Setting Your Intentions for the New Year! [Episode #538]

This week’s topic is: Setting Your Intentions for the New Year!

Happy early New Year. I am so excited for our upcoming year together as a community and to be able to keep growing and sharing with one another. We have so many amazing announcements upcoming for you guys from Solluna.

I hope that you’ve had a restful period between Christmas and New Years. Hopefully this year is a little bit of an inward time where we start to reflect and think about what we want to cultivate and create in the upcoming year and what we want to let go of.

For many of us, 2020 was a year of deep introspection, shifting, confusion sometimes about what’s going on in the world. Unfortunately, I say with compassion, for some of us deep pain and suffering on different levels, including physically and mentally. I think this year is going to be a wonderful shift for all of us. And today I’ll be sharing tips on how we can step with our best foot forward in this new year.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Susie – Sweden

There’s always so much emphasis on the New Year being the time to make shifts or improvements in our lives. Do you have any tips on how to adjust this thinking so that it’s a practice throughout the year?

Monica – Texas

It’s so hard to think about goals I want to achieve. Is there a better way to view goal setting?

Tami – Oregon

What is the best way to set intentions for the New Year so we set ourselves up for success?

Karin – Maryland

How much should we attach ourselves to a list of goals or intentions? Should we jot it down and then move on or do we need to actually put it into practice? I don’t want to overthink it.

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Inspirational Thought of the Week

“True friendship is broad and inclusive.” – Paramahansa Yogananda

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Your Energy: Out With The Old and In With The New
• Breaking Through Old Habits and Fears!
• The New Year’s Edition: Resolutions?
• Detoxing in Time for the New Year

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 Hey, Beauties and welcome back to our Thursday Q&A community show. Happy early New Year. I am so excited for our upcoming year together as a community, and to be able to keep growing and sharing with one another. We have so many amazing announcements upcoming for you guys from Solluna, including our brand new updated Solluna app, which will house our Solluna Circle, which will include one live virtual circle with me every month, as well as daily tips from me. So I am so excited about this program, and if you’re interested in learning more, please head over to mysolluna.com. I hope that you have had a restful period the last few days, the last week, the time between Christmas and New Years can be, hopefully this year for you a little bit of an inward time where we start to reflect and we start to think about what we want to cultivate and create in the upcoming year and what we want to let go of.

Kimberly: 01:08 And of course for many of us, 2020 was a year of deep introspection, shifting, confusion sometimes about what’s going on in the world. And of course, unfortunately I say with compassion, for some of us deep pain and suffering on a physical level and among mental level and different levels as well. So we want to step with our best foot forward in this new year. And I think that this year is going to be a wonderful upturn, a wonderful shift for all of us.

Kimberly: 01:46 So our topic today is actually Setting Your Intentions for the New Year. And we’re going to be going into some more new year’s ideas on Monday, for our next solo cast. But today I wanted to get into some of your questions about intention setting, and again, how do we really put our best foot forward?

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Question 1: There’s always so much emphasis on the new year being the time to make shifts or improvements in our lives. Do you have any tips on how to adjust this thinking so that it’s a practice throughout the year?

Kimberly: 02:34 Our first question today comes across the ocean from Susie, who is from Sweden. Hello Susie. Sending you love over there. And she writes, “There’s always so much emphasis on the new year being the time to make shifts or improvements in our lives. Do you have any tips on how to adjust this thinking so that it’s a practice throughout the year?” I agree, Susie. I think that it feels a bit contrived to me, to be honest, that it’s always this date of January 1st. And that’s when people sort of think about their resolutions, their goals, their intentions, whatever it is. And then most people abandon them in a few days or a few weeks, and then that’s it. For me, it’s always felt … And I shared this with you guys a few weeks ago. For me, it’s always felt that the biggest internal shift, because it aligns with the external collective shift is really the Solstice, which is around December 21st, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, going into the darker months. And that has always felt like the inward time is starting there.

Kimberly: 03:49 So then the last few years really thinking about that period about deep, deep reflection. But even then I don’t think it stops there. I don’t think it should ever be any tiny amount of time throughout the year that we just reflect, and then we drift along and then we don’t revisit, or again, redefine our focus, our goals, our intentions. So there’s a couple of ways to keep this alive throughout the year. You can think about doing it on the equinoxes and on the Solstices, so you’re going with this flow of nature. And every few months, four times a year, you’re treating it like a new years time to look back on what you had your prior intention and then redefine that going forward. So in that regard, you can, and I highly suggest this, write down what your intentions are. I think it’s very, very powerful to write down your goals and your intentions by your own hand on paper, it’s a way to make them already more concrete. You’re pulling them out of the ether, out of your mind where no one else can see them, and you’re starting to put them on paper.

