Episode 143 - Choosing Your Word of The Year
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Hello, beloveds, and welcome to today's episode. Jumping on here before we start to let you know that this episode is actually a recast of the previous year's Word of the Year episode, when I was revisiting how to share this cherished and important practice that I do every year of choosing my Word of the Year. There's really not that much more that I have to say about it than I recorded last year, and so, because we close this time of year anyway, I am sharing this episode again and we will see you with a fresh, brand new episode when we return from holiday break on January 9th. Enjoy, and I can't wait to hear your Word of the Year. Hello and welcome to the Come to your Senses podcast. I'm your host, embodiment-based coach, mary Lofgren. Here we explore how to live bravely and beautifully through a lifestyle of embodiment. You'll hear gems to empower you around mindset, mindfulness, somatic psychology and neuroscience, as well as beauty, food style and the art of slow living to meet your soul through the senses. I am so happy that you're here. Let's begin. Hello, beloveds, welcome to the podcast. Happy week of the new year. It is New Year's, 2022 at the time of this recording and in today's episode, I'm really excited to bring you a process that I've been doing for the last couple of years that has truly changed my life and changed the way that I approach growth and goal setting, and that is Word of the Year. So in 2020, actually in 2019, right before 2020, I chose the word that scared me the most, which was positivity. I did an exercise, which I'm going to tell you a little bit about, and one of the prompts was you know which is the word that scares you the most? And in order to see my life through a more positive, less jaded, less complaining and victimized lens, I knew in my body that what I needed to open to was more positivity and not toxic positivity as we know, can be really harmful and can actually intensify that jadedness and that pushback response. But simply including the whole story of a picture, which is that it can be both and and be both good and annoying, or both good and frustrating, et cetera, et cetera. And I had an image of myself, you know when I imagine myself radiating this quality of positivity that I wanted. I saw myself sitting in this specific place and I was wearing a white furry sweater and white jeans and I just looked so at peace. I've never worn all white before. It's not a common outfit for me, but I just looked so at peace in my vision and so receptive. And wouldn't you know, friends, not 10 months later, I was doing a photo shoot and there I sat white jeans, jeggings, actually white fuzzy sweater, feeling absolutely lusciously dolled up and in my feminine, and so confident and so proud because I really let that word reshape me that year and used positivity as a form of power that year and it got me great results. And since then I have been using the word of the year exercises that I'm going to share with you today. The exercises I'm going to share with you are a way of pulling from the fertile soil of the year past. So anytime we plant seeds of our intentions, the richest place to plant them is in reflection and in appreciation for what the year past has held. We're also going to talk about an exercise to envision what it is you want to see this year. And if you're like me, you know for many years I resisted setting intentions at the New Year because I was annoyed at all the pressure to set intentions and to slay my goals, and you know all of that, and I was also very afraid that I would choose the wrong one, you know, or I would be so overwhelmed with all the things that I wanted to shift or Intend or change that I would just write this long laundry list and then have zero focus and containment, which is the absolute enemy of creation, as we'll talk about later. And so we'll talk about how to unearth and source your intention from an embodied place and a place that feels like a notch lighting up on your compass Rather than a firestorm whipping around in your mind of all the things that you want to improve. And then, finally, I'm gonna share with you a Magical ritual that you can do that will help ground your intentions into a visual piece, not a vision board, although I actually am a believer in vision boards, but vision boards, I don't know. There's such something a little bit creepy about vision board culture, and If you love vision boards, god bless you, I affirm you, but this is gonna be called a magic collage, which sounds different only in name, but the process that I'm gonna walk you through is A bit different than a vision board, although it's kind of rooted in vision boardiness. So you know, and so this is a juicy episode, my friends, this is kind of like a master class, and you may want to revisit this episode with your journal and a pen and press pause on some of these questions. And with that, let's dive into our gems. So the first gem is around your orientation to desire, themes and intentions, a Quote that I share often. Here is Something that the Buddha once said which is all of your life arises from the tip of your intention, and Typically at the start of a new year, we're in Capricorn season, everybody. So this is your time to get your hands in the dirt, and with the language of warfare that is often associated with Creating your goals, such as to slay, crush, smash and kill your goals you might be feeling a little squeezed, you might be feeling a little pressured, a little adrenalineized. And so the first gem and this is an embodiment exercise. So I want you to notice what you feel in your body when I say the words slay, crush, smash, kill All those words that I used before, that can become in words attached to your goals. And now I want to try a few different words and see how they land in your system Enchant, bewitch, charm, delight. I notice in my own body that those words just melt differently on my tongue and I wonder what you feel. Is there a sweet spark happening in your nerve endings? Is there a warm build happening in your belly? And