What a year 2004 has been! Life has taught me a few new lessons in the past twelve months and I am anxiously awaiting the lessons in store for me in 2005. Last year at about this time I wrote a column about the importance of goal setting in mapping out the way you want your life to go in the coming year and beyond. Overwhelming response to that column made me promise to bring it to you again. It is time once again to examine with objectivity the past twelve months and see how it went. Did you reach the goals you set last year, or were they wishes that never came true? Are you better off this year than last in some areas, or are things the same as they always were or worse? If the latter is the case for you, most often you have only yourself to hold responsible. There is no reason for anyone not to make life go right. A few simple but not necessarily easy steps can make it happen for you.
A ritual for me at the beginning of the New Year is that of the burning bowl ceremony. It is a ceremony in which I write down areas of my life that are not exactly as I would like them to be and burn the paper in a large fireproof bowl as a symbolic release of the negativity in my life. You might consider the burning bowl ceremony as culling old junk that is no longer working and making room for a whole new outlook. It is a sort of spiritual house cleaning. This is then followed by a very detailed goal-setting session in which every single aspect of my life personally and professionally is designed to build my ideal scene. I write everything down and make specific positive affirming statements out of every goal. For example, instead of saying, “I want to take more leisure time for myself” as a goal, my statement might look something like, “I take at least one long weekend out of town every other month.” Instead of saying, “I want to exercise more,” I might say, “I work out in the gym for at least 45 minutes 5 times a week.” The word “try” is eliminated from this process. As Yoda said, there is no “try”. You either do or you don’t do. The statements are written as if they have already happened and I am reading facts in retrospect. Several sheets of paper are filled with statements like this one then I fold it and place it in an envelope addressed to myself and put it in a file to read at the end of that year.
Last year our entire office staff decided to join in the burning bowl ceremony and see what happened. We sat together and I acted as narrator, reading suggested areas of life that might need clearing then we all burned the papers. After that we spent about two hours writing affirming statements, placed them in envelopes addressed to ourselves and sealed them. I returned the envelopes to the staff members in the second week of December for everyone to read and see how it went. Out of the then seven staff members four of us had accomplished at least seventy five percent of what we wanted to do last year. We had not spent the entire year obsessing about what we wanted to do, but by making positive affirming statements the year before we had made up our minds about how our year would go. Everyone was astonished that the accomplishments were made without a regular reminder of what the goals originally were. In fact, most of the staff had forgotten about the envelopes completely until they were returned for the year-end checkup. Our plan for the burning bowl ceremony this year will put us into the first week of January before we put everything in writing but that is all right. As long as you get to it early in the year (at least in the first week or two in January) the purpose is not lost.
If you haven’t already done your own version of the burning bowl ceremony, it is not too late. Take the time to clear out the things in your life that are holding you back then write out exactly what you want things to be like for your life this time next year. You will be amazed at how much of your plan will come to fruition just by your planting positive seeds on fertile soil then leaving them to germinate as you support a positive environment in your life. I have a written guide for this on file if you need help getting started. Feel free to e-mail or call me and I will get the guidelines for the process to you. I have done this for 7 years now, and the results are overwhelming. I can say without reserve that my life is markedly better today than it was when I lived it without planning for it to go the way I wanted it to. Make this the year of growth and change for you. You can allow negativity in your environment to suck you in and give you excuses not to produce or you can be a beacon of hope for those around you as you flourish and prosper in the face of adversity. The choice is yours. Treat your body and your spirit well. Happy New Year.