2026 - Could this be Your Happiest Year Yet?

Welcome dear ones to the latest Solo Episode of Finding Your Way Home; the Podcast dedicated to supporting your journey inward, and into a life that's profoundly conscious, connected and deeply alive.

Today, we're diving into a special topic requested by one of our listeners: how to cultivate deeper happiness as we move into the year to come. What are the measures of true personal joy, contentment and peace? And once identified in a way that feels authentically intimate to you, how do we begin to build this in our lives - emotionally and experientially? 

After a decade working with hundreds of clients, I would argue that this question lies at the heart of most others. Behind the yearning for success, a healthier body, greater income or a deeper sense of self, is a foundational desire to be "happy" in that realisation - to come to a place within yourself and your life where you can finally rest still for a moment, satisfied & satiated by all that you've created. So, in this week's episode we dive in - exploring the nuances of building your own "happiness" blueprint, and what might unconsciously stand in the way. 

So my loves; sit back and soak it in - from our heart to yours. Let us know what lands...

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 - Simply visit @ab_embodiment on Instagram, or our website at www.ab-embodimentcoaching.org

Sending love, wherever you're listening,

A x

Transcript

Anthea: 0:13

welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

1:07

Beautiful creatures. Welcome to this week's episode of Finding Your Way Home. So I'm tuning in with another solo, and as with the past few solos, it's been audience requested. We've had A real boon of requests around relationship dynamic, developing deep self-worth, navigating moments of insecurity in how you see yourself, or how you relate to others. And so that's been a huge part of the focus of these recent solar episodes. And I leave you this in the first few days of the new year. And we've had a request that felt particularly worthy of focusing our attention on, given that we're at the beginning of January, and given the way that one can often feel at this time, which is both really excited and loaded with all of the messaging around beautiful new habits and practices and intentions that you can set at this time of the year. And so many amazing, inspiring speakers that will give you all sorts of guidance on what they've discovered to be the best ways of optimizing yourself for health or for longevity, or for career success for the first few months of the year. But it can also be, by definition, quite a disco populating time. You know, you go from really downing tools to often an intensity. At the beginning of the year as far as work is concerned or getting back into school rhythms, it can be quite a lot, and it's added to by this expectation that we really seal the year in how we started, so people become quite anxious and quite precious about what these first few weeks involve. And so my first really encouragement for you is please stay gentle. Please stay gentle, at least in the first three weeks of this year. Give yourself the time to slowly emerge from your Christmas rather than expecting that you immediately have all of the answers and the entire bulletproof blueprint of how you're gonna live this year to come. And I say that not to diminish the impact that making Conscious Choice has because it is truly, truly important that we recognize our agency. That we take a really good, detailed, honest, self-compassionate look at what is working and what isn't working and that we make some decisions about our part in that. I was talking to the students that I run my training with, And you know that thing of combining honesty and compassion. When you look at your conduct and you look at your identity and you look at your relationships and you look at your relationship with yourself, it's really important., It's not always comfortable to develop a deeper, more intimate relationship with self, largely because it forces you to examine and land with. Aspects of your behavior that are not optimal for you or for other people? You guys know that I am a regular practicer of reflection and amends. Both of them are really important that I analyze what I could do differently and that where that's an opportunity to make a commitment to behave differently with other people that I do that. Um. What that requires, of course, is a baseline belief that I'm allowed to make mistakes. And if I was to offer another little nugget of guidance for the beginning of this year, it would be to hold that very close to your heart, that you are not intended to have any greater level of perfectionism than anybody else in the world. And if your expectation of them is one that is laden with perfectionistic mentality, I would recommend that you look at that too. Because holding other people up to that level of austere judgment. It's a real barrier for intimacy on both sides. You know, I've been reading a lot recently about attachment theory, and one of the patterns that I found particularly interesting when looking at avoidant patterning is that the avoidant personality will want to limit exposure to emotional intimacy. In themselves or in other people. And one of the ways of doing that inadvertently is by finding fault in the people that you love. And none of these patterns are conscious. So that's not to, criticize anyone that finds themself operating through that tendency., Nor if you're listening and you know yourself to be of more of an avoidant, patterning that you criticize yourself. That's not at all the intention here. But I found it really interesting when I then reflected on where are the moments where I've tended to critique other people or myself? And I know that the intention within me is always on some baseline to establish a deeper sense of stability through identifying what I consider to be wrong and placing myself at as greater