Beautiful Women,
Wow, we are a mere 2 days away from 2012. The energy feels palpable, doesn’t it?
Just about everyone I talk to is going through some major shift as we complete the year. For many this has been a bit painful so I want to remind you that the breaking down process is necessary and important for you to create room for your new intentions to emerge. Just breathe and get connected to the strength, the truth, and the power within you, allow those things that are no longer a match to who you are to fall away, and give yourself the opportunity to emerge as the butterfly from your transformation.
As we start to turn our attention to what we want to experience in 2012 I want to offer you a way to engage with this process that is quite different from the usual resolution and goal-setting.
This ritual is an opportunity for you to call up your connection to Beauty and that divine, lush, feminine essence within you so that you are dripping with it.
Mmm, already feeling it? Yes!
Can you sense how dramatically different it would be to create your intentions from this place??
You see everything we “do” is informed by the way of being in which we are doing it. This is the key ingredient that either guarantees our success and fulfillment or keeps it elusive just beyond our reach.
So the question is:
Will you write your intentions for the year in a rote list following a very orderly, organized, unfeeling process (or feeling a lot of shame and frustration at what didn’t happen this year) as “resolutions” that fall away within months or even days because they aren’t connected to anything?
-OR-
Will you dance with your visions and intentions, embrace them, MAKE LOVE with them, invite them to penetrate the very core of your soul and existence??
Read on to get the skinny on how you can bring in your 2012 brimming with vitality, embodied in pleasure, and bursting with joy. I guarantee this will pave the way for an extraordinary year. Please leave a comment – I’d love to hear how it went for you!
A friend recently gave me a priceless piece of feedback. He told me that to truly have what I want I must completely open up to it, reach out to it, dance with it. He used a dating analogy saying he saw me wanting the full-on relationship with the objects and experiences of desire in my world but I wasn’t even dating them yet!
I have been trying this on in various small and large capacities. An example of a small one:
I was in my steam room the other day. I noticed that my body was having a hard time relaxing, my head was racing around various thoughts, and I realized I wasn’t even allowing in the benefits of the steam experience. I was actually bracing against the positive benefits of the steam. I then consciously relaxed my body, shifted my posture to a more open one, and allowed myself to receive the steam breathing it in fully into my lungs and taking it into my pores. I emerged from that experience with an entirely different experience of the healing benefits of steam – something I would have missed out on had I not allowed myself to let go and receive.
I also applied this advice to my desire to invite in more financial abundance into my experience. When I inquired into myself I realized I had been bracing against money, afraid of the challenges it might bring into my experience. So, I sat with a $100 bill in my palm and took it in – I fully embraced it, studied it, celebrated it, thanked it. I noticed all kinds of things I had never noticed before on the bill and then welcomed it into my experience placing it on my altar in a place of honor.
Do you ever notice yourself bracing against the very thing you want? You are definitely not alone! This is a common experience with women.
Life is constantly reaching out to us. Are you reaching back?
OK so let’s take this now and apply it to our intention setting.
Imagine if you visioned and imagined from a space of being fully receptive and available to the experiences that you are calling in?
Imagine how your life might transform if you allowed yourself to truly feel what you are calling in? To reach out and embrace these experiences with a full-hearted WELCOME!
So, try this on.
On New Year’s Eve, set aside some quiet time. Some of you might have to do New Year’s Day but there is an aspect to the ritual that involves shedding and releasing just before midnight so I invite you to try to make that happen!
1. Open up the space for your ritual
By lighting a candle and sitting in brief, silent meditation.
If you have an altar you may want to sit in contemplation with your sacred objects. It may be that you’ll find that certain objects have energy for you and certain objects no longer do. I invite you to shift and change your altar to include only those things that hold energy for you now.
Allow the party of New Year’s Eve to settle down in your system and clear out any frenetic energy just by taking some deep grounding breaths.
