The Year of Your Heart
It is the start of a new year, and that brings about the annual question of how to approach the year. As you may know, I am not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, and I suspect many of you reading this are not either. They often sound like great ideas and generate great enthusiasm while making them, but they tend to get challenged, forgotten, and broken - often before they’ve really gotten started. Then you’ve got double your troubles: the first being whatever was troubling you in the first place that your resolution was meant to fix; the second being the inevitable sense of disappointment in yourself, or even betrayal of and by yourself, that creeps in from once again breaking your promises to yourself.
This scenario is most likely to unfold when resolutions are made from the mental and emotional levels, serving the wants and needs of those levels - which are also known as the false self or ego. Even though resolutions are meant to be good for you (eat better, exercise better, meditate better, tell the truth better), there still is likely to be a motivating factor built in that is (unwittingly) designed to boost the ego (“see how good I am, look what I achieved, or what I conquered”). None of that is bad, of course. But if the deeper level of your your true self - which I call your heart - is not involved in the promise-making, it’s not likely to be involved in the promise-keeping either.
You may be familiar with the concept of symbols vs. experiences - that is, that what I want may actually be simply a stand-in, a symbol for the deeper experience my heart is looking for. Maybe I want a more fit body so I’ll feel more attractive - because then I’ll feel more lovable, more acceptable. But if I work my butt off (literally!) without doing the inner work to love and accept myself no matter what, then I’m not going to get what I really wanted no matter how many hours at the gym or miles on the track I’ve clocked.
If I want to make more money so that I’ll feel more secure, but I haven’t done the inner work to become trustworthy inside myself, then no net worth nor cash flow is going to grant me security. No matter what I can buy, it won’t be enough to overcome the sense of lack and fear that I’ve built into my psyche.
Having a clear intention of the kind of inner experience I want really is helpful, especially if it’s my heart I want to put in the driver’s seat. So here’s my approach: go directly to my heart for direction. Ask my heart “what’s the inner experience, the quality of being I really want?” - and let that piece of inner wisdom guide and frame the doing and the having of the outer levels. But simply asking the question and doing no more is probably not going to guide me to the experiences I want, so having something simple in place to remind me of what that is seems to be a very good plan.
There’s a practice gaining traction these days that I find far more effective than most New Year’s resolutions: choosing a word for the year (or week, or project…). At its best, this is not a mental approach to grabbing a word, but rather one of opening and allowing the word to come to you, through your heart. The idea is to do some reflection on what inspires you, supports you, uplifts you, and then find a word (in any form or part of speech) that to you accurately names that heart-ful experience that you want more of. It might be something like joyous, appreciation, accepting, learning, peace, awe, simple, courageous, gratitude, willing. That word becomes your guide for making decisions, choosing actions, changing perspectives. I most recently did this practice with the word “cherished.” I looked for and created experiences that made me feel cherished. I’d ask myself, “is this decision aligned with my feeling cherished?” Or “how would I respond to this situation if I truly cherished myself?” “How would I handle this if I knew I were cherished?” You probably can guess how delicious a practice this turned out to be - and how cherishing myself led to cherishing others too.
Unlike a resolution, there are no promises to make or keep, no measures, no tracking the times or ways you use it. There’s just letting a word both reflect and enhance your intention (inner energy), which then directs your the attention (outer energy) into manifestation. You may be very very surprised at how that manifestation happens. It just might turn into the Year of Your Heart.
There’s plenty of information you can find online for selecting a word that will be a meaningful guide for you throughout the year, although some of it tends toward the mental/emotional approach. I suggest that the deeper the work you do in exploring the experience of your heart, the more likely you are to choose a word that will help you shape this year into a year of the heart. Deep work isn’t necessarily long work or hard work - it’s just very intentional.
My word for this year, in case you wondered, is “devotional.” Although that may have different meanings to different people, to me it carries my intention to allow a sense of sacred purpose to be with me and to suffuse all that I do. I’m settling into a new phase of my life - a big change a big change in my life - and I’m feeling more grounded, more expansive, and wanting to share more of this goodness. Looking back, I realize that it was a devotional intention that got me here, so I want to to continue that approach and see where it takes me. I suspect that, among other things, it may lead me to become more active in reaching out to you - perhaps more blogs, more events, and maybe (just maybe) the occasional Facebook post will become a bit more of a thing.
You are part of the sacredness in my life, so I hope you’ll feel free to reach back to me in the comments and share your own intention for the year.