a distance from it as possible. And that goes for the traits within me, and that goes for the traits within other people that I find really challenging to navigate. So I leave that there for you as a little thought. And now I am officially going to dive into the topic that was requested, but it sort of touches a little bit on some of the guidance thus far. The question that is really tender that we've been asked is how to cultivate greater happiness. And gosh, this really is a one, and it's a particularly relevant one at this time of year because. If I really drill down on what are all of the habits and all of the goals and all of the beautiful intentions, the words of the year, all of these amazing ways that we try to mark and commemorate and in some ways style the year to come. What are they all oriented toward on some level? Fundamentally, all we're really looking for is a greater level of contentment and peace. And so when someone says to me that they want to be happier, where my mind goes to is those words, contentment, peace, ease, fulfillment, appreciation, a sense of safety, uh, a feeling of being loved, a quality of enoughness, you know, ultimately. Those are the core. There's a lot that lives on top of that. Stimulation and excitement and passion and purpose and creativity, a feeling of usefulness, visibility in the world, all of that to, it's what makes the color and the vibrancy of life, the, the energy. But you can't get to that energy if you don't have the foundations underneath. And I would argue that that stability is a huge amount of what we're hungry for. What we're thirsty for, what we're seeking so often in people, places, and things. So as you listen to this, my first request for you would be that you take out a piece of paper and you write down on that piece of paper what happiness means for you. And that might look like words or it might look like a rhythm of your life that feels particularly appropriate for you. Or maybe it's more to do with, these are the things that I'd love to be involved in or the causes that I'd like to be a part of, or this is how I would love to be cherished and held by the people around me. Maybe they are more softly external things, but even if they are, I'd like you to take a minute to just write down what are the internal states of being that I'm seeking. So that's part number one. You could just pause this and then take your time and do a little bit of writing around what that means for you, because ultimately no one on the outside can really give you the blueprint for what happiness is for you, nor will you as much as I'm asking you to sense into it based on your experience thus far of your life, as much as I am asking you to do, that you will not be able to cultivate your experience of happiness theoretically. Not by creating the most perfect nighttime routine, not by getting the perfect substack rhythm or creating the most amazing sales pipeline, it won't be from those things, It will be from allowing yourself to live in the world or be from allowing yourself to have a discovery season. Of what really creates some of those states for you, a state is a lived experience. It's something that you allow yourself to embed into and embody. You know, the most recent time that I can think of where I really felt open, spacious, inspired, attuned, appreciative was when I visited the site that I'm hosting our retreat in this year to come. And it was partly the impact of the sea, and it was partly that I had taken a kind of wild 36 hour trip away from my London life. And it was partly because I just stayed away from my phone and my laptop and I let myself really soak in a new atmosphere. And I discovered through soaking in that atmosphere, what I loved the beauty. And the peace and the quiet and the gorgeous conversations that I had with the people that were on site and the people in the local village. It was really meaningful for me. And the image of that has created a real anchor. Over the months that have been since then, which have been phenomenally busy and they've had a lot more of that highlight quality that I was mentioning before. This insulation and the opportunities to be live with people and the closing ceremony for our container and all of the busyness of work and all of the incredible podcast recordings, all of that has been so rich. But that's been that layer above my foundations for me, just for this creature. are moments when I can ground. And appreciation is a really important one. If that feels like a, an emotion or a concept that is somewhat lacking in your life, it's one that I would really encourage you to begin to cultivate. I like appreciation more than gratitude because certainly in the way that a lot of us learn gratitude as a practice, it can feel almost, not punitive. But it can feel almost slightly forced. Like someone from the outside is giving us a moral imperative that we need to be grateful. Otherwise, you know that there's some kind of punishment that might be involved. Appreciation for me implies a pause. It's like that moment where you spend long enough in a park watching the sunlight hit the auburn leaves. It's that, and you appreciate the light in that moment. It's got a quality of the sacred to it. For me, that's a lot of what happiness is, appreciation and contentment. Then live alongside each other because what contentment implies for me is a feeling of enoughness and satisfaction with where I am and what I have, and I think it's something that our society doesn't wildly encourage. The quality of more is one that I am so familiar with. A lot of my experience, particularly when I was my least happy and I, I've had periods, I've had periods that have seemed really profoundly successful on the outside and internally have been really stark. And so I know what I'm talking about here, at least from a personal perspective. I also know what I'm talking about from the perspective of having worked with so many. I, I haven't ever counted it, but you know, we'll be