A New Year, A New Theme

What is your theme for 2012?

Every year I choose a theme for the new year.  Why?  It becomes my year’s anchor and guide.  Instead of waddling through a year, I have purpose.  At the completion of the next year, God-willing, I can look back through a lens and see my life with a given perspective.

My themes usually are about calling forth an inner quality of being.  In 2009, my theme was Self Care.  2010 I was “birthing my Soul.”

2011 was different as my focus was on a skill or profession.  I was cultivating The Writer.  To do this, I became a member, then secretary, of the Phoenix Writer’s Club.  I could be found in writer’s workshops, such as Stella Pope Duarte’s workshop Drawing Down the Muse.  Or at Paradise Valley Community College taking a creative writing or magazine article writing class.  As a guest writer for a local blog, I wrote weekly about the Soul for liwi.com.  I started my own blog soulfulresources.com which then turned into bonniebarnard.com.  I had four articles published in the Puma Press and one in the North Central Phoenix News.  Writing my second book, and struggling with the format, I hired a writing coach to urge me along.  2011 was about The Writer, for me.

What wants to be born within you which you will give permission to be cultivated throughout 2012?

This may require a journal, some paint, and possibly tearing up photos from magazines or downloaded from the computer.  Allow yourself time to be quiet and pensive.  Maybe make your favorite cup of warm tea, add some soft music or light a candle.  Sitting quietly ask yourself “what is wanting to come forward this year?”  “Who do I want to become?”  “What human or spiritual quality have I not yet lived that I am willing to cultivate?” “Soul, what do you want to bring forth in my life?“  As you ponder, draw, write, cut, and create.  Chances are the “theme” will take a while to pop forth.  That’s okay.  It is better to have some clarity around a theme than immediacy.  Then wear your theme quietly for a few days to feel if this is it.  Once you “know” it is yours, give yourself permission to “stake claim to it.”  This can be done in ritual, dance, art, telling a friend, creating a collage.  The “how” doesn’t matter, the owning it does.

Some years, I’ve then let it go and unfold in its own rite.  Other years, I have taken conscious action for its fulfillment.

This year my theme is “being me.”  Sounds easy, right?  I hope so.  I cleaned and cleared out so many of the “other” voices within me telling me how to live my life and what my life “should” or “ought to” to look like.  I’ve given up acting out of obligation, mostly, and yet I catch myself sometimes being lured into someone else’s idea of who or how I ought to be.

Ouch.

Recently a colleague asked me if their friend could stay at my home.  I said “yes” out of being “nice” but the truth was, I didn’t want a guest.  Why didn’t I just say “no?”  Being me in 2012 is not about being harsh, cruel, and dictatorial (although all of that lives within me, too).  It is about saying “yes” when I mean “yes,” “no” when I mean “no.”  Doing what is mine to do, and leaving the rest for another.  Listening to my heart followed by assessment from my keen mind (not the other way around). I anticipate much fun and  joy as I continue to align my actions with my True Self.  Authenticity, right?

If you’re willing to share your “theme” I’d love to stand with you in celebrating it.

Happy 2012,

Bonnie

Photo by DreamsTime