if so, I want to give you the chance to reflect on which of those feelings and sensations feels more sustainable. So you may have noticed that with the first set of words, there was a commanding element and a forward-facing element and a little bit of an aggressive element, all of which is powerful, magic and very important and necessary for a successful human existence Human skills to have. They're actually related to my personal word of the year, and what you also may have noticed is that there was a required tension in order to embody those words of the year. One of my highlights of this year past was attending a celebration of life for my dear friend Dahlia's husband, justin, and I've talked about him on the podcast. He was a retired Marine and I remember, during the national anthem, watching the Marines stand at attention and the way in which every muscle in their body was tightened their fists, their spine, their face, their eyes were focused. It was very beautiful to witness and it also gave me a lot of information about that particular kind of energy which is tense and intense, whereas bewitch and charm and delight and seduce. What I notice in my own body around those words is that there is an echo of soft pleasure, there is an intrigue where I don't want to just charge forward but I want to lean in closer, and there's actually a melting sensation that happens in my own body. And so if you have ever set goals or chosen a word of the year and then fallen flat on following through, I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you. There is, however, something wrong with relying solely on tension and adrenaline for creation, because when we look at anything in nature, things don't typically grow in tension. Flowers are strangled when they try to grow ensnared by weeds, and so, again, if you struggle to sustain both dreaming and action, that kind of magic combo, it's not, in my opinion, because you're too weak or too undisciplined or too soft. It's because you simply haven't been taught how to use your full system of intelligence. As feminine beings, we drown in overcapability. Our ability to produce is 10% of our magic. It is the tip of the iceberg. What constitutes the bigger, chunkier, meatier, juicier, more magical parts of us is creativity, magic and magnetism. So that is your first gem is shifting your orientation, where you're not just setting an intention or writing down a list of things you want to accomplish, but you are participating in magic when you choose your word of the year no-transcript. As I mentioned earlier, I find that one of the most potent ways to create is to look back and reflect on what has already been created, and so I'm going to share some questions with you about the year past and invite you to reflect on these journal, on these, and the first is what just happened, what transpired this year? You know, if you're like me, you have a hard time remembering what you had for breakfast, and so it can be easy to forget all the magic and beauty and grief and accomplishments and achievements and benchmarks that have already transpired, and I find it useful to look back through my photos and through my calendar to help me get a reminder of what has transpired this year. For me, one of the most significant things about this year was that I lost my soulmate, my little familiar, Winnie. Oh, I know there's a lot of Winnie fans out there. This was the year. This is the year I had been anticipating since I got Winnie in 2013, anticipating and anxiously anticipating, and here we are, and here I am on the other side of that. That's really big, and so, whatever has transpired for your year, what have you learned this year? How have you grown? What do you wish that there was less of this year? As you reflect back, what were those key high points? When I think about my own year, I think about the trips that I took and the interruption of my day to day that happened when I embraced the magic of travel. Who did I enjoy spending time with? Where did I engage in my own bullshit the most this year? For me, I know that that's me at night scrolling my phone saying just one more, just five minutes. It's my own bullshit, deep, deep, deep down in my heart and in my gut. I know I'm actually hurting myself, but that upper echelon of my being says no, just like that. Helpful to reflect upon my friends, and no judgment, no analysis needed or even permitted here. This is just a gathering of information and a distilling of what you've received from this year. And then the next step, next gem, is something that I learned from coach Tanya Lee, who's the founder of the School of Self-Image, and she actually has some really great episodes on Word of the Year. One thing to know about Tanya is she sometimes talks about weight loss on her podcast, so that can be a trigger for a lot of us. So FYI, content warning. But I really love her stuff around mindset and imagination, so I'll put that in the show notes. She prompted us to really furnish the image of what we'd like to see on the next new year. So what are you wearing? Who is surrounding you? How are you talking to who is surrounding you? How do you feel in your body as you get up to go to the kitchen or to the bathroom or wherever you are? How do you carry yourself? How do you walk? As you look at this version of yourself? What did she let go of in this year? What dream did she go for? What bullshit did she stop participating in when fear and scarcity and lonesomeness came up? What did she tell herself? How did she meet herself there and what pleasures was she? Nurtured and expanded by All really really powerful questions to open up new pathways of possibility? And then what I do is I go back through some of that journaling and again this is a prompt from Tanya to circle the words that have certain aliveness, and that's how I choose my word of the year, and the prompt was the prompt to choose the scariest word. For me, that was positivity. You may be surprised by what comes up, I think. For myself, I often notice I have ideas about what my word of the year will be, but then, in my writing, something completely different and