Choose a Word to Guide Your New Year
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By
Rosie Molinary | 12/22/2011
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I start each year with the same rituals. In lieu of more traditional resolutions, I choose a word that really proclaims my intention for the year and create a vision board. Over the years, my words for the year have given me momentum, subconsciously willing me towards what I want for myself, even when I am not consciously thinking of them.
VOICE
The year I chose "voice" also coincided with the year that I started working on my Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I went into the program as a very determined and defined poet. I came out a non-fiction writer. In between, I found my personal voice, something I didn't even know I had been dodging out of fear, perhaps, of saying something that might counter someone else's understanding of me. I had embraced voice as my word for the year, then because of my desire to help others find their own. Truth be told, I had needed to find mine. Subconsciously, I must have known that when I chose voice as my intention for the year.
PEACE
I chose peace as my intention the year I became a mother. I was anticipating being overwhelmed with conflict over professional and personal responsibilities and worry over the best possible parenting decisions that could be made at any particular moment. Embracing peace—the idea that there could be stillness in my heart even when there wasn't stillness around me—was life-affirming and calming in the buoyancy of that year.
WELLNESS
In 2010, my second year of motherhood, I chose wellness. I had, as every mother does, laid myself bare in order to create a sturdy foundation for my son. But in doing so, my health had really suffered. I wanted to embrace intentional wellness as part of my daily care. By choosing wellness, I had a simple siren call to do right by me which also, as self-care always does, allowed me to do right by everyone else.
This year, I chose expansiveness. In the two years since we had become a family of three, I had made my world as small as I could in order to give everything under my wing the care it deserved. But I was beginning to feel like my world was not quite composed of all the right things in all the right measures. I wanted to take a look at what made up my world and re-embrace passions that I had put aside when my newest passion, my boy, had come into my life.
Twelve months later, I can look back and see so much growth and engagement. I tried many new things that thrilled me: like a winter garden, stand up paddling, using equine assisted learning to promote self-awareness in workshops that I help facilitate, hot yoga, and some other things that I just didn't love.
And while reflecting on those hits or misses has definitely been insightful, perhaps the greatest insight has come from realizing that perhaps my word was not quite right this year. With the benefit of hindsight—which is really what reflecting is all about it, isn't it?—I can now see clearly that it wasn't really expansiveness that I was seeking.
Yes, I wanted new challenges. I wanted to push myself a bit beyond my comfort zone. I wanted to see where I could take myself. But I didn't want to do those things just to do them, just to be expansive. What I can see now is that what I really wanted was greater energy, an energy born not from making my world bigger but from making it more pure, more essentially true for me. I also really wanted to savor the moment I was in rather than feel pressured to race to the next moment that I had scheduled in an effort to be expansive. As I consider my word for 2012, I am fully embracing what I learned from this year so that what I create—consciously and subconsciously—gets me even closer to the life I most wish to have. That, after all, is the greatest gift of intention.
Have you ever considered starting your year with a word? What words are on your mind for 2012?
Tips for Choosing Your Word
Want to set an intention for 2012 by choosing a word? Follow these steps to hone in on the right word:
1. Visualize 2012. What are three images that pop into your head?
2. What are five words that you hope will describe your 2012?
3. Consider your images and words. Meditate on what really touches you and that you most want out of 2012.
4. Focus in on your word. Capture it in a journal or your mind so that you have made a conscious commitment to the intention and then let it go and see where it guides you.
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