Tangled in New Year Ritual Tinsel
Happy New Year to you!
Just like that it is 2025, and one thing I found myself caught up in like tangled tinsel was all the things I had “to do” to kick off my year.
The list looked a little something like this:
Reflect on 2024 to honour and release it.
Read The Desire Map book.
Print off the Unwind your Year workbook.
MindScape.
Join this Life Mapping workshop I saw.
Sign up for this intention setting workshop.
Choose a word for the year.
Make a vision board.
Print off the JanYOUary challenge for Mark Groves’ community.
Do this.
Do that.
Do it all.
There are a lot of really powerful rituals that can help us get rooted, focused, and kick off the calendar new year. I’m not throwing shade at any of them.
But what matters most is what resonates with you.
And who knows best what you need? YOU do.
Not this “guru” or that one.
YOU.
You are your own guru.
Ask her. Or ask him.
Doing 27 things for the start of the new year sounds like a distraction from actually sitting down and doing the thing that soothes your soul--the thing that gets you centred, decluttered, clear.
So I took out a metaphorical machete. EFF all of the shoulds. I put away my books. I threw away my lists and got rid of worksheets and papers that didn’t feel aligned for me.
Then I asked myself:
What would fill me up?
What feels most supportive and in alignment with me?
I knew I needed to ask myself what would feel supportive, helping, and self-honouring to me.
I dropped my shoulds, rules, and front-heavy expectations for myself for 2025 and took a deep breath:
Listen lady, you know best. What would feel so good for your soul?
I decided I wanted to spend a ritual evening with myself and a journal. In order to do so, I knew I needed to go to the city to get some supplies. I let time support me and my inner compass guide my choices.
I picked up a few magazines, roamed a couple stores for inspiration, and bought some snacks that I really loved—all to love myself deeply for the evening. When I got home, I set it all up on the floor like I was hosting a ceremony for me. I pulled out my best basket of woo—my essential oils, my crystals, my tarot cards, my quote cards, my incense, my poetry books, my pendulum, my singing bowl, and my meditation music balls.
I let my intuition take the lead and I just followed what felt nourishing, soothing, nurturing, soft, loving, and joy-inducing.
I rolled out my yoga mat, pulled out my journal and pen, lit my incense, and turned on some lovely high vibe music, and I had the most glorious, soul-filling evening by myself where I reflected on my growth, challenges, and celebrations.
It felt like pure magic. It smelled like total bliss. It sounded like soulful expansion. It looked like a ceremony space filled with abundance, healing, blessings, and alignment.
(After you read this... pause, take a deep breath, and read it again.)
I considered what to set down, and what to pick up with alignment, what interests I might like to explore, and so much more. I didn’t follow any particular roadmap, but instead let my inner compass be my guide, for it is so full of wisdom.
My pen filled page after page after page with intentions, celebrations, emotion, dreamy visions, and more. It flowed with so much ease.
I laid down on my yoga mat for a few songs.
I flipped through a couple of magazines and cut out what caught my attention, starting a little pile of clippings that included words, images, phrases of how I want to feel.
I had a gentle smile on my face the whole time. I went to bed with a happy heart. I honoured what I felt inspired to do when I felt inspired to do it, and it felt so much better than I could’ve even imagined.
The next day, on New Year’s Eve, I attended a comfort-zone-stretching afternoon sauna and cold plunge retreat event with Back2Nature Wellness & Adventures. To say it was divine and transformative would be a mega understatement. This experience is worthy of its own email to debrief the abundance of insights, cleansing and clarity that it brought forth. Stay tuned. It was magic.
A couple days later, I felt inspired to pick up my copy of The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte. As I flipped through the book, I landed on the pages that have a list of possible core desired feelings. I scanned the list for a few minutes, then jotted down some feelings that resonated with me. The next day I added a few more, crossed a few off. After it all percolated another day, I pulled out a highlighter and highlighted the feelings that resonated with exactly how I want to feel this year. It all flowed so easily. There was no forcing. No overthinking. Just so much heart.
On January 4th, I sat down on my bedroom floor and began mapping out my vision board with the clippings I’d collected. It was fascinating how I flipped through the same two magazines a dozen times and had different words and images capture my attention each time. I let it flow, paused as needed, tended what needed to be tended to, then came back to it. I turned on some music and had such a fun, heart-filling time creating a mixed media vision board masterpiece that I absolutely love! I got in such a creative zone that felt meditative—because it was.
Vision boards are about capturing the feeling you want to experience in your reality. As I was working on my vision board, still honouring what I felt inspired to do when I felt inspired to do it, I had a word pop into my mind with such clarity that I automatically said it out loud. It was like it had been served on a silver platter. I knew immediately this was my word for the year. It came to me with such ease.
My word for 2025 is: INFUSED.
Here are the other core desired feeling words for how I want to feel this year:
Soothed
Dreamy + delighted
Squeezing the juice out of life (*found on a list of Generator words from human design that captured)
Deeply fulfilled
Soft + slow + seen
Authenticity as a magnet
Rested + revitalized + reinvented
Exquisitely feminine
Curious, courageous
Trust the titration
Then, today, I did some MindScaping which was enlightening and lovely.
This whole experience was so expansive and spacious and aligned for me. I am in awe of the flow that unfolded once I trusted myself to know what felt best for me. The fact that I was trying to boss myself into doing 8 different New Year’s exercises and processes was overwhelming, scattered, and out of alignment for me. Slowing down the frantic New Year must-do-all-the-things-mindset and sinking into my inner knowing was just the antidote to potential chaotic self-sabotage and collapse. Instead, I had a soul-soothing, expansive experience that flowed with ease and fun and joy.
Sometimes we really need to stop bossing ourselves around.
(Yes, I heard that. Thank you ;)
Imagine how it would feel to give yourself a little grace; to offer your mind a hug and a blanket and ask it to just slow its roll and get a good sleep.
The New Year energy can be really great, but there are also a lot options of wonderful supports, and they’re not all meant for you. They’re not.
So stop treating it like a homework assignment that’ll be marked, or something that you’re missing the due date on.
You’re not behind.
You don’t need to be ahead. Ahead of what?
Find your own pace.
You don’t need to buy into the pace of the New Year energy if it doesn’t feel aligned for you. Find what does feel aligned, supportive, refreshing, soothing, exciting, self-honouring, revitalizing, or whatever other feeling feels best for you.
When you find your mind yelling shoulds at you… pause, take a deep breath, then ask your heart what would feel most supportive for you in this moment. Whatever comes up, try to make space to honour it. I promise if you practice this, you’ll find what feels best for you. It likely isn’t being bossed around by your mind, I can tell you that for free—and from experience.
Always in your corner,
Kristin
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