finding flow, happiness, commitment, renewal and more…

Last year at this time, I was pulling my word for the year on for size.  WHOLEHEARTED.

It felt right. It felt clear.  It felt like what I most needed.  And it was.  What I wanted from wholehearted was a guide, a reminder to always be true to my passion, to my purpose, to where my energy would most be fed.  So when an opportunity presented itself, the essential question I had to answer was, “Can I do this with my whole heart?”  If I couldn’t, I knew that I needed to decline.  And while a few years ago, I would have heartburn over saying no, what I have come to realize is that my no makes way for someone else– the right person who can do it with his or her whole heart- to say yes and also makes way for me to devote more energy to my current whole hearted yeses.  It was a big lesson and one I am continuing to fine tune this year.

Moreover, wholehearted reminded me of the intention I wanted to have with my family, friends, in my hobbies, and personal pursuits.  When I got distracted from being where I was mentally, I reminded myself that I wanted to be in whole heart.  It was a compassionate reminder to reengage and one that I will continue to use.

As I began to think about this year’s word, a concept came to me really quickly.  REVOLUTION.  I wanted to shake things up in my life.  I wanted to help the women I worked with revolutionize their lives.  I want to do lots of fine tuning in different areas of my life.  When I read this quote from RUMI, it seemed to summarize the revolution I was seeking:

Set your life on fire.  Seek those who fan your flames.  RUMI  

But as time passed, I settled into a different knowing. When I considered what my year would look like after having lived REVOLUTION every day, I realized that it wasn’t that I wanted my life to look drastically different.  It was that I wanted my life to be more simple, more spacious, and easier while consistently making forward, healthy progress towards all of my life’s dreams.  Maybe what I wanted was the opposite of revolution, I thought.  Maybe what I want is easy.

And then something else clicked into focus.  It wasn’t easy that I wanted as much as ease.  It was flow.

I want things to feel easy- at work or home- even when they are hard because I am so into them that the work it takes is meaningful and pure for me.

I want to feel in the zone.

I want to have that nice consistent movement forward and that when I hit a rock, I can recall that you just build up more energy to finally surpass it.  To know that it is the journey that matters, not the destination.  To keep moving forward even when curveballs come.  To rise.  To be energetic.   To proceed smoothly and readily.  To have life be mostly even in the parts that I can control.  And all of that feels quite right so flow it is.

Over this past weekend, at visionSPARK, I got to watch women shepherd in their word for the year and also have heard about words for the year on Twitter and Facebook.  Here is where some of you are concentrating:

DESIGN.  WITH INTENTION.  HAPPY.  AUDACITY.  ABUNDANCE.  DECISIVE.  CHANGE.  BOLD.  MANIFESTATION.  BALANCE.  EMPATHY.  LISTEN.  CONNECTION.  ATTENTION.  FEARLESS.  DO.  SOAR.  ENGAGED.  FREE.  OWN.  GO!.  ENOUGH.  ENERGIZED.  CONFRONT.  NOW.  CHOOSE.  RENEW. PURE.  COMMIT.  WHOLEHEARTED INTENTIONALITY.  PRESENT.  VALUABLE.  PEACE.  ADVENTURE.  MEANING.  TRUE.  SPACIOUS.   

These words.  These beautiful, powerful, grounding, guiding words.  These are the words you have shared.  The words you have chosen for your year.  But they are more than words, aren’t they?  These are our wishes, our clarion calls, our dreams.  When the world is quiet at night, these are the words we will return to, our touchstones to gauge how intentional we are being, how much we are offering ourselves what we want.  These words are our home base when the world gets hairy or unfriendly or hard.  When we face our deepest challenges, we will whisper to ourselves, “courage, peace, commit, soar, pure, connection, flow” and we will know which way is true, we will see our way forward.  These words are our mini-manifestos for the year ahead.  May each one of us have the year of our imagining and know that though the year will serve us surprises that we could never have imagined, by choosing our intention this year with our word, we have made it malleable.  We have placed our fingerprint into our year with our word, and we have claimed that we can and will make it our own, even in the midst of its surprises.

Have you chosen a word for the year?  What did you chose and why?

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