25 Begin Again

January 1st is an excellent time to assess the past year and enter into the new year with clear intentions for a happy satisfying year. Although, any day of the year is a good time to focus our intentions and put the past into context and move forward with positive intentions. In this episode of the podcast, I share my own system for reviewing the past year and making a plan of action for the year to come.  

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  Hello,  is Laura Pallatin. Welcome to The Practically Spiritual Show, where we support one another as we break with harmful religious and cultural indoctrination and create our own personal spiritual path.  This episode of the podcast will air originally on Christmas Day, 2023.

For a lot of people, Christmas Day is the biggest day of the year.  Since my children have grown up and my life is more my own, Christmas Day has become a much more subdued event. I do have friends and family we  celebrate, but I'm already turning my attention toward the new year and how I want to set myself up to have a fantastic 2024. 

I thought it would be really neat to invite you in to my personal ritual for ending a year and beginning a new one and remind you that we are beginning again all the time in our lives. January 1st just happens to be a very nice day on a calendar, but um, this can be applied at any point in your life.

I hope that you enjoy this episode.  I'm looking forward to sharing this with you. So, let's listen to the theme song together, and then I'll meet you on the other side.

  Welcome to the Practically Spiritual Show.  Together we will learn, laugh, and grow. Break indoctrination.  Rise above our nation. And so, oh, oh, oh. 

Welcome to the Practically Spiritual Show.  

 The week between December 25th and January 1st is very often kind of a quiet week, right? We've already had the big buildup of Christmas. If you have kids, they're happy at least for a week, I hope, playing with their new toys. They're out of school.

A lot of people take those days off from work.  And even if you don't, even if you are going to work, it's probably not going to be, uh, your busiest time of year, unless you're in retail. Now, if you're in retail, that's a completely different,  deal. But, for most of us,  that week between Christmas and New Year is an excellent time to take stock of the year that's passed, and start to prepare for accomplishing some of the goals that you would like to accomplish in the coming year. 

  People come up with amazing acronyms that sound like exactly what they're trying to say. Um,  so mine is RREDI, uh, not great. Anyway, it's REVIEW, RELEASE, ENVISION, DOCUMENT, and IMPLEMENT.   

January 1st  is a wonderful date to use to start again, but so is March 29th or July 2nd. Really, any day  where you realize that your life is just not going in the direction that you want it to go, and you want to begin again. You want to Take stock of what you've done. You want to start to move forward. 

I want to remind you that we're not starting from the beginning.  Anyone who's watched a child learn how to walk, gets a really good lesson in perseverance. They get themselves up, they take those steps, or they try to, and then they land back on their bottom.  

And then they pull themselves up  and start all over. But what we don't see from the outside is the fact that every time the child lands on their bottom again, they learn something. They learned, don't shift your weight this way. Don't lean that way, and they're wiring their brains to learn to walk.

Every time they get up again, they are getting up with the knowledge that they gained from falling down. And that's, that's what life is. We have opportunities to get up again every single morning that we wake up.  

I'm  going to share with you my process that I employ every year  that week  between Christmas Day and January 1st, and create my own ritual for moving forward. 

 First on my list is a review.  That's where I sit down and take stock of the year I just finished. How much of my vision board from last year, because I'll have that in front of me, did I accomplish? Is there anything on there I want to bring forward?  

I do an assessment of my year. How did it go? Did I get caught up in doing things that were outside of my main focus? Were they fun? Was it totally worth it? Would I do it again? And then, other things that distracted me that I don't want to have more of. It's really important to do that assessment of your review, because there are things that you, like maybe you had lunch with a friend once, and that's something you really want more of.

 That's going to come into play when we get to the vision board, but right now we're just reviewing and assessing. Once you've really done that and you've looked at the lessons that you that you gained from the past year or the past experiences, we're just gonna take a moment and appreciate all the lessons that we learned.      Those lessons, those falling down on our bottom, that's  totally worth it. 

 Taking a moment to have that appreciation of all the experiences behind us. And then, we're going to release our attachment to what did and didn't work out in the year past. Now, I like something called Magic Wish Paper, and it's pretty readily available.

I have started buying it on Amazon. I used to buy it in a shop when I lived in California, but now that I'm in Oregon, I don't have a shop that sells that that I know of. And I just love it. It's a special kind of paper. You write on it   then you wad it up in a ball and , straighten it out into a tube. Maybe I'll do a little video, show you guys how I use it. Um, and then you light it and it floats up in the air and it turns into a cinder. And I absolutely love this. I find it so freeing. It's not always convenient to have a fire outside.

 Magic wish paper is something that I use in my house. You could also use it on a porch, outside someplace. Probably a better idea because it is fire. But I've never had a problem with it in my house.  

And I've shared it at retreats with people without  having any problems.   My favorite way is magic wish paper, but you can write it on a piece of paper and burn it. You can write your words on toilet paper and flush it down the toilet. You can go someplace and scream it into the woods. Whatever works for you to get that out, right?

To release your attachment to what did and didn't work in the previous year. So that ends the part of the episode where we're going to be talking about wrapping up last year, and now we're going to move into envisioning what we want to see in our lives going forward.

