc expresses it through the Earth’s womb beginning to awaken. Brigid embodies the flame that keeps life warm during the last cold stretch of winter. These traditions converge because they speak of the same spiritual reality: the transition from hidden gestation to consecrated emergence.
In 2026, this threshold deepens further as Candlemas converges with the Full Moon in Leo and Tu B´Shvat, the New Year of the Trees.
Candlemas, aligned with Imbolc and St. Brigid, and in 2026 converging with the Leo Full Moon and Tu BiShvat, marks a rare threshold where the returning light ignites the heart’s fire, the womb of the Earth stirs, and the inner Tree of Life awakens toward embodied illumination.
Across traditions, the message is the same: the hidden light is ready to be known. The sap rises before the blossom appears. The heart’s fire brightens. What has been carried in silence is ready for consecration.
How can we offer our Light?
To offer our light is to allow what has changed within us to shape how we move in the world.
It is offering our healing as gentleness with others.
It is offering our insight as clarity and truthfulness.
It is offering our compassion as listening and presence.
It is offering our strength as protection for what is vulnerable.
It is offering our gifts without needing recognition.
When our inner awakening becomes embodied in small, daily acts, the light multiplies. What was personal becomes shared. What was felt becomes lived. This is how illumination ripens into service, not through force, but through natural expression.
The Temple of the heart opens into the world through how you walk, speak, choose, and love.
How to Honor Candlemas
Light a candle and offer the light you have received back to the Source within your heart.
Sit in silence and bring what has been growing unseen in you into conscious presence.
Wash or anoint your body as a sign of re-entering life aligned after inner change.
Share one act of kindness as a way of letting your inner light become lived.
Walk in nature and feel the same hidden stirring of life awakening within you.
Candlemas is the sacred shift from private transformation to lived truth. The light born in the womb of stillness now stands before the altar of your life. Bring it to the Temple of your heart. Offer it. And allow the light you release to return as a greater indwelling.Below I share 2 videos, one on Candlemas and a beautiful Aramaic Mantra. The second video is from one of my favourite musical groups Light In Babylon.
Kipur, this beautiful song by Light in Babylon, is a contemporary musical prayer rooted in an ancient Hebrew poem by Solomon Ibn Gabirol, the great mystic-poet of Sephardic Spain, born in Málaga in the 11th century. Sung as devotion rather than performance, the song carries the essence of teshuvah—return—not as guilt or punishment, but as the soul’s longing to come back into alignment with its Source. Woven with the spirit of Candlemas, the feast of sacred light, Kipur feels like a candle lit at dawn and dusk: a quiet flame offered in humility, honesty, and awe. It is the sound of the soul standing exposed before God, where words fall away and breath itself becomes prayer. In this meeting of ancient poetry and living sound, light is not something we hold—it is something that holds us, guiding the soul home through remembrance.
Blessed Candlemas.
AHAVA,
Ana Otero
