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I hope that this is the year that you change your life in only the way you can, with the power only you have. I can’t do it for you. The words can’t do it for you. They can only encourage and guide you like an old friend, a message from far beyond and deep within. I hope you focus more on what you feel between the lines than what you see on the pages. I hope each day makes you take pause and contemplate what invisible, third door of possibility you may have missed. I hope you are not afraid to go inward, the space from which your entire life is born.
I hope that this is the year you stop dancing around the perimeter of who you intended to be, of what you came here to do. I hope that this is the year you learn to defy what’s reasonable and build sense in a world of your own design. I hope that this is the year you discover that the floor does not only hold up if you remain where you are standing—with each step you take, and wherever you may go, it will rise to meet you, as it always has, as it always does.
The courage with which you enter today will become the fate that you meet tomorrow.
When you do not know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential.
plan for the moment, the joy, the journey.
When you finally admit that you do not know what is next, you enter the golden vortex—the space between everything you know you’re meant for and anything you had previously imagined to be.
Happiness is not thinking you have earned the world’s approval, but waking up each day and feeling so at peace within your own skin, quietly anticipating the day ahead, unconcerned with how you are perceived.
Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything.
Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.
There are two rivers running through us at all times, one that carries all the voices of the world, and the other, a single voice that stands alone—the voice of our inner guide.
The first realization of wisdom is the recognition that there is truth fragmented everywhere, and to delineate the two rivers into wholly good and wholly bad is to deprive ourselves of the depth and beauty that our hearts are truly trying to bring about. The journey is not about abandoning one in favor of the other, but knowing when it is time to listen, to hear, and to follow each.
You cannot desire what you do not already contain. Desire is a projection outward that is proportionate to potential inward.
What you are waiting on is your own willingness to accept the mountain you must climb in order to pull those desires out of the deepest parts of you and create them in the world you already inhabit.
Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul, and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.
life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.
Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you. It cannot begin to compare to the joy that you will one day know. You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before, because you will become a different person.
Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come. You’re through it, but you’re different, because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.
The journey is not how you place down what’s weighing on you, but how you learn to stop picking it up. Not when you decide to stop, but the strength of your resolve not to begin again—with
How you move forward is what you begin to reach for in their place.
That more is possible, even if the past did not show you that it is. That our greatest dreams and our deepest fears may coexist, and the existence of one does not negate or lessen the other.
That the very moment that you honor where you are with complete surrender, you open to the next experience life wants to offer.
Release yourself into the dreamscape, and follow your heart’s deepest calling, as it is leading you to the actions that will continue to weave your life into the story of humanity. Without you being here, nothing—not one single thing—would be precisely the same. You are an integral, irreplaceable thing. You came here to do what only you can.
When you ask for belonging, you must listen if life says, but not here. What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.
Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you. These little signs are not so little—they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.
Declare: I will no longer participate in my own suffering. If I have not one other friend in this world, I will be my own most loyal companion. I will not turn my back on myself. If I am loved by a dozen and not one, I will not focus undue attention on gaining the love of that one. I will speak to myself with compassion. I will not spend my life engaging in things that can only bring about my own unhappiness. From this moment on, I am on my own side.
You may fear the quiet times in your life, when your soul goes through a winter. However, it’s often those same times when the most profound and human work of all is being completed. Be still. Do nothing. It is both the quiet and the noise that writes the symphony, the blank canvas and the paint that makes the picture, the rest and the movement that gives you the wisdom, insight and clarity to press forward more boldly than ever before.
Maybe you should trust the missed connections, the calls gone unanswered, the opportunities that had every reason to work out but didn’t. Maybe you should trust in the small signs before they become big ones. Maybe you should trust those tiny contractions, the nights that exhaust you and the people who don’t see you and the places that make you feel that subtle uneasiness. Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you. Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working, because it might be trying to guide you to what will.
Every hour is a new beginning—you just don’t realize it until you remember that every soul-shifting, life-changing experience you have happens in an otherwise ordinary day.
What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life. What did not transpire was not meant to; the end of that journey would not have led you somewhere you would have wanted or needed to be. If you are really honest with yourself, you know this on the inside. There were so many signs that you willingly brushed over in the heat of blind hope. If you spend your life fixated on the might-have-beens, you miss out on the steady currents that have carried you all this way. Notice what stays. Notice what is constant. Notice what perseveres. These are the things that the song
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give the majority of your time to your greatest strengths.
You have overcome every single thing that has been unexpected, that has been heart-wrenching, that has not gone your way. You have built a life within the complete unknown, you have reconstructed a new version of yourself from the pieces of what you thought would be. You have always contained within yourself the remarkable strength of the human spirit, and no matter what tomorrow will bring, you will carry that power into it, too.
