Turning Over a New Calendar Page
What do I want my life to be like in 2006? Where do I want to put my energy… What is calling to me… What areas need to be put into shape… Where do I feel excitement and “fresh air”…. ?
A fresh new year is a great time to do some Focusing, sensing inward for what is needed and wanted, what feels like a direction of rightness.
Of one thing we can be sure: there will be surprises. Many things cannot be planned or predicted. But felt sensing what is wanted is not the same as planning. Why?
What most of us mean by “planning” has a linear quality, an If-Then structure. “If I do this, then this will happen.” The trouble is, human life when lived from within with meaning and creativity is not actually very linear! From the “planning” perspective, flexibility and creativity and spontaneity have to be added in like afterthoughts. There seems to be a paradox here: How can I plan for change, which is unpredictable?
Living Knows Its Way Forward
Focusing helps us understand how sensing into now can also be a sensing into a kind of future, a future that is responsive, adaptive, fluid. There is a future that is here now…. just as the green shoot pushing out of the ground “knows” the future plant it will become.
When I bring awareness inside and invite my sense of how it is to be me, now, living my life forward into this fresh new year… I get a sense of excitement… But when I bring the word “excitement” to the sense inside, it isn’t right. What I feel here is steadier than “excitement,” kind of like… (sensing again)… kind of like a motor is running, a steady confident readiness.
What will 2006 bring? Who knows? And yet this “rumbling like a steady motor” feeling inside me IS a kind of knowing. And it feels good.