Kimberly: 05:09 So what I do is I write them down and I fold them up, and then I put them on my altar so that I can see them. And I don’t see the writing because it’s folded up, but I know what I wrote because it hasn’t been that long ago. And then I revisit mine pretty often. So here’s another thing. So you can look at them seasonally, or you can think about going with the rhythm of the moon. So this would be more of a monthly practice, which I think is really, really beautiful, and is part of our DNA, especially as women because we have our menstrual cycles which are aligned with the moon rhythms. And every month on the new moon, you can get out your old intentions. Your prior intentions. They’re not that old. And look them over and maybe write new ones, and that will be your intention for that next period. And sometimes you may find that you don’t need to write new ones because your intentions are carrying forward through several moon cycles, and maybe every new moon cycle you decide to revisit, refine a little bit.

Kimberly: 06:18 So that’s a way to not only keep goals and improvements and intentions top of mind, but it’s also a way to align with the greater rhythms. And anytime we’re expanding beyond ourselves and we’re including the cosmos, nature, what’s going on in a much bigger way, other people, culture, society, how we can benefit others. Anytime there’s this idea of expansion, it’s going to benefit us because we’re not meant to be the small limited beings. We’re meant to expand. So I recommend doing that either on the monthly moon cycle, or seasonally, and that feels a lot more natural. So thank you so much Susie. Sending a big warm, cozy hug in Sweden, a country I hope to visit one day.

Question 2: It’s so hard to think about goals I want to achieve. Is there a better way to view goal setting?

Kimberly: 07:09 All right, our next question comes from Monica and she lives in Texas. She writes, “It’s so hard to think about goals I want to achieve. Is there a better way to view goal setting?” So I think even the whole concept of … Lots of love Monica, I love your question. I want to dive right in. I think that goal setting can come across sometimes as a bit masculine, and it’s this idea of to-do lists and going down in a linear way and achieving this and crossing this off the list. And if that doesn’t feel good to you, then I suggest that you don’t even use that approach at all. There isn’t one way to do things.

Kimberly: 07:55 I feel that intentions, the title of our show today, is perhaps a more holistic way of looking at how we move forward in our life and how we can stay in flow. And that feels more of the divine feminine. And it also feels that … Of course it’s not one or the other, it’s not the feminine or the masculine, but it’s really finding the balance and finding the whole-ism within that and making sure that we don’t feel like we’re going too far in one direction. To an extreme the masculine could just feel very rigid, and to an extreme the feminine could feel a bit circuitous and perhaps unfocused. Again, not literally, but the way that typically we think of the attributes that would fall into either.

Kimberly: 08:54 So if we don’t like goal setting, if that just doesn’t resonate with us, I totally get it. And a way that we can think about intentions that’s very, very powerful is about nourishing ourselves through the four cornerstones as we move forward into the year. And what happens is when we nourish ourselves holistically, we grow into our own power, because our power comes from our wholeness. And so when we do that, we are able to create organically and things in our lives start to fall into place without the pushing and the pulling and the normal prodding that I think doesn’t feel very good about goal setting, or the connotation of it for many of us. So think about deep, deep internal nourishment. And that in turn will allow us to step into our wholeness, step into a deeper connection with ourselves, and in turn, allow us to connect more deeply with other people. And so we start to move just from isolated self care into family care, community care. And we start to feel, again, that expansiveness, which is part of our nature. And the more and more I go along this journey, I realized such a vital, vital part of wellness.

Kimberly: 10:09 So Monica, what you could do is you could write in your journal, food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. And you could just think about intentions for deeply nourishing yourself this year. So food wise really, whatever it is, focusing on whole foods, focusing on home cooked meals, bringing in more seasonal ingredients, checking out some Solluna. New recipes, whatever it is. Body-wise, how do you want to feel in your body? Do you want to try learning a new skill in your body, or do you just want to simply commit to walking every day? Whatever that might look like for you as well. Emotionally, committing to journaling or community time, something like our Solluna Circle, finding times and ways to share and to process feelings. And to have the space to take a step back. Because when things start to pile too closely together, I often find that it leads to stress, and that never feels good.

