Episode 197 - The Art of Tending New Year Intentions
As a new year arrives, you may be planting new seeds of intention, dreams, and desires.
I also know that old chestnut of adrenaline-fueled New Year transformation may already be rising in your bloodstream.
Think of today’s episode like you are slowly sipping an elegant digestif to quell the heartburn of typical New Year messaging.
You'll discover:
A gentler way of nurturing your intentions slowly and steadily, through the art of tending
Three powerful mindset shifts to attune your perspective and bolster your energy for new habits and small shifts
How to imagine a vivid vision, where your intentions reach not just to the branches of your life, but to the roots and blossoms too
If you’d like support in sustaining your energy and practicing presence-based living and leadership, you’re oh so warmly invited to join us in The Sanctuary, open now through January 13th.
As a special bonus, I'll be hosting a live, 2-hour, Embodying Your Word of Year workshop in January, as a way to let your word take up residence inside you, becoming something you can feel in your breath, your posture, your pace.
Join us for a season of joyful tending in The Sanctuary today.
With Love and Excitement,
Mary
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Hello beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode titled the Art of tending.
So I love the word tending. I mean, don't you just want to let that word melt on your tongue and burrow into your cells tending. Say it with me to tend. And this word and the essence of it is something I've been thinking about a lot over the last month as I've been preparing for a new season in the sanctuary, which is our global Come to your senses community. And this season, our theme is the Art of tending.
And the reason that I chose this theme is because for so many of us, we naturally want to set intentions this time of year. Some of you might choose a word of the year as I do. And the way in which we've been conditioned to create change or to enact an intention is using stress as strategy. And what I want to teach you in this season is something that has changed my life so dramatically, which is an orientation shift from doing and discipline, and that old chestnut willpower to reliance on something more graceful. More gentle and something that takes the burden of total responsibility off your back, and instead allows you to put your trust into something greater. And where I have learned a lot about tending is by studying the cycles and the rhythms of the earth and in the sanctuary.
All of our learning follows this seasonal rhythm, because our bodies naturally mirror what's happening in nature, as our bodies are nature. And it's not just what's happening in our physical bodies, but in our emotional bodies, in our creative bodies, in our mental bodies. And as we have just crossed the threshold of mid-winter, this is actually a time where reliance on effort and willpower is most likely to fail us because our energy is so much naturally lower. And this is where the art of tending, gathering, stewarding, holding, cultivating is such a more natural way to relate with our intentions. And so today, our focus is going to be on tuning in with the energy of tending and also shifting the orientation of tending. In other words. If you may be accustomed to the orientation of planning and action, or measuring a goal based solely on its achievement, rather than the actual vision of what that goal will bring into your life. This episode is very much for you, because what we're going to be exploring is a much more sustainable way, a much more fun way, and a much more gentle on the body way of nurturing your intentions in 2026.
And if this is something that calls to you, I am delighted to announce that the sanctuary is open for new members for a very limited time. And as a special bonus, this season we are including a two hour Embodying your word of the year two hour workshop to anchor that essence into your body and to step into a state of clarity and purpose and most of all, enjoyment as you nurture these intentions for your new year. And that's going to be happening in January. And so just head to Mary Lofgren Sanctuary, and we would be delighted to welcome you for a season of tending. And with that, let us now dive into our gems. And so as I mentioned today, our focus is going to be on an orientation shift from the energy of wishing and hoping, or the energy of forcing and pushing to this energy of tending what is ours to tent. And I'd like to invite you to just try on these words in your body and notice how they land. So these are all words and themes that we might associate with tending. So first trying on the word to tend. Tending. Nurturing. Stewarding. Cultivating. Holding. Nourishing. Responding and sustaining.
Oh, I feel like I just slid into a hot tub. I mean, those words just bring such a sense of richness to my own body and really break the spell of forced change, which I believe is a real relic of the embedding of diet culture into our consciousness. So I'm currently at a Airbnb in upstate New York, where I've been spending the holidays with my beloved family. And as I've been preparing for this word of the year workshop and choosing my own word and just doing my own work around intention setting, I've been noticing this old patterning when I first opened my eyes of okay, what's my word? What's my focus? Where am I going?
You know, which, as you could hear in my voice, is a rhythm of desperation. It comes from this old imprinting of control and of not openness as I am. What am I doing? Where's my focus? What am I creating? How do I be productive? You know, you might notice these questions flying into your own mind when you wake up in the morning or as you meet. The sometimes uncomfortable moments of quiet time, like when you get into bed at night and the quiet causes your thoughts to be a bit louder. And so this is our first gem is trying on in your own body.
That difference between doing and tending, that difference between making happen and nurturing change, and the difference between staying on top of it and working in harmony with it. And whenever I'm on vacation or taking time off, there's always this niggling urgency of, you know, the fact that I run a business and as an entrepreneur and a business owner, time off is kind of a. Fantasy because, you know, I'm always holding what needs to be done in the business where the business is going. And if you're planning, you know, yada, yada.
