Episode 166 - How One Word Changed My Whole Year (+ Gems From Fulfilling A California Dream)
What if one simple word could transform your entire year—even your life?
Today on the podcast, I’m sharing the one word that has guided me on a year of some of the biggest changes of my life.
It’s not the kind of word you’d expect.
When I first shared it with folks, I’d cringe.
I thought it was too soft and simple, that it couldn’t possibly hold the weight of the transformation I was hoping for.
But as usual, the butterflies in my belly knew more than my mind could foresee.
In today’s episode you’ll hear gems on:
How choosing a word of the year has been my compass for the last 5 years—and each year it just keeps getting richer
The story of how this year I stepped into a 20-year dream come true—and the gems of wisdom collected in the process
The key differences between muscling your way through change and magnetizing it with surrender and devotion
Inspiration for choosing your own word of the year, and how to breathe life into it all year long
With love and wonder,
Mary
P.S. For the first time, I’m offering my Word of the Year Devotional Mastermind exclusively for annual members of The Sanctuary. Come explore a year in sacred relationship with the path that calls to you. Click here to learn more.
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00:57
Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode, which is a tiptoe through the tulips of this past year 2024, and the gems that I have collected on my journey, of which there are many, because this was a big year of change and transformation and, most of all, of listening and responding to the tiny tendrils of intuition and desire that inspired me to move to Northern California, and so I've got a lot to share with you today about what that process has taught me. I'm currently sitting at my desk in my office and looking out at the sun blazing through an oak tree and seeing the freaking fog rise off the San Francisco Bay, with the skyline in the background. I mean what a dream come true. I've been yearning to live here since I was in my 20s. So this is a 20 year desire that has come true this year, and one of the reasons for this move is that this year I chose a word of the year, which I do every year, to embody some essence that is whispering to me, calling to me, and in a moment I'm going to share what that word is and why. Every time I would share it with another person I would cringe and be embarrassed by it. But this episode is the first in a series where I'm going to be sharing with you a bit about this process of word of the year, and I'm very inspired to share it right now because in the sanctuary which is our come to your senses cozy community, a monthly membership program where we come together to practice beauty and enchantment and sensory spirituality together, as a special bonus for the year to come, I am delivering, for the first time ever, my signature tried and true word of the year process in a devotional mastermind.
03:25
It is a year in sacred relationship with the path that calls you. You know, when I first started doing word of the year on my own put a lot of muscle into it and I did a lot of just what we do in personal growth spaces typically around, kind of forcing myself to align with this goal that I had in mind. And over the years I've really tweaked and adjusted this process to suit the needs of my and your resplendent feminine nervous system in a way that requires less muscle, more magnetism, less ramming your body into the shape of your word of the year and more being in relationship with your word and receiving what this essence that whispers to you is wanting to deliver. And we're doing something really special in the sanctuary right now, which is including this word of the year bonus as a part of your annual membership, and we also opened up a special 12 month payment plan for the annual membership. So normally the annual membership is a single payment, but in honor of wanting to make this mastermind as available as possible to as many people as possible, there's also the option to do monthly installments and still receive the mastermind. So schoolofsensuallivingcom slash sanctuary to get all the juicy, yummy details, and I so hope to see you as we breathe new life into the calling of your heart's desire in this devotional mastermind.
05:32
So last year at this time I was sitting on my couch in my house in Western North Carolina and I actually have a video of myself that I sent to my best friend sharing my vision for 2024. And the fact that my word of the year this year was happiness. Oh gosh, I cringe every time I say it. Well, actually, that's not true. I don't cringe anymore. In the beginning I cringed because every time it would come to word of the year, I'd choose something really powerful and dynamic and something I was reaching for that was beyond my comfort zone. And this year, when I went through my word of the year process that I take you through in the mastermind, it became really clear to me that this word was shining and shimmering and beckoning and had a message for me, and that in all the words that were circulating in my vision, this was the word that was the rooted trunk of the oak tree, of all of my other desires and happiness felt warm and it felt alive. And I said to my friend in the video it's New Year's Eve, 2024. I am sitting in a mid-century living room in California. I am wearing a black V-neck cashmere sweater and buttonfly blue jeans. I am radiating with health and happiness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and all these other pieces of my vision. And wouldn't you know it, friends, right upstairs, from where I sit right now is my mid-century living room, and hanging in my closet that I purchased at a rummage sale in San Francisco is a cashmere v-neck sweater. That I knew was the sweater that I saw in my vision.