in the hundreds by this point. Having worked with so many people on creating deeper, richer, more fulfilled lives in their work or in their personal spheres, and the capacity to be in a quality of enoughness contentment with right here, right now. To slow down long enough and to adjust your mentality long enough to be with this and to find the beauty in this. It's one of the most important skills in life because this place of thirst, this place of wanting this desperation to evacuate your current circumstances, that's the pain. That is the most consistent and the most profound form of numbing and suffering. And by and large, that experience comes from a deep, deep, deep sense that's often been with people for decades of disquiet and unsafety. And so we really wanna know if that's going on for us. Every time you reach for your phone. When something is troubling you or something feels naked or unfulfilled, every time there's a conversation that you leave or a client experience that you leave where you feel on some level, oh God, there was something there that wasn't quite right. You feel exposed or you feel less than you are insecure or you're anxious that you haven't done a good enough job. You can't read for the signal from the other person that you are. Held in that moment or that they care about you or that they understand what you mean. I mean, these things, they're really simple and they're also so subtle and there's so many people, gosh, it makes me feel quite emotional saying this. There's so many people walking around on our planet that are on some level distorted and then. We are bumping around at each other like bumper cars We bump at each other from our places of misunderstanding and fragility and fracture and, and whole rather than wholeness. And we do our best. Of course, we do. You know, coming outta the Christmas season, you might be really aware of that. It's just a ton of people that don't really know how all of this works trying to do their best. It's not until you have those amazing deconstructing conversations after Christmas that everyone gets a better understanding of, oh, that's what that person was going into that context with, oh, this is the understanding that I needed in order to be able to navigate you better during that intense family context. Very little of that conversation is actually had, and it's because people get scared. They get scared of raising a difficult dialogue, or they get scared about expressing a need because when they've done that in the past, it hasn't been met with sweetness or even basic honoring. I find a lot of the time, we are far more. Spacious and polite with people we know much less than the people that we know, much more intimately. In a sense. All of our own staff gets involved, and one of the things I've been reflecting on recently is the way that, particularly with the work that I do, I support a lot of people in their relationships, their romantic relationships, because even if someone comes to me and they want to progress their career. Actually stunningly. And of course, so many of the patterns that are enacted in your professional life are also the ones that get enacted in your personal. And so this theme of how do I love more deeply, how do I come toward my partner more skillfully? Um, how do we really make relationship last? How do we reignite passion and intimacy in places where there's been confusion and mistrust? It's a huge focus of mine. Uh, it's arguably the work that I think is the most important in the world. You know, what we do for a living. I love, I find it fascinating and really important, especially when I'm working with people that have deep senses of purpose. But I, for me, the deeper purpose is always gonna be to come back to humanity and how we can make a better job of that. And if you can make a better job of that, actually you do end up then winning professionally because all of you do collaboratively, collectively. Anyway, I'm sidetracking, but one of the things that. I've been playing with recently is. Almost reimagining what we expect from a relationship and what we expect from ourselves. IE, for me, for the last decade, I have had daily practice. Daily practice that brings me into my most centered way of being daily practice that continues to stimulate my mind. It's a, a form of daily responsibility taking, and I have the luxury of that and I do totally recognize that it's a luxury because a lot of my last decade I've been single. Which for a start just means that you're much more in ownership of your day. I've lived, uh, either with other people or on my own, but even when I've been living with other people, I've had my own space. I have a job that is constantly bringing me back to questions around authenticity and grace and integrity. Also, I don't have children. And so my responsibility is to myself, it's to my clients, it's to my family, it's to my friends, but I'm not, I'm able to direct my time in my day more than I know is the case for many people. And so, as I say this, I really do want to reinforce that. I recognize that there are very different contexts. A lot of people listening to this will be navigating. And so please integrate this in whatever way is useful for you. But I've been reflecting on that practice, that practice, of really knowing that my wellbeing, my center is my job. Because a lot of what I observe, and this is particularly the case in romantic relationship, and particularly the case when we're in a wild socializing season like Christmas, is that there's a huge undue responsibility that is placed on romantic relationship or other intimate relationship that it gives us the things that we need to take ownership for ourselves. And I use the word practice because actually that daily commitment of meditation, of prayer practice, of reading, of um, some form of reflection that notices the places in my lived 24 hours where I've been optimal and where I've behaved not quite in accordance with my own values. That reflection is