Kimberly: 11:10 So the last cornerstone is spiritual growth, and your intentions may be to develop or to deepen your meditation practice, to spend more time in stillness, which overlaps a little bit with our emotional wellbeing, just having more space between all the doing. It’s so healthy. It’s so needed. Being in nature more. So whatever that is. So that could be a really nice way to start and just to think about how we want to deeply nourish ourselves and move into more of our whole power this year. And then if it feels good to expand beyond that, then you could think about intentions for using your gifts out into the world, intentions for perhaps what you’re excited about creating or any creative pursuits. And keep it more of that flow way, that very organic way, instead of goal setting, if that doesn’t resonate. So try it Monica, see how it feels to you. Even when I’m telling it to you I feel nourished. I feel like I want to do it myself and give myself a hug today.

Kimberly: 12:21 Because we are meant to really, of course, take care of ourselves. And when we are able to deeply see ourselves in that holistic way, we are able to deeply care for others and everybody just grows stronger and stronger, which of course is the purpose of our community, and I believe the reason that we’re here. To help serve each other. So give it a go, let me know how you do, and I send you so much love.

Break

Kimberly: 12:50 All right Beauties, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be back right after the break with two more questions for you on this topic of setting your intentions for the new year.

Question 3: What is the best way to set intentions for the new year so we set ourselves up for success?

Kimberly: 13:04 All right. Our next question comes from Tammy, who lives in Oregon, and she writes, “What is the best way to set intentions for the new year so we set ourselves up for success?” I love this question, Tammy. I think it is a wonderful question. And I will say that I think that the best way to think about intentions is to think about them as an ever evolving dynamic part of your life. Like I was saying in our first question to Susie, it’s not something that’s meant to be rigid. It’s not something that’s meant to just be a one-time thing that you write down and never think about. You never revisit. It never shapes and it never molds. Life is fluid, we are fluid. Every cell in our body, our blood, our electrons, our cells, everything is dancing and moving. And so should the our approach to our intentions. It doesn’t make sense to create something that’s rigid and stagnant when we are not rigid and stagnant beings, it will go against our very nature.

Kimberly: 14:12 So I think the best way to think about it is first of all, to sit in meditation and to breathe, and to connect back in word with yourself, with your body, and pull the senses back in. So the senses going out will see what other people are doing, they’ll see what expectations are of you from other people. It’ll be a lot of noise. It’ll be a lot of stuff out there. And it’s very hard to really create your intentions from truth if they’re rooted in the noise of other people. So what I suggest is really just making some space to meditate and to think about the year ahead, and think about the next step and the next phase for you.

Kimberly: 15:08 So you can think about the year, but again, we know that we are going to revisit this hopefully many times throughout the year. And if I … Sorry, I’m so excited I can’t bring it … How about bring it up again? If we are to sit in circle together, which hopefully we will, these are things that we will continue to talk about every month and circle and to introspect, and to make sure that we’re staying aligned to our truth, and to our voice, and to our bodies and how we can best nourish our bodies food wise, and emotionally, and meditation wise and so on. So I would say to tune inward, and that is first of all, the best step for success, because when you start to write after you meditate, you’re aligning from the inside, not from the outside. So you’re already setting yourself up for success because you are already thinking about or feeling into your own truth.

Kimberly: 16:04 And then the next part would be to, again, not think about things in such a rigid way. So instead of saying something like … And you guys know, I’m not a big numbers person. So I think numbers have a lot of rigidity attached to them. And some people it helps. But for me, I know that when I stopped letting go of numbers and stopped weighing myself, and my goal was simply to just feel radiant and fit and good in my body, my body did open up and responded to that much better than when I was weighing myself all the time. So I would say in your intentions, to think about the feelings and to think about it in a more qualitative way. Versus, “I have to lose 20 pounds in the next 60 days. Numbers, numbers, numbers.” Or, “I have to …” Or, “I want to.” Or, “I must make an extra $10,000 in the next year.”

Kimberly: 17:04 Whatever it is, if that feels good to you, go with that. But if it doesn’t, to think about the feeling of more abundance, the feeling of being more fit in your body, because I think that feelings and emotions are much stronger motivators than feeling like we have to fit these numbers and this rigidity, which can set us up for failure in some ways, because it puts us on that, almost like a tight rope of I’m on or I’m off, I’m perfect or I’m not. And as a recovering perfectionist, I can say very much that is not very fostering to holistic health and healing. But rather, again, going into our emotional body and creating what we want from this less linear approach, and this much more feeling approach.

