Do you have a ritual or practice you engage with to complete your year and move clearly and powerfully into the next?

I find the holiday season, the closure of a year and the short, dark days all colliding in the same month to be slightly overwhelming. I love a good, grounding practice to take stock, reconcile and bring some sweet closure to what’s transpired.

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Week one is about taking stock. Watch below and get started.

Practice: Start by writing down anything that you set out to do, achieve, experience or express this past year. Look at both concrete goals and objectives and also experiences. Look at what you wanted externally, and also what you longed for internally.

Next, take your list and separate it into two different lists:

List 1: Goals and Intentions that were met and/or I’m satisfied with.

List 2: Goals and Intentions that were not met and/or I’m not satisfied with.

Some of the items on your list may fall into both categories. Maybe there are aspects of something that got met and you feel great about, but other aspects fell short.

Give yourself some space here. Take a couple of days to create your list and let that simmer. Come back and add to it when more things come to you.

When you’ve completed this part of the practice, reflect on these three questions before next week’s practice:

1. What do I tend to pay attention to and emphasize?  The positive or the negative?  The successes or the failures?

2. How has this emphasis or what I’ve paid attention to this past year, informed my habits and behaviours?

3. What judgments are present as I do this exercise, about myself, about others, or about how my year’s gone?

Once you’ve completed all of this, you should have your previous year really stirred.  Next week, we’ll start reconciling what you’ve dug up here.

Do you have a friend or partner that might benefit from doing this? Invite them!  Even though this practice is really a solo mission, in week three, I’ll invite you to do a partner practice that’s very powerful.

And please, join us in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think of this practice. You going to do it?! Let me know what it’s opening up for you and I hope to see you back here next week.