The New Year always gets me excited.

I think it started when I was kid. My mom would have us sit down on New Year’s Day and write out our goals for the year. I would spend hours contemplating that list – dividing things into categories that I thought would occupy my next year. Creative, spiritual, physical, and educational were usually top featured. Later, financial became a part of it too.

For me, there was power in those moments: Thinking about the future, my desires, making them concrete. It filled me with possibility, excitement, hope – so much that I could feel my heart leap and swell at the potential of things to come.

Now, whether or not I make a list, that feeling starts up around the middle of December and takes me through the middle of February. I admit, I get excited all year about new possibilities, but this New Year thing is different. It has momentum. Promise. Tradition.

Caroline Myss talks about it as the holiday of the fifth chakra (throat). This is the chakra of the will, the place where the head and heart meet to discuss terms and desires. It can be a battleground or a place of melding. It is definitely the place to get our head and heart into alignment and open to some real power and possibility.

This year, consider the different voices from your head and heart. Weigh them with your mind and with your body. See if you can bring them together so strongly that you thrum with the possibilities. And don’t worry! January 6^th isn’t too late to get started.

Ever found yourself in a situation where you desperately wanted something far out of reach? A better body. An answer from God. Your relationship to mend. A happier life.

You want it so badly that all you can think about is having it. Everything else falls to the side – including your joy – and you live in a state of near panic, depression, anger, hope, and disappointment all the time.

But as good manifesters, we feel we must cling to the thought all the time. To keep the doubts that taint our prayers out of the mix – out of our minds. To make sure we don’t miss the answer. We curse ourselves when we forget to stay focused. And ironically, I think that clinging prevents us from actually finding the solutions we seek.  

This year, when making those resolutions, I propose another option, one much less distracting and much more open. The subtlety is in Attention vs. Intention.

Attention is conscious thought, all the time. It is the thing in the forefront of your mind, and holds the danger of distracting us from the present moment.

Intention is a moment of extreme focus – as much as you can muster – where you put your plea out to the Universe. Perhaps you do this in the morning or evening or the beginning of the year. Perhaps you write it down. Or post it on your wall. Then, let it go. Forget the specifics. Let it drift and sing on the wings of angels all day long. Let your soul decide how to best manifest your desires. Get out of your own way!

This is where Attention comes in. In the midst of surrendering to all of your possibilities, living your beautiful life, watch for the signs. Books and people and events and encounters that answer your prayers of the morning, or from last year, or that time when you were seven and wanted a pony. Anything can happen in that place of openness, and almost always it is unexpected, emerging from sources you wouldn’t possibly have considered.

In other words, stay in the present, focusing on the sheer joy of your existence. Your prayers, after all, were offered this morning. Trust that you have been heard and allow yourself to see the answer!

Then, if you want, the next morning or evening or whenever, bring yourself back to those specific Intentions. Remember and refresh them in your mind. Then offer them up again…

Questions? Feel free to comment or email.

Have a beautiful day.