I’ve always loved new year resolutions!

Weird, I know!

Not the kind that you are bound to break with guilt and shame.

I’ve always loved the support to create a focus.

I love being invited to take a moment of quiet, of imagining and dreaming about what I value. What matters to me. What I want to grow and what I want to release.

It is the end of December, 2024, and we have just passed through the longest night, or day, depending on your hemisphere.

As the last month of the Gregorian calendar year comes to a close, we get an invitation to pause and reflect.

Whether you practice religious or cultural holidays at this time, in whichever tradition is meaningful to you, or honor the solstice, there is a joy to taking a pause.

To pause and reflect and make yourself a promise.

Of course, life just does its thing, regardless..

All of the best things that have ever happened to me were not planned.

Like Love. Success. Hope. Community.

The best things in life are not only free, they are given to us.

Still, I agree with Nietzsche when he said, more or less, that humans are defined by our ability to make promises.

As the year turns, consider if you can make a promise to yourself.

Make a promise to yourself that holds a vision for our future.

Not for you alone, but for you in relationship.

A being in the world. A being that belongs.

Try the following exercise to give yourself a moment to review and reflect on the year we have just travelled through.

And then give yourself permission to make a promise to the future, to the coming year, to the world in which you belong.

Review and reflect

Invite yourself to take 20 minutes to review and reflect back over the last 12 months or so.

Have some paper handy, or some way to make some notes and sketches.

Invite yourself to recall …

• a nighttime dream or an unusual, mysterious daytime happening
• a moment of joy, little or big, solo or in relationship
• a body symptom or body experience that troubled you this year
• a time of rest, chosen or enforced

As you recall and explore each of these moments, use your hands to create a gesture to represent the main energy in each of these experiences.

Make some notes about each one of them as you explore.

Let yourself draw a quick ‘energy sketch’ as Arny Mindell called it for each one. Make a quick, spontaneous drawing to represent the main energy in each of these experiences.

After you have recalled each of these four experiences, moving between them. And look over your notes and sketches. Notice what you notice.

Invite yourself play with the hand gestures you created, allowing your hands to make each gesture in turn, and then shift and play between them.

Are there any patterns? Is there something that stands out? Is there something that seems to be missing?

Allow yourself to take it all in.

To feel your journey through time over the last year or so.

Notice any memories or thought threads that emerge.

Feel your being, over time.

Welcome what was nourishing and let go of anything that you don’t need.

Notice what feels less known, what might be new and emerging.

Make your promise .. dreaming into the new year

Now, allow yourself to focus on a feeling experience that you could nurture this coming year.

Make a promise that you will give this feeling experience your love and attention.

See if you can come up with a statement, just a few words, or an image, or a song, or all of the above, to anchor your promise.

I love creating a physical reminder of my promise, like a poster for the wall.

One time I actually made mugs with a photo and words for the year, and gave them to my family as Christmas gifts!

Explore what you might like to do to create a physical anchor for your promise.

Make your promise for 2025 and allow it to carry you into the world.

You’ve got this.

And the world needs you.

Love,

Hellene