But I really wanted to turn off for the end of the year. And so I was trying on this orientation of tending and my goddess. What a relief to have these 20 to 40 minute anchors in my days where rather than working or meeting deadlines, it was like my little appointment with myself to tend what needed tending so that my nervous system could anchor and relax in all these other areas of life. To me, that is the magic of tending is getting clear on what is mind, take care of and what is mine to put in the hands of something greater than me. So I invite you to try that on in your own body and in your own life. What is mine to tend? what is mine. To let go of the second gem in the Art of tending is actually living into that question itself. What is mine to tend and what is mine to let go of? So you might have a goal or an intention or word. And in this old paradigm, there might be some over identification with a singular goal or intention itself, rather than the full landscape of your vivid vision. So let's say the area that you choose for this year that you want to shift is around your finances. What I encourage you to do and and a question to drop in here is what is it that I believe this shift in my finances is going to create in my life? And the way I like to look at this is if my finances are the. Trunk and the branches of the tree. What are the flowers and buds that come from this intention? Because likely, if you are shifting to this orientation of tending, that will shift and change what you tend. So for example, if you have this desire around finances, what you might imagine it will bring is more freedom, more of an ability to release stress and be present in your relationships, more of an ability to invest in your health, more of a sense of self-esteem, greater creativity, greater access to pleasure and ease in your life. And so let's say you go to tend this desire when I sit down and I do my own tending ritual, which is something that we're going to be doing every Monday in the sanctuary. We're going to have 20 minute tending ritual called the Monday Hearth. Oh, don't you just want to warm your hands by that fire? The Monday hearth, where we gather together in about ten minutes of slowing down, connecting with the body and the breath, and allowing all of the whirring snow globe snowflakes to start to settle and drop down, and we get clear on what is ours to tend. So that might be doing your numbers in your bank account.
It might be reaching out to five clients, but if the vision is that you have greater freedom in your health, perhaps the tending action is actually going on a walk. And this is what we're going to be doing in the Embodying the Word of the year workshop is rather than focusing just on the word or just on the goal, is filling out that vivid vision so that when you are pruning and tending this tree of your vision, this compass that is. Anchored in your body, tells you where to go with wisdom, tells you where to go from wisdom.
Because when we are trapped in the circular, action oriented mind, often we might be busy all the time and moving so fast, but feel like change is happening so slowly, barely perceptible. And often that comes from taking action that is based solely on the adrenaline of drive, without grounding and anchoring into its depth. It's like a tree trying to nurture itself from the branches alone, rather than the reach of its roots. And so when you think about your intention or your word of the year, I invite you once again to imagine trying on some of these words nurturing, stewarding, cultivating.
When you think about centering this essence you want to create and step into in your life, what would it be like to hold it? To nourish it. To rather than barking at it to grow faster. Invest your energy in the quality of the soil. And so that's gem number two is tending the whole vision. And then gem number three is that tending is a practice of growing. But it is also a deep practice in letting go. Because when you focus on tending you are working with life force as your leader. In other words, you are aligning your power and your energy with what creates flow. What creates energy? What creates magic and what creates gradual, sustainable change? Which is something different than you holding it all together. It's a partnership with that essence, with the elements, and with the cycles and rhythms of your own body, and not just what you hold intend, but what holds you. So this week I attended a writing circle with my good friend and teacher, Susie Banks Bell, and she read us a poem and offered us a prompt inspired by that poem. And the prompt was, what is it that holds us? What in us is held? And this speaks so much to the essence of today's episode and the season of tending. And I wanted to read to you from my journal what holds me, what holds us. Something so great, so great in all capitals. The same thing that holds the earth like a big blue Christmas ball. That which holds the ocean, that which holds cell and sinew.
What in us is held so gently. All we cannot hold. Heartbeat, heartbreak. All that must be surrendered. And all that must be surrendered to. Hi, my name is Mary. And I am held by the mystery. And so are you. What is mine? To hold this moment. This heartbeat, this breath, this life. Oh, and when I read that, it's like I feel such faith in whatever change is to come this year. You know, I have intentions, but rather than intentions of changes I wish to see this year, I chose my words. And normally I just choose one word. And I've been really committed to that in the past. But this year I did it a little differently, and I chose my intentions and my words based on some work that I did around my core values and my core values in this season of my life. And I know some people think values are not necessarily changeable, but for me, there's something I revisit on a frequent basis because depending on the season and the cycle of my life, my values are going to shift.
And so in this season, my values are courage, charm, imperfection, impact and love. And for each value I wrote a value statement and my value statements are courage is fun. Charm matters. Imperfection is normal. Impact is what I'm here for. And love is everything. And one of the things that I plan to do with these words as kind of a vision board is to create. Also, in Susie's course, we learned how to make these little folded books, and almost like a string of paper dolls that you can unfold, is to create a little zine of my values and my intentions for this year and have one be courage, one be charm each with my value statements. But where the background of each of these pages is, this long script of love is everything.
And this is so meaningful to me, because I really trust that with these words and intentions as my anchor and the way that they guide how I brush my teeth, how I cook for myself, how I show up in my community. I trust who that woman is becoming. And this is the magic of the art of tending. Is that these words, which were born from deep within my heart, become like the spring sun. And my job is simply to turn towards them each day and grow in their direction. And so if this messaging and this concept is meaningful to you and creates a buttery sensation in your body or a sensation of a little spring snowdrop starting to get ready to uncoil and burst forth from the frozen soil or however it lands. I would be so delighted to support you in practicing the art of tending to make this season one of greater ease and joy and partnership and simplicity, so you can head to the link below this episode. Or Mary Lofgren Sanctuary to join us for this season. Also, this season, I am including the option to add on a reduced rate coaching session. So if you've ever wanted to coach with me one on one, there's the option to add that into your package. And I am so excited for these next weeks of tending the body, tending our energy, tending our joy, and our pleasure. So if you're a member of the sanctuary and you're listening, get ready, my friends, because we will be gathering around the hearth and it is going to be a beautiful season ahead. Thank you so much for listening today and always, and I will see you in our next episode.