completely surprising comes up, and I recommend really using your body as a barometer there. What is the word that sparkles, that gives me a little bit of a quickening in my belly, an expansion in my heart, that lets me know that I will have to reach beyond my ego in order to embody this. And then it's time to put this into image. So, once again, as feminine beings, we have a very high need for beauty and seduction. Louis Schwartzberg once said beauty and seduction are nature's tools for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. And so this next step is the vision board-ish step, and this is to create your word of the year collage. So, whereas a vision board is kind of specific images of what you wanna create, again, no shade, love it. Affirm you yes, probably we'll be creating one of my own this year, and so there might be a house or a relationship and all these things. What I urge you to do is create a board, either on Pinterest or on poster board, with things that you print out, or you could also decoupage something with. I have a journal that I created at the Yule Retreat with all these beautiful Yule images and stickers, and you could create a journal around your word of the year, and what I encourage you to do in capturing your images is not just placing things that you want, but placing images that evoke that feeling. So two years ago, my word of the year was expansion, and for some reason, wine-colored satin was the flavor that brought out my appetite for this one particular kind of expansion, and so that would be an example of something that I may not put on a vision board, because I could kind of take or leave wine satin, but there is a very specific image and vision, as you notice yourself in your own vision, how you walk and how you carry yourself when you embody this word of the year. Maybe you see yourself walking similarly on a beach or through a market in Cairo, or strolling the streets of Barcelona with a journal writing about how gaudy inspires you, or maybe you see yourself riding through the wilds of Wyoming with a sweaty horse underneath you and salt on your skin. Who knows what your word of the year is going to evoke. And again, you may have a desire to ride a horse in Wyoming, you may not, but if that's one of the images that evokes the feeling, add it to your board, and so, more than just a vision board of what you see, this is kind of an embodiment board of what you feel and the feeling that you wish to evoke. And then the final piece is actually something I'm gonna share with you next week, which is around setting intentions and setting goals from this place. So I find that it is Absolutely essential to begin with this enchantment and with this seduction into your word of the year, and you might be pleased, as punch, to stop there. But what I also find adds tremendous amount of fun to the mix is setting a specific goal. You know, while the feminine is this flowing, gorgeous, luxurious, liquidy yumminess without any structure or containment, it can feel like you are lost in the mists of Avalon with no idea where you're going. And so next week, what we're going to explore together is how to bring this embodied feeling into action and into some real, tangible things that you can see happen and manifest in your life through an embodied approach to creating your dreams and to the pleasure of committing to your dreams. This year I had a goal and a dream to save a certain amount which I'm very proud to say I'm on the cusp of. But I also had a dream to be able to do an unassisted pull up by the end of the year, which is not even close, not even in the same galaxy of being able to do that, and I've learned a lot from that process of having those two goals and seeing one come to fruition and then seeing the other fall flat. And I'm excited to share with you what I have learned and seen many of my own goals and dreams become realities, and also what I've learned in seeing many of my goals and dreams Fart like a whoopee cushion and go nowhere, and what you can do not if, but when that happens, because that inevitably happens and how to shift the story around it so that you're not taken out by fear, but you are instead emboldened and clarified as to how to move forward. So, my loves, wishing you a very happy holiday week. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time For coaching classes and community in creating a lifestyle of embodiment. Head to schoolofsensuallivingcom. There you'll find a free video series on how to reduce anxiety and intercept the stress response through powerful, confident body language. Head to schoolofsensuallivingcom.
I’m tromping around my hometown this holiday week in upstate New York, visiting family and friends, walking through the sacred grounds of my childhood as the woman I envisioned I’d become.
I’m so proud of them both.
All this reflecting has me thinking about where I’m ready to evolve next.
You may already be feeling the crush of the classic “Extreme Makeover: Life Edition”, that is so common at the start of a new year.
Choosing a Word of The Year is a key practice that helps me shape my upcoming year like a sculptor sitting at a wheel of wet clay.
Word of the Year offers a touchstone of stability, even when the chaos of life is whirling and swirling around us.
When choosing my Word of the Year I ask myself some key questions, and in today’s episode I’m spilling the butter beans just for you.
Some of the gems you’ll discover:
An enchanting ritual that goes beyond your typical vision board
How to navigate away from rigid goal-setting, and towards a more fluid, nurturing approach
How to meld creativity with intention
How to choose your word confidently, when there’s so many to choose from
Discover how a single word can create profound change, and lead to a year of unexpected magic in today’s episode.
This is the first in a two-chapter series that will help you focus less on fixing, more on ; FEELING the abundance of the year past, and the smolder of the year to come.
This episode is a re-cast of Episode 94. We’ll be back with a new episode on January 9th. See you then!
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