The New Year: Never Abandoning Myself Again

Every year my spiritual family chooses words that reflect things they’d like to study or overcome in the new year. In previous years my words have meant a great deal to my self study. Past words include:

• Maturity: Growing up in order to be the adult in my own life and not relying on others to be the authority figures around me. Becoming responsible for my own self and actions and choices. Feeling my greatness vs. my smallness.
• Kartanya: This may sound silly to some but in my spiritual family we chose names for ourselves that represent our essence. We believe that there are two selves, the spirit and the ego, and that the meaning of life is to embody your spirit and abandon the ego. My word was my spirit’s name, Kartanya, and my study was to get to know that one better and explore a life living with my spirit’s qualities present. For example: my spirit is strong, deep, powerful, a warrior, compassionate, and deeply attached to the truth. My goal that year was to live as that, and to flag what got in the way of that.
• The warrior: After the study of Kartanya, I wanted to submerge myself in life as the warrior and so the next year I did a study of my strengths and how I got in my own way of that. My teacher lives a warriors life. She is absolute in what she says and does, giving her words weight and making trusting her effortless. Having her as an example of this has made all the difference in getting to know myself and my triumphs & pitfalls. The warrior battles for truth. It is the gift for everyone the warrior encounters. This is who I strive to be and who I inch closer to becoming every day I choose to do the work.
• Communication: When I first started doing this work I had to learn how to speak again. I had learned over time to shut up and abandon my needs because any attempt at getting them met seems countered by frustration and disappointment (hint: I was trying to get them met by the wrong people!). It was hard enough to meet my own needs, asking for something from others felt like breathing underwater. I would construct complicated sentences because I was basically fighting to describe why my needs mattered enough to be heard and met. I was embarrassed to tell people what I needed and would find round-about ways of asking, such as making my partner ask for me, or just suffering and hoping someone would notice. My job became practicing saying what I needed and wanted without a ton of unnecessary detail, and knowing that ultimately I didn’t need anyone to get my own needs met. Paying attention to my words was a powerful practice, one I still make the choice to do daily, and still struggle with.
• Impeccable: When I started to turn off the impulse for self-harm and replace in with an impulse for self-care, the success rate was not very consistent. I started by making a list of everything I wasn’t doing at 100% (nearly everything). I broke it down into categories; Home, Health, Hobbies, Step-work/NA, and so on. Then I put all the things I wanted to do better in under each category: keeping dishes done, walking the dog every day, meal planning, brushing my hair, homework, paying bills on time, doing something I loved to do, ect. It helped me organize all the things I wanted to be impeccable in (on a human level and a much deeper level) and helped me deliberate what categories I was lacking in. I wanted to study how far off I was because I know people who are impeccable with many or all of these things, why couldn’t I be? What would it look like if I was? Who would I be?
• Change: Finally we get to this year. This year was a year for changing and mixing up all of the stagnation I’d gotten comfortable in over the years of doing the work. I got comfortable in saying I was doing the work but not venturing into some of the major places I knew I needed to shine light on. I began this year by going deeper into the school majors I chose. I started this website and began writing my truths down which gave me freedom and exposed things I hadn’t necessarily thought were ok to share before. I became more dedicated to my chosen path in my career. I became more dedicated to guiding my son as he entered his more individualized years. I had goals of moving and getting a job I love. My grandmother passed ending a long and often difficult relationship that I learned from, but struggled with for many years. My closest relationships were changing. I finally felt like a grown up and began taking responsibility for myself, my son, and my actions by being less afraid of the consequences and more excited about the possibilities. I began choosing myself over others. I celebrated a decade of commitment to my sobriety and myself. This year has thrown me for a loop but it has been life altering in the best way.

Intentions: What to study this year?

On a particularly rough day recently I started calling and talking to friends as a way of working through some things. As we checked in, I mentioned how I had been setting and holding boundaries in my closer relationships and how some of those relationships were changing as a result. Because of these boundaries, things felt scary and exhilarating, but in the deepest way calming. I told this friend it felt like I was finally ready to start living. As if everything I had know before wasn’t living life, but me holding my breath in wait, avoiding the surface because of its unknown contents. But that didn’t feel right. I have been living, the struggle is living. It is a journey filled with reflection and just because the struggle’s been is omnipresent doesn’t mean I wasn’t living. There is some fear at the thought of thriving because my past-self tells me learning/making mistakes will cost me something (happiness, success, friendship, whatever) and that I am solely responsible for myself through my learning process. So by trying to save-face I disabled myself and my growth.

This year I unlock the prison doors (I’ve held the key to) for so long in order to experience everything this incarnation has to offer. I take responsibility for my self created prison and acknowledge that the “power” others held over me was not real, but in actuality my own mind making me the warden as well as the thief. I stole decades of opportunity, to learn & grow, from myself by assuming other people had so much power over me that I was subjected to their will. I became the warden to keep myself small which meant I had stagnated in this “safety”. This year I take back my power (from myself and others) and start taking some worthwhile risk. I will hold my boundaries with others and not freely give away my power to claim victimization by them. This year I will study where I still fall into this trap and hopefully take less and less time gaining freedom. What a gift to begin this new year, this new decade.

Have you, or will you, be setting intentions this year? Is there a certain word you feel like holding in your consciousness to study? What do you want from this year? Feel free to reply in the comments below.

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