You are the peace between the highs and the lows,
You’ll always return to what you really are, you will always come back to your truth.
You are all that is steady and safe within you.
Finding yourself also requires losing who you once thought yourself to be. Cultivating the deepest and most lasting forms of inspiration often requires the most rote kind of consistency. Figuring out what’s right for you is acknowledging that different things are right at different times—alignment shifts as you do. Healing is often a process of being able to hold and embrace the contrasts of your experience, to embrace them, to let them be.
You start to see that you cannot see everything, and so begins the true journey of your life, which is the dance between what is yours to handle and what is yours to release. What you must reach for, and what you must allow to come. When it is time to speak, and when it is time to listen. When it is time to teach, and when it is time to learn. When it is time to exert your will and when it is time to surrender to a path far greater than anything you could conceive of prior. This is what it is to live—to understand your free will, and develop the discernment to use it well.
That is the true test of what is right—not what instantly falls into place, but what entwines its roots with yours, and allows you to most fully blossom. Not what shows up instantly and unexpectedly, but what stays, what remains through it all.
The things you want to create also want to be created through you. What you are longing to bring into the world is also what the world is longing for you to bring it.
Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give. You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be. If you are going to give your energy to anything, give it to what’s already working. To the people who already love you, to the things that show potential, to the places that make you feel more alive. Life speaks to us in subtleties, in the smallest possible ways. In the little clicks, the funny coincidences, the ways the ordinary collides into the serendipitous.
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Our life force can never truly escape us, but it can be withheld until our bodies feel safe enough to begin again. Give yourself the time you need to regulate to your new normal, let yourself witness with each passing day that it is once again safe to exhale, to step outside your comfort zone, to trust in the unknown. Slowly, you will learn to take hold of that wild spirit within you once again, and this time, you will be more focused, and more intentional.
You will begin to see that it was never about whether or not you were capable of becoming what you most desire, but that you were simply distracted, unknowingly surrounded by those who infused a sense of disbelief so deeply into your subconscious mind, self-limiting beliefs became the parameters in which you thought you had to experience this world. You will begin to decide what really matters to you, what you actually want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time.
You will have to learn how to outgrow some things you love. You will have to learn that some things are right for a time, but not forever. You will have to learn that moving on from them does not diminish the place they held within you, the importance they have to you, or the impact they had on you. You will have to learn that if you are not growing, you are not really living. If you are not moving on from anything, you are not moving toward something. You will have to learn how to let go of some things that are still beautiful, because you know that they are not quite right, because you know
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If you do not know what to do next, it usually isn’t because your next step is far out in the distance, but rather right in front of your feet. You are being asked to stop gazing outward and start looking inward. You are being called to rebuild yourself at this exact moment. If you do not know what to do next, it is not because you need to seek more answers, but rather, accept the ones you’ve already been given. If you do not know what to do next, it’s time to learn to be in the answered prayer that is this very day. It’s time to learn how to use what you already have, and be as you really
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You’ll be surprised by how consistently things will show up exactly as you need them to, and not a moment before. When it’s time to act, the energy will come. When it’s time to make the choice, you’ll know what to decide. When it’s time to leave, you’ll find yourself writing the resignation. Trust yourself. You don’t have to predict every possible turn of the future, but strengthen your faith in the fact that you will be taken care of no matter where you find yourself along the way.
It’s disrupting you because it’s trying to move you—to a kinder thought, to a better place, to a deeper knowing. It is trying to open up a piece of your heart that you have closed, to soften you in the places where life has left its harshest scars. It is trying to inspire your forgiveness, to meet others in the moment, as they are now. It is trying to help you stop keeping the past alive by maintaining outdated perceptions, and it’s trying to bring you firmly into this moment. It’s unnerving to you because it is a messenger, and you have not yet heard what it is trying to say. It is persistent
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When we find it too difficult to arrive fully into the present moment, it is almost always because the quiet is telling us something we are not yet ready to hear.
On the days when it hurts too much to dream, to hope, to think of anything beyond the line of sight ahead of you—just rest.
Your unwillingness to press forward in outdated ways is not a sign of your noncompliance, but that the spiritual freedom you have cultivated from within is finally beginning to take root.
You are here to carve a new way out of the unknown. You are here to defy what’s expected and create a new normal, one where you feel inherently free to not see external challenges as absolute dead-ends, but to discover the quiet resilience you cultivate as you work your way around them. You are here to nurture the feeling a life most fully lived would give you in your chest, not what you imagine it would appear in someone else’s eyes.
What is happening around you when you are the most peaceful, open-minded, inspired version of yourself? What is happening when you are not?
