With Winter Solstice upon us, it is a time to go within and make bonfires (figuratively and literally) to celebrate the returning of the Sun, burning the death of the past year and planting seeds for the beginning of the next year.
I have taken to having themes for each year. Instead of a long list of resolutions that can easily be forgotten by March, I decide to have one focus to really put all of my energy, blood, sweat and tears into. It is when we have one focus that the manifestation happens quickly, easily and completely. I would rather create/fix/transform one huge thing a year than have a list of crap I did half ass or gave up on.
2016’s theme was “Shit or Get Off The Pot”
It was the year that I was either going to finish the book I had been working on for 18 years, or just release the need to finish/publish it and move on from it. The threat of walking away from the dream really caused me to streamline my focus to just the book, so that it became my number one priority all year.
At this very time of the year in 2015, I was SO VERY tired of talking about writing the book…I wanted it to be written. My dream was to make the jump from writer to author and I couldn’t handle having “finish book” written on anymore intention lists. I wanted it off my “To Do” list and on my DONE list.
In order to accomplish this, I booked time in my schedule for writing that never got canceled…only moved if needed, said no to lots of social engagements in order to stay home and write. Most of my travel that year was either to writing retreats I went to facilitated by someone or more often, my own retreats where I went to a beautiful cabin somewhere secluded in Nature and did nothing but write my book and commune with the wilderness.
With all of this energy and focus, I created the open doors to meeting my team to help me birth this baby, and still continue to amaze myself at who walks in to help me to this day with different aspects of the book post publishing.
2017’s theme was “Being Seen and Heard”
2017 was definitely also a sub theme of “Year of The Book.” I spent the first part of the year creating the online portion of the book, editing, having the artwork created and finally getting it out into the world to be born by April.
April and May were all about creating an amazing experience and party for people to come and celebrate this accomplishment with me, and boy was it a night I will never EVER forget this lifetime.
The second part of the year June through November was spent being out and about doing book readings, book signings, getting interviewed on Podcasts, online interviews, Bullshit Bonfires, doing a Facebook Live challenge going live EVERY SINGLE DAY for 21 days, getting the book into stores up and down the coast and researching PR people to help me spread the word as far and wide as possible.
This past month, I was lucky enough to manifest something I am so grateful for from an amazing woman who works at Sony Studios, and who is also my Reiki Student.
I met her in a business coaching mastermind I was in for 2016, and we really had a lot in common…things so close to my heart like Amma, healing work, singing and even both of our roots were in the goth scene…we are definitely soul sisters! After the year of masterminding was complete, we continued meeting every so often for dinner and one night I was talking about my next steps for the book, and wanting to get it recorded in my own voice for Audible.
She offered to record me and get it mixed and mastered at the studio in trade for me teaching and attuning her to Reiki Level 2. This was one of those times in life where you know that you are backed by The Universe, and doors open one by one for you with sign posts guiding your way to expansion and wonder.
I am not a novice to being recorded, as I have been recorded singing hundreds of times in my band years…but never have I been recorded reading something so personal and so lengthy…and just me…no music…no drums…just my voice, my words and my soul expressed.
We recorded me reading my story for six hours a day for two days.
I had truthfully taken a huge break from the contents of the book once it was completed this year, except for the short readings I did of a few paragraphs at events or during interviews, but never had I went through and read it out loud to myself…most authors would not…we are silently writing it out and reading it in our heads during the editing process. I may have spoken out a sentence to make sure it made sense…but not 150 pages of sentences.
I was almost on a different plane of existence especially during hour 5 and 6 of reading into the microphone.
I literally broke down crying at 5 extremely intense parts of the book:
My parent’s divorce
My suicide attempt
My parents being by my side in the burn ward…together for the first time in almost 2 decades.
The near death/out of body experience in the burn ward
Explaining what my relationship with God is like now in the last chapter
Reading this whole book out loud and reliving the joys, the pain, the fears, the self-hatred of my youth giving birth to the self-love of my present and everything in-between really did something within me, as it sparked my theme for 2018:
2018’s theme is “Deep Physical Transformation”
Yes…it is time again.
After reading out loud my constant tales of dying and coming back to life literally once and figuratively/spiritually countless times, it turned a switch on in me that has been laying dormant for a while.
In 2011 I had a huge inner and outer transformation happen. This was when I focused on only me for the year and brought in juicing and put my focus on losing weight and bettering myself physically as well as emotionally and spiritually.
2012 came in and took an intense lover away, my band of 12 years was gone and my advertising industry career of 15 years gone…all at once, and it all truly left me floundering for a while.
That was when I put my all into building my beautiful healing practice, receiving business coaching, being out and about networking and all of the 20,000 other things it takes to build a business from the ground up. 2012-2015 was ALL about focusing on what I do instead of how I use my body and what I put into it.
Once the business was built and running smoothly, then the focus on the book came in 2015-2016, and again the focus was on what I create instead of what I feed to myself and what I do with my body.
2017 came in, and I have been more focused on what I am putting in my body this year. I went Vegan in June, have been having a smoothie filled with 70 different superfoods for breakfast every morning and am working on remembering to eat small meals throughout the day instead of forgetting to eat all day after my smoothie because it truly fills me up for many hours and then having a big dinner because I’m super hungry.
I feel as if the foundation for deep transformation has been set for me to really do some deep inner work with Shamans, Hypnotherapy and Meditation as well as getting out there and working out my physical body to bring on even more physical transformation in 2018.
I have really worked on the insides these past years by going on the deep journey of doing this work full time and finishing the book…time to push it even deeper and sweat some shit out in the physical realm.
One practice I give my clients who are wanting to release fears or anger that they have towards a situation or person is to have them either write a list of the stuff they want to release or write a letter directly to the person or people who hurt them.
The next step is the most important…to read it out loud. To get the emotions, hurt, stagnation out of your body through the Throat Chakra and then burn the paper for full release.
I never took my own advice with my book until this past month.
I lived my book
I wrote my book
I now have spoken out my book
Time to burn a copy of my book within love in a ritual bonfire this New Year’s Eve to release it even further out into the world.
The deep ignition of transformation I feel within shows me that 2018 will be a super powerful year for me…and just like I did in 2016 with scheduling in non negotiable writing time for the book, I will be scheduling exercise, healings and physical activities for myself and making them priority #1 for this year. Never canceling them…only rescheduling if needed.
2017 was The Year of The Book…2018 is The Year of Me
What is your theme for 2018?