Today's message is a video message. You'll find the transcript below if you'd rather read than watch or listen.

This video is the practice by itself (it's about 13 minutes long).

I hope however you are celebrating our individual and collective movement from 2024 into 2025 you know that you are loved, you are sacred and that you are truly radiant just as you are.

Sending you Love,

Tawnia

PS: We start a 33-day guided meditation gathering on Monday at 7:30am ET (it'll be recorded and you'll have access to the practices through all of 2025) and I would love for you to join us! Every Monday will be a practice focused on relaxing into the present moment so you can consciously and intentionally cross any threshold you encounter in your life - it isn't just guided meditation, it's an important skill-building practice for your life journey. You'll find more information here or you can reply to this email with any questions you have.

Transcript:

Hello Radiant Soul. Today we stand at the threshold leaving 2024 and stepping into 2025. However this past year unfolded before you and for you, this is quite naturally a moment of reflection, a moment of gratitude, and a moment of release.

I know we hear a lot about release practices and letting go as we come to this time of year or the ending of any cycle- this is something that we can embrace in every lunar cycle, in every season, in every year, the cycles within the cycles, within the cycles and the seasons of our lives. And we're often told how important it can be to, to take that opportunity to reflect- to sit in reflection, to sit in gratitude, to sit in release- before we cross that threshold and step into what is new, in order to consciously set those intentions and to consciously walk out our path into whatever is the new cycle that we're moving into.

We can sometimes bring a hardened edge to our approach to practices of release and letting go, imagining that we're sort of discarding or pushing away or cutting off or cutting loose a thing that no longer serves us, a useless thing, a thing that has no value rather than an approach that acknowledges that someone, something, a situation, cycle, a relationship held immense value and has run its course, or some portion of it has run its course.

That instead of a wholesale sailing of a ship and releasing an entire thing, a cutting off of a thing, it's more about a realignment to make space for the truth of our lives; the truth of our priorities; the truth of the direction that we are heading in and making space for these intentions that we have yet to set.

One way you might think about this is, for instance, this year both of our kids went off to college, so when September came, my husband and I found ourselves just the two of us at home. And the releasing of the way our household once operated was necessary- we were no longer making dinner for four people; we were no longer buying groceries for four people; there were no longer two additional people to take care of the simple things of the day -walking the dogs, letting the chickens out, mowing the lawn.

And that necessitated a letting go of how things had been, what our schedule used to look like, how our household once operated in favor of creating space for what the rhythm and the pace and the reality of the rhythm and the pace of our household was now with just the two of us.

And then here at the holidays, it did the reverse, and both kids are home and it's, again, a realigning of the rhythm and the pace and the way that our days move and, and its... there's no hardened edge there.

It's not a cutting out or cutting off, it's simply ... a lot more about softening and creating space.

I sometimes think of a ball of yarn, when it's all tangled up -and if we start pulling on it, we often create less space, and we make the tangle more difficult to pull apart because we've reduced the amount of space that's available inside. Where, if we approach the ball of yarn and we just start to kind of tease out the pieces, we create a little bit of space that allows us to see how the individual threads are wrapped around each other, are entangled, are interwoven and where there might be space to shift that,to untangle, to free ourselves.

And sometimes we get really entrenched in how we think things are, how we believe they should be, we like how they've been and so we deny the reality of what is. And the challenge of that for us is that we can't see the possibility and the spaces when we're clinging to the rigidity of even something that we loved.

Change is quite natural and, though it can be difficult, it's important for us in this whole reflection and gratitude and releasing process, to honor that there may be grief, that we may mourn what was, we may mourn what we wish was.

We may have come into 2024 with a set of intentions and goals and ideas and visions and enthusiasm and energy for what we thought would come to life, how we hoped the year would unfold, what we believed was possible for us, for our families, for our communities, for our country, for the world and we may be finishing out the year having seen some of those not come to fruition. Having seen some of those go in maybe the exact opposite direction or take a complete 90 degree turn that we never could have predicted.

So within this whole process is an honoring.

However it is that you choose to look back on 2024, however it is that you choose to honor yourself and the events that unfolded and how it is that you chose to navigate what it was that unfolded before you and for you in the previous year, I would invite you to make space for joy, make space for gratitude, make space for grief. Make space for all the sensations and the emotions, the feelings that come up for you around the year.

We don't owe it to anyone to love or dislike or push away anything. The reflection, the gratitude, the releasing, the, all of it, the approach that you bring to stepping across this threshold from 2024 to 2025 is deeply personal and incredibly individual.

While we all travel in this big collective experience of being- well many collective experiences, honestly, so we are in our familial experience; we are in our community experience; we are in the the earthly experience, the human experience and so on and so on and so on. So there are layers of collective experience that we are having and every single one of us is having an individual experience within that collective experience.

And so, however it is that you feel about 2024, however it is that you are ending this year, it is uniquely yours.

And I would simply invite you, as I talked about yesterday, to just let yourself be yourself and be with yourself.

And to invite a softening into your reflection and your release. To give yourself the opportunity to imagine allowing things to flow naturally away from you simply because you don't hold them anymore.

There are so many forces at work that are beyond our control. An image that I really like to use is that of a snow globe and how, as we move through life, we stir things up. So imagine yourself at the center of the snow globe and the snow is swirling all around you and to get a sense of clarity, of breath and expansiveness and openness isn't to gather up the individual pieces of snow and then place them on the ground, that's not how we clear the air around us in a snow globe. To clear the air around us in a snow globe we become still.

We stop agitating and stop moving.

We breathe and we allow the force outside of ourselves, gravity, to just draw the snow away toward Earth.

A settling will happen when we soften and relax and allow it.

This is an approach to release that is more about no longer holding on. It's a letting go and setting down and then allowing the natural forces that exist all around us all the time to carry away.

I suppose the image that's coming to my mind as I sit with this idea of being at this threshold and approaching release in preparation for stepping into the new and honoring what has been is what if we allowed ourselves to just settle into an inner stillness?

Because the truth of the transition between 2024 and 2025 is that it will happen.

We will wake up tomorrow and the clocks will say January 1st, 2025; our computers and our phones will tell us that we crossed the threshold without actually having to move at all.

And so I wonder if we can challenge ourselves to soften out of 2024- to unclench our jaws, our fists; to unarmor our hearts; to lower our guards; to sit with ourselves and listen and allow.

Because like gravity acts on the snow in the snow globe, the natural flow of time will carry us into the next day, will carry us into the next beginning ,the new cycle.

And maybe in the softening we'll learn a little more about how it is that we are releasing our ideas of what has been, what should be; are letting go of our "wish it were different, "why can't I just".

And instead carry with us from this year into the next the seed of being in really honest and loving relationship with ourselves and with what is.

Not in a passive, "whatever" sort of way, but in this really deeply intentional, really deeply centered in what we are learning of ourselves, what we are learning of our true priorities, what we are learning of what is most aligned, most precious, most sacred within us, for us, and in our lives as a result.