07:41
And at the time that I chose the word happiness, it didn't totally make sense. In fact, I remember years ago talking to a friend at a pool party in upstate New York. It was one of my high school friends and I was telling her about one of my family members who had lived in our hometown for a long time and she asked well, are they happy? And I remember saying to her what do you mean Like? What kind of a question is that Like? Who do we know that's happy? You know, and maybe it's my jaded ex New Yorker, but happiness has never been one of my values, never been one of my values. Or you know something I even thought to care about. You know, depth, service, purpose. You know those all seemed much more valiant to have as values and have as words of the year, and this year was very, very different in my choice, and it's, of course, no surprise that the year I chose a word that was soft and unfamiliar and very bright, was the year that yielded the biggest change and the biggest moves towards the kind of transformation I wanted to see in my life, and so the first gem that I am collecting from the last year is a newly layered understanding around happiness. I think, prior to this year, one of the reasons I would shirk happiness like an uncool little sibling was because it seemed very hallmark toxic positivity butterball, you know. It just didn't seem to have any depth to it, and by trusting that, my body knew something about this being my word of the year, even though my mind couldn't understand it yet, I've come to an understanding that for me, you know, happiness is not either or my outside world or my inside world. It is both.
10:05
When I was living in Western North Carolina, where I lived for eight years, I was in a constant battle with myself. I love the people that I love in Western North Carolina and I am so grateful for my time there, and it was never a fit for my soul. It felt like constantly wearing a pair of corduroys with raw wool lining, like overalls with some sort of, you know, asbestos laden insulation on the inside, like I, just like. There was constant friction, and for the first few years I felt like, oh, this is just, you know me trying to do a geographical cure and not wanting to, you know always wanting the next thing. And you know I have so much here I have a house, I have friends, I have, you know, community, I have support, I'm close to family and all of those things are a recipe for happiness. And yet there was just a part of my soul, acreage of my soul, that was unfertilized and decrepit by the fact that I just knew I wanted to be somewhere else.
11:31
And I often tell the story that about two years ago, my good friend Allie Monday and I were in the car on the way to DSW, in the rain I remember it very poignantly and I was lamenting about the fact that I was not satisfied where I was living. But I didn't know where to go. And you know, moving back to New York felt too hard, moving anywhere else felt just too unknown, because I am from New York and so I have some built in knowledge of that place. And she said well, you know, if you could live anywhere, where would it be? And I said, well, absolutely, 100%, northern California, like if I had all the money and no fear. And she said well then, why don't you just move there? And it was so confronting because in that moment I knew I was going to have to take her up on her dare and dare to follow my dream that, even though it is expensive here and it is far from family and I don't have a built-in community, so what? This is where the stirrings of my soul are leading me and that brings me to the next gem, which is that slow change is sustainable change. I've always known that in my mind and somewhat in my body, but this year that nugget really transformed from knowledge into wisdom. Because in that moment in the car on the way to DSW, if I had packed my bags and moved to Northern California in one fell swoop, I probably would have hated it here.
13:25
But I really took my time and in April I came out here for about six weeks. I am part of this fabulous pet sitting network called Trusted House Sitters pet sitting network called Trusted House Sitters and I have a lot of experience with caring for animals. So I was able to house sit in multiple different neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Multiple different cities really get a feel and a flavor. I booked my trip to come back in the summer.
14:00
After that trip in the spring, when I really gave myself the chance to explore and feel into if this was right for me and I got a clear yes in my body, I then scheduled another sit, a two-month sit in San Francisco. Hello, sage, the French bulldog that I sat for and loved dearly. If you're listening, in fact, whenever I would have Sage out on the street in San Francisco and someone would ask his name, I would say it's Sage. But because I felt like, as a white woman saying I had a dog named Sage, I just looked like some sort of wellness influencer and I would always follow it by saying but if it were me, I would have named him Meatball. I'm just dog sitting and you know, to me he looks more like a man, witch or a meatball. But anyway, I digress.
15:05
I sat for for two months and gave myself just a really long window of being out here to make connections and get to know people and see, do I want to live in an apartment by myself? Can I afford to live in an apartment by myself? Because, you know, according to Zillow it seems like maybe not. But when you get into a city and you meet people and people have, you know, apartments in their garden unit or whatever. You can get a good deal. And I discovered I don't want to live by myself in a brand new city and I have a wonderful housemate who is a dear friend, and we are creating a beautiful home. In fact, coming up, we have a solstice dinner party and it's just been my dream and my vision to do the things that I do normally, but with someone else, in partnership, and all of that is happening for me at the moment.
