Growing and Harvesting – Live a Healthy New Year Revolution

Happy November friends!

Now is the time when we gather this year’s harvest. Welcome new and old friends to commune at the table by your hearth in your heart. Lean back and take pleasure in the slow savoring of what you have nurtured this year.

While you enjoy the treats of the late autumn season, you may sense winter’s approach and its invitation into introspection. Now is also a naturally supportive time to contemplate how next year’s harvest can be beneficial to your spiritual and health evolution.

Open to all that is stirring within you during this threshold shift of the seasons.  When ready, respond with a clear proclamation of ONE WORD, one simple intention you will set and honor for the entire upcoming calendar year.

If you commit fully to this one simple Sadhana,  you will be rewarded a mindfulness practice that augments the vibration of your pure essence. Ganesha will place appropriate challenges on your path and empower you to see them through to their removal.

Do you feel inspired to take flight into your highest self?

Close friends and regular students who have attended my yoga classes near to one year’s closing or another’s beginning, have likely heard me speak to what I call my NEW YEAR REVOLUTION practice. On January 1, 2007, I said goodbye to the commonly practiced New Year “Resolution” and never looked back.

I had come to witness how New Year resolutions are too commonly born from some shade of denial or rejection, a kind of negative self-regard. In late 2006, a fellow yogi, teacher and friend, Rebecca Stuchen, shared with her yoga class her own recently acquired practice that involved replacing the resolution tradition with an annual word to practice. I immediately resonated with the idea of weeding out an old constricting practice and in its place growing a new empowering yogic practice.

Yoga translates into integration of the self, union with divine Self, and applied skill in action. To me, it has never meant rejection of any part of the self/Self. A powerful revelation was made:

Thus, my own personal New Year Revolution practice was born. Each year I plant and grow a new area in my garden of consciousness, a mindfulness farming practice if you will, that encourages more care, more depth, more expansion, more revelation, more SHOWING UP to these unique aspects of my human existence.

This New Year Revolution practice involves choosing ONE WORD and practicing full stewardship of this word for the entire calendar year. This one word is like a beacon, drawing me back again and again to the higher human potential path of self and universal love. Each year it will, without a doubt, kick my butt, turn me inside out, push me up mountains I didn’t know I could climb. It helps me refine the tuning of my lens of perception. The result: I experience more and more of the dazzling, beautiful, mysterious and wild worlds within my world. The Self within the self.

My chosen word for 2015 is UPGRADE. The word climbed up high in my conscious awareness in early November last year. In retrospect, I see how its power had started to take hold as early as October 1st with a very large upgrade purchase. In this year’s New Year Revolution, UPGRADE has been a catalyst for big action across all areas of the holistic wellness wheel: significant upgrade projects in my San Francisco apartment, vehicle upgrade purchase, upgraded mystical experiences in sacred foreign lands, upgraded spiritual teacher connections, upgraded career accomplishments and earnings, upgraded applied creative forces, including more upgrades I will mention in the closing months of 2015.

This practice has great building power. My 2016 word appeared even earlier in this 2015 year. Arriving on the waves of my awareness during the September fall equinox weekend, no doubt my attendance of a Sally Kempton meditation retreat in the power place of Esalen in Big Sur, CA aided this fast arrival with such clear intuition. Just as “Upgrade” immediately went to work prior to the actual start of 2015, my 2016 word,  having already received my acknowledgment of its presence, is already giving glimpses of first revelations and prioritized tasks for me to focus on in preparation of creating another beautiful empowered start to a Happy New Year. I will reveal this word on the 2016 Happy New Year Day.

I invite you to join me in embarking on a 2016 New Year Revolution life practice.

Close your eyes. Sit quietly. Breathe slowly and deeply.

Ask that you may be an open clear channel to perceive THE word when it is ready to appear, a word you will grow in yourself for a whole year.

Don’t force or rush it. It may take weeks or months to appear. When it does you will know. The word will pop up and repeatedly poke your consciousness.

You might question the word  (I did when Upgrade appeared.)

If it stays, it is yours to keep.

Once it sticks, you will see how sharing your word with others makes you more accountable to developing its practice and developing yourself.

Are you ready to grow and GLOW in the New Year?