Dear Friend
🌹 🎶 Threshold to 2024! 🎶 🌹
Happy New Year!!
Wishing you a truly joyful, creative, fulfilling year ahead with many adventures and some lovely surprises!
Happy New Year!!
Wishing you a truly joyful, creative, fulfilling year ahead with many adventures and some lovely surprises!
Releasing Resolutions and Returning Revolutions
As we bid farewell to 2023 and welcome 2024,
here are a few reflections on how resolutions and revolutions
can become medicinal and magical.
Resolutions emerge from words meaning to release or break down into smaller parts. Any goal we have becomes a manageable and doable reality when we break it down into smaller daily actions - for example: a resolution to exercise can involve signing up for a dance class or getting a new pair of walking boots. Too often we define our resolutions in terms of loss and negativity - giving up chocolate or losing weight - which are often laden with self-judgement and punishment, prompting our inner teenager to rebel. Instead of something we 'should/ have/ ought' to do, resolutions can become an enjoyable expression of who we are. When I connect with my love of movement and its feel-good benefits, it's easier to implement my exercise routines and release myself from distractions such as scrolling!
Revolutions come from words meaning to cycle. As such they are part of our daily rhythms - our breath cycle, the passage of day and night and the earth's orbit of the sun. They cycle through patterns and themes, integrating that which has gone before, just as the chorus of a song returns after the verses. A quiet personal revolution occurs when we return to our centre and to what is true for us. It can be as simple as taking a deep breath and regaining equilibrium in the middle of a crowded street or speaking a calm, loving word to someone in distress. Revolutions are powered by powerful longings for change, such as Martin Luther King's dream that his children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character. So our inner revolutions orbit around our axis, aligned to our values, ethics, principles and cherished loves, hopes and desires.
As we give ourselves space to still down and ask
- What do I want to Create in 2024?
revelations may emerge, returning us to ourselves - we may discover a longing to visit a long-lost friend, travel to a far-flung place, go rollerskating in the park or plant flowers in the community garden.
So as we cross the threshold to 2024,
let's not define ourselves by our failings, let us positively return to that which burns at our core - our love, passion, creativity, kindness and desire for a better world and let that inspire our resolutions and revolutions.
As we give thanks for the blessings and lessons of 2023, honestly appraising places where we have felt most proud and most humbled, we can build on all we learned. Let's set our strong intentions and dream new visions of the lives we'd like to lead and the world we'd like to build, whilst taking the simple everyday actions that make dreams a reality...
and then let's throw it all in the fire and surrender to the mystery of it all!
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