really critical for me to choose a different path the next day. It builds the awareness. It doesn't lead to excessive naval gazing, but it does lead to different decision making. And what I also find, and I sort of touched on this a little bit at the beginning, is if I have the humility to recognize where I've. I've gone against my own standards for myself without punishing myself for it. Then what that also does is it allows me to lean into greater intimacy with other people, because if I can be accountable with them, I let them in a little bit to the challenges that I experience. I, I let them get to know me better, and that ultimately creates. The best bond, the most sustained bond, and the most fluid adaptation when things externally become difficult and you need to bring in your team. So when I talked before about people bumping up against each other, a little bit of that is because there isn't quite enough self-supporting. You either fall into two camps and maybe you ping pong between these intensive self-reliance where you are actually so suspicious of trusting anyone else that you are unwilling to let them in on any area of deep intimacy within yourself. Because the risk of losing your independence and the risk of what they might think if they see you is imperfect, is too great, or a level of moving outside of yourself where you are less willing to look at. The sense of uncertainty or the areas of healing that need to be. Explored and analyzed within you. In a sense the grayness or the darkness inside. And so you distract yourself by moving out of yourself, out of your body, out into the external world and out into relationship constantly. And I've done both of these things so I can share that neither of them take to the extreme is a good idea. And what we really wanna be developing, if we go back to that idea of happiness, is a really healthy balance between the two that I lean into relationship for all of the beauty that it creates, that I indulge in physical connection with other people, that I go into spaces where we're talking about topics that feel really important and guiding for me, and that I also take daily responsibility for my own happiness. By identifying the key metrics of that for me and the key actions or practices that move the needle. You know, I know that for me, a day where I'm not in movement practice is not a good day for, it has to be early in the morning. I need to get into my body. I need to move. The stagnance or the stuckness. I have very intense dreams, and so a lot of that needs to be circulated and shifted out of my body. It's the same reason why I did a lot of breath work practice over the course of 2025. It's the same reason that I shake almost daily dance almost daily. I need that physicality in my life. That is what places me in the best. Possible capacity to be contented, to be peaceful, to be energized in this day. It's also the way that I tell myself that I love myself'cause I delight in movement. I find it the most delicious pleasure. And that might not be the case for you as you listen, you know, might not be a movement jama, but. If you are then denying yourself, that is silly and it's unnecessary, and I would really encourage you to place greater emphasis on what you actually enjoy over the course of this month to come, because not least as you're building habits, the more emotionally meaningful your reason behind the habit is, and the more emotionally enjoyable the experience is, the easier it is to maintain. My invitation would be not that we are leaning into the uncomfortable numbing form of wanting and pleasure, it's that we are leaning into genuine enjoyment as a key metric in your life, as something that is validated and important for you. And if you find that challenging then that's also a place to start. I think what I'd also say on this happiness theme is that it's really important. To evaluate the things in your life that are not working, and in some ways I don't really wanna dwell too much on what could feel like negative scrutiny. Of all of the things in 2025 that didn't feel optimal, et cetera. But you will have both a rational understanding and a felt sense of the relationships or the practices or the business opportunities, or the daily ways of treating yourself that really do not work for you. And I would really encourage you to place greater emphasis on beginning to refine yourself away from those across the course of the month to come. Because even if they're low level, they are a low level harm that depletes your energy, that builds up resentment that, negatively utilizes your time. You are on one level committing to and investing in those things every time you passively choose not to change them and. My invitation would be there is a life that is much more rich and deep and beautiful for you. That does not need to involve any of those compromises of yourself, any of those compromises of your happiness. And there might be some steps involved in beginning to move away from those, uh, negative stimuli, but those steps will absolutely be worth any challenge that you encounter in enacting them, not least because you will in that process, build your sense of self agency, which is a huge part of what ultimately creates for people a feeling of joy and fulfillment in the world. Is the degree to which they feel that they can trust themselves, that they can rely on themselves, that they know that they have their own back. As a partner in- life, so I'm gonna leave you with all of those things to chew over. And I would love as always, to know any thoughts that arise, any specific questions that you have in relation to this episode, and as you've all been doing, any topics that you would really love for us to continue to cover in this little sequence of solos before the brand new season of Speaker interviews is released to you at the end of January. I send you love for now, my friends. Speak soon.

Anthea: 27:49

Gorgeous listeners. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.