16:00
I imagine that you can hear the happiness and bubbleth over champagne, bubbles in my voice that were generated by slowly and steadily walking, one step at a time, this path of this essence that was calling to me. And so a question that you might drop in for yourself, around this idea of slow change being sustainable change and I work with clients on this all the time in my coaching sessions is that often, when I am resisting something, some change I want to make or some action I want to take, it's usually because I have already put myself 10 steps down the road of where I should be or what I need to do to get to where I think I should be. And instead of that orientation? Where am I right now and what is the next baby step that appears when I deeply listen.
17:17
You know that's another shift of orientation that I experienced this year is in the past and you know, traditionally around the idea of making your goals happen and seeing your dreams come true, there's a lot of emphasis on taking action. Rightly so. Takes a lot of frigging action to make a dream happen. Rightly so. Takes a lot of frigging action to make a dream happen. However, what I find is that normally I can reduce the amount of action that I think I need to take by about 60 to 75% if I take the simple step of slowing down to get quiet and listening for my inner guidance as to what is the next step before compulsively leaping into a flurry of action that ultimately is just not sustainable. So, therefore, it's like I, maybe you, we get burnt out and then it just goes back into the resistance pile and frustration pile, so, slow and steady. What is that next pebble on the path?
18:29
And the final gem that relates to this warm, buttery essence of happiness that I've been in relationship with this year is when my bigger desires are tended. Pleasure becomes so much simpler and the little things become so much more satisfying. So there have been many times in my life where you know I'm no stranger to creating little oases of sensual delight in my shoe that I wasn't willing or able to address or to tend to. You know, I would do these things and get a little lift, like a little mini wave that just kind of picks you up and puts you back down in the ocean really quickly. But again they didn't quite quench my deep thirst.
19:49
And I've also had the experience and I'm having the experience now that after a long time of feeling like something wasn't resonant and now something's harmonizing, like where I've chosen to live, things like creating a dried orange garland for the holidays with crimson straw flowers and hanging them in the window. It's like a giant Pacific Hawaiian wave that just lifts me and tosses me in the sky and then drops me down nice and safe. It is amazing how much pleasure capacity has opened up for me when in my being there's a baseline of harmony and resonance, as opposed to when I was wearing the asbestos overalls and it just didn't matter how many fancy dinners I took myself out to. I mean, you know, and not to paint a dismal picture, I mean it's not that I didn't enjoy myself and enjoy pleasure, but there's a difference and I'm really getting to know this now, having tended to this really big desire inside of myself is that there's a difference in using pleasure to get through something that doesn't feel harmonious in my being, and exploring and enjoying pleasure as a compliment to what feels harmonious in my being. And just after a long, almost decade of living in the question of that and living in uncertainty, I am so grateful to be listening to some sweet indigo girls harmonies crooning from inside of myself at last, and who knows everybody, I have a little bit of that foreboding gratitude that Brene Brown talks about, like when you look at your kids and see how much you love them, when they're tucking them into bed and then immediately think what would happen if something happened to them. I noticed that, as I'm sharing this with you, there's a little bit of like well, just remember, mary, moving to a new place isn't going to solve all of your problems, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I know that. I know that deeply. That has been.
22:20
Another gem of this year is the difference between honeymooning and committed relationship with where I live. And what I do know is that when I put my head on the pillow at night, I've done it. I have followed a really, really big desire, one that I felt like was bigger than what I even dared to dream, like I didn't even take this dream seriously. My family is like what do you mean? You've always wanted to live in Northern California and it just felt so distant from what was expected of my life, of my own narrative, that I didn't even think to tell anybody about it until that day in the car. And whatever happens with my life here in California, or what doesn't happen, I have answered that call inside of myself and that feels like happiness, my friends. And so if this exploration and experience of being guided by the essence that calls to you, and having support and a guided process to go through over an entire year to stay in sacred relationship with this essence, join us at schoolofsensuallivingcom slash sanctuary or click the link below this episode. It is going to be more fun than a barrel of Santa Cruz surf. Gods everybody.
23:56
Okay, with that cheesy joke, I am going to sign off and say that I'm very excited to deliver this episode to you as the first in a series, so you can expect another one coming at you real soon as we explore how one word has the power to change our whole year and our whole lives. Thank you so much for tuning in. See you next time as you prepare to step into a new year. Take a moment to pause. What is calling to you when we choose a word of the year? It is more than setting a resolution or even naming a desire. It's a vulnerable step into a living relationship with the essence that whispers from your soul. Relationship with the essence that whispers from your soul. My new year gift to you for annual members of the sanctuary is the word of the year devotional mastermind. Anchor your intention into your body, breathe life into its essence and be supported in community. I hope you'll join us as we journey together in exploring the art of commitment to the calling of your heart. Schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash sanctuary. To learn more.