 I like to make a list of everything I want more of in my coming year. Sometimes it's helpful to let that sort of flow. Acknowledge things that come into my mind that I would not necessarily have planned.  Not so much logical, but just acknowledge them.

More time in a garden, more time listening to music, 

whatever comes up for you, even if it isn't something that's practical or  logical that you would necessarily think to put on your list, but some things are just gonna come up for you. Maybe a friend that you haven't seen in a long time. Maybe that will come up for you. So just write it all down without editing at this point.

You're really just doing an emotional mind dump. What do you want to see in the coming year? And this is a really neat exercise because  You may find that there are some goal You honestly did not see coming. Like, that, you're like, really? I want to do that?

  When you let Spirit speak through you, you may be surprised what ends up on that list. We're all different when it comes to envisioning. I have a very, sort of, literal imagination. I can picture things very specifically. There's people who are much less visual, and for them it's more about feeling, or words might come into their mind. So respect your own process, and just write down everything that comes. 

 The next step I call it documenting. And that is where you are going to put this into something that works for you. A vision board, a poem, a narrative sort of speech. Um, you can write a song. You can write down words in different fonts on your piece of paper.

It does not matter. As long as when you see it it ties you to these ideas that we've been talking about. So everybody's going to have something different and that's exactly the way it should be because your brain is wired differently than mine and we want this to work for you. 

For me, I keep it really simple. I like colored pencils for this process. I know some people like to use magazines. That's totally fine. My problem with magazines is that it's easy for me to get so caught up in having to find the perfect picture that I will spend so much time doing that that I don't complete the project.  And then of course it's got to be in the right scale and I can get a little nutty behind that stuff.

So keeping it super simple with Colored pencils and pens is what works for me.  Make it in a size that you can put where you will see it, because it's not going to work if it's tucked away in a drawer. I like to put mine on the refrigerator, however this year I think I'm going to put it in my studio.

  Finally, we're going to start implementing the things on your vision board. Now, I have bought a paper calendar for 2024. I'm sure that a lot of people are perfectly happy using your electronic calendar.

And it doesn't really matter what source you use.  You can pick one item and assign it a month.  You can do that on your vision board, right? You can write words and then put under it a month that you would like to accomplish it. Whatever that looks like for you, that's the way to go.

  I'm just an old school paper person. I like that paper in my hand. And I got a calendar that's small enough for me to carry it in my backpack that I carry with me all the time, but big enough for me to actually make notes to myself. I'm really excited about that. I have achieved a lot by using this system.

Um, fibromyalgia really does limit my life in a lot of ways. And having that on my refrigerator that I look at on a regular basis has been really helpful.  I've written books. I've written songs. I've gotten myself out there and actually done, live performing of my songs. I'm recording my songs now with a local music producer. I really have done some neat things.  

 A lot of us have ideas that we don't realize,  we have dreams that we want to get to someday, but we don't make an action plan, we don't start moving toward them because they seem like dreams, but I can tell you right now, a dream is going to stay a dream unless you have a plan of action.

There's a story I remember hearing early in sobriety about two frogs sitting on a log. And one of the frog makes a decision to jump off the log. And of course there's still two frogs on the log because the frog made a decision but the frog did not jump from the log. And sometimes we can get really wrapped up in idea planning and strategizing and Looking at all the ins and outs and buying gear and  getting a new computer because we're gonna write a book.

There's endless, endless things that we plan to do, hope to do. But it isn't until we start taking action on those things that we start to accomplish our goals and achieve our dreams. And I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you're one of those people who wants to grow your life, who wants to achieve things,  and I'm here to tell you, you can.  You really can. 

 I hope that was helpful.  I'm  going to go over the list again. And so it's review  in which we assess our year and appreciate what has gone before. Some kind of release ritual where we let go of our attachment to what we achieved and what we didn't achieve, what was good and what was hard, everything attached to the period of time we're releasing.

Envision,  make a list of all the things we want to bring into our lives. Document, which was the vision board or some other tangible way that you record for yourself what you want to bring forward, and then a plan of implementation. 

That's what I am going to be doing for the next few days, and I will put a video on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube of the Magic Wish Paper because I just think it's really super.

 I'll show you guys my vision board too, so you can get an idea of what to expect for me in 2024. But as I said, you don't have to wait for any particular period of time. Starting over or beginning again is something you can do any time.  

This brings us to the end of another episode of the Practically Spiritual show. This topic means a lot to me because, um, because it is something I do every single year. Something I look forward to that has helped me immensely and I really hope that it helps other people too. You can reach out to me on Instagram, Facebook, threads, TikTok or Youtube.

I also have a website that I made for The Practically Spiritual Show, that is thepracticallyspiritualshow. com. Or you can find me at laurapallatin. com. I'm also working on creating a community through a newsletter. If you're interested in signing up for that, just send me your email address at any of the platforms that I already mentioned. 

 I'm so excited about sharing 2024 with you. I have a very good feeling about this year.  Until next time, take care of yourselves, and remember, there is no them. There really is only us. 

   Thanks for listening to The Practically Spiritual Show.  Thank you so much for sticking around to the end. It means so much to me. I love you. See you next time. Bye bye.