2. Do something that will have you feel very lush, soft, receptive, and abundant.
That might be some light movement, yoga, or dancing or going for a hike. That might mean lying on your bed giving yourself a massage. That might mean taking a long luxurious bath or hot tub. Or writing, drawing or doing something otherwise creative. That might mean putting on your favorite dress that you feel amazing in. (This is one of my favorite ways to sit down and do my Femvolution activities – it helps me to be in my yummy, feminine essence.)
For each of you what this looks like will be different. This is your time to go in with yourself and take exquisite care of yourself. Take as long as you need to cultivate this feeling until it gets in your bones and you are embodied in it.
Remember, as you are doing this reach out and embrace these experiences. If you are on a walk, fully breathe in the trees. If you are in the bath, feel the water dancing over your skin.
3. Write down your responses to these questions:
What do you honor and celebrate about 2011?
I encourage you to not only look at what went well this year but also celebrate the challenges. Inquire within yourself about how you grew as a result of those experiences.
One of the keys to a truly pleasurable life is to transmute the lead of our life into gold. We can do this by recognizing and honoring what these experiences have given us.
What are you ready to let go of?
This is your time to consciously release those qualities and patterns that no longer serve you that you feel ready to release. Note that some things you might not feel ready to release. Be honest with yourself.
Pull out a 2nd piece of paper for the following responses:
How do you want to feel and what do you want to experience in 2012?
Notice this is different than setting goals. This is about inquiring into what achieving the goals you set out for yourself would do for you. This is about looking a few notches deeper than the accomplishment itself. This imbues a deeper context and significance into what you design for yourself. Be sure to look at every domain of your life.
AND most importantly write your responses as if they already happened. For example:
“The deep flow I felt this year allowed new business ventures to come to me that expanded my financial wellbeing to a great degree, enabling new homes and adventures.”
This is a powerful exercise that can put you in direct resonance with the things you most want to be, do, and have.
Remember to include the feelings and to EMBRACE these experiences within yourself.
Who would you have to be to make 2012 your most lush, vibrant, connected, passionate, alive and happy year yet?
This invites you to look at the qualities of being that you would need to step into to become that woman who has those experiences you are visioning. What would enable your life to become lush with vibrant growth?
Recognize that these are qualities that are already within you. The key is to simply step into becoming that woman. This takes a decision.
4. DECIDE
Take this opportunity to decide once and for all that everything you wrote down is what is so and there is no other option. Close the back door. Step into faith and the belief in yourself.
5. Bow to yourself.
You have just taken the first step toward living an empowered life and honoring who you truly are.
6. BURN! AND GROW
This part of the ritual came from a woman named Maureen Collins and I love it!
Burn each paper in separate dishes or shells, making sure all the pieces are turned to ashes.
When cooled, put them into separate envelopes or containers (film canister, Ziploc baggie, etc.) and mark “to shed” and “to grow” on the container.
Around 5 minutes before midnight, start visualizing all the things on the “to shed” list, and see them slip away, see them blown away and washed away, out of your energy field, out of your life and out of your reality. Then go outside and pour the “to shed” ashes into your hand and let the wind scatter the ashes away and release them and all they represent, as the old year fades away.
(For those of you going to parties, you might need to adjust this for your timing!)
After midnight, after blessing the new year, with the second container “to grow”, visualize all of these goals, desires, etc. coming to fruition, to this level of reality. I bring that envelope down to the garden, and with a stick dig a small hole, then plant these ashes in the earth, near a tree or in a special place, (for those in apartments, I encourage them to use their favorite houseplant). The ashes are a reminder of the life cycle, the power of nature and the honoring of Mother Earth, that these seeds of hopes and dreams are nurtured into reality, in the coming year.
Have an exquisite transition into the New Year however you plan to honor this moment. I’ll talk to you on the other side!
Love and Blessings,
Melissa
P.S. If you want to enter 2012 from a place of embodied clarity and pure delight with a group of extraordinary women on the same path, I’d be honored if you would join me for the Lush Life Immersion Program starting next Thursday 1/5/12. SIGN UP HERE