Kimberly: 18:02 And that may feel a little abstract to you at first, but it’s not. If you think about writing out your intentions, I intend to be fit and to feel good in my body. I intend to draw in more abundance this year. I intend to use my passion for XYZ. For music, for whatever, fashion, for playing with kids, to create more abundance for me. So you can think about it in terms of flow, just a more feeling way. And I feel that that does set us up for more success.

Kimberly: 18:38 And then the third thing I would say, Tammy, is to also break down your intentions into smaller steps. So you can think about it for a period or the big goal. And then you can think about, okay, in Q1 or in this first month I want to read some books about this subject to prepare myself. And then you can reward yourself when you know that you have taken that step. It’s a smaller success, but it’s still a success. And that really feeds your brain. It gives your brain dopamine and feel good chemicals, and it inspires you to keep going. Versus there’s the big goal and there’s nothing else between point A and point B. That can be a very lonely journey to get there. And it feels really good in your body to yourself to give yourself those little steps along the way. So I highly recommend doing that.

Kimberly: 19:33 And try it for yourself. Break down your bigger intentions and think about them in periods. Or like we were saying earlier, if you don’t have overarching intentions right now, nothing’s coming to you that feels organic, just think about it in phases. Think about it in terms of the moon cycles, and we can go month by month and it keeps evolving because we keep evolving, and the deeper we go into ourselves, we will start to change. We will start to … It seems like we’re changing, but we’re actually unfolding more and more into ourselves.

Kimberly: 20:10 So Yogananda, the great yoga guru talks about the mud that’s over the gold that is already us. So what we’re doing is we’re just scraping off the mud. And so that feels like a change as more of the mud put peels off. But really we’re just getting down, down, down into our core, which is really what the whole philosophy of the four cornerstones is meant to help you do. To nourish all parts of yourself in a balanced way, which is the way to keep going deeper and deeper into connecting with yourself.

Question 4: How much should we attach ourselves to a list of goals or intentions? Should we jot it down and then move on, or do we need to actually put it into practice? I don’t want to overthink it.

Kimberly: 20:38 So give it a go. I love you, and I love this question, Tammy. Thank you so much for being part of our community. Sending you so much love and happy new years. Okay. Going to our next and final question. This is from Karin. I like the spelling. K-A-R-I-N. And she lives in Maryland. And she writes, “How much should we attach ourselves to a list of goals or intentions? Should we jot it down and then move on, or do we need to actually put it into practice? I don’t want to overthink it.”

Kimberly: 21:11 So Karin, I think that everything that we’ve talked about up until now really does apply to your question, jotting it down is a very important practice, writing something down, concretizes your ideas, and it helps you self organize your ideas and also clarify them to yourself and clarify them to the universe. I am a big believer in intention, frequency, energy, because I think everything is energy whether we acknowledge it or not. I am a student of quantum physics, and the deeper I dive into learning about quantum physics and quantum mechanics, the more clear it is to me that everything is just pulsating energy waves, and there really is no separation. So what we’re putting out with clarity is we’re sending signals all the time. We’re creating with energy all the time, whether we acknowledge it or not. It’s sort of how they say that something like 90% of communication is nonverbal. We communicate with our energy, with our facial expression, with just the presence that we come into a room. With our gestures, everything is energy.

Kimberly: 22:23 And so when it comes to intentions, we want to treat them as a living, breathing, dynamic energy, not something that we just write down and move on from, but something that becomes part of our life. So what I mean by that is when we were talking with Monica earlier about this idea of nourishing yourself, that’s an important intention I think for all of us to perhaps consider this year is how we can deeply nourish ourselves and bring ourselves closer and closer back to wholeness. Because not only do we feel our best, not only are we our most powerful then, but then we are also able to serve and to help each other more and more. And I think that when … You use this word, Karin, attachment. We don’t need to attach to anything. It’s just a guiding flow, a guiding signal, or one guide post, but then we keep flowing and we keep shifting and we keep evolving. And that’s why I think on the moon cycles, it’s a really beautiful practice to keep visiting your intentions, and to keep thinking about evolving them, rewriting them if we need to, and making them feel really dynamic in our lives.

Kimberly: 23:41 This whole idea of the New Year’s resolution is very masculine. And I think a bit outdated. That we just do something on January 1st, everybody goes around on January 1st, and then everybody talks about it and then it fades away in sometimes a week or a few weeks and a month maybe. And then that’s it. It just feels very stagnant, and it doesn’t feel like it’s a living, breathing thing, which is why I think that approach really doesn’t work for most people.

Kimberly: 24:13 So yeah, I think the way that we can flow into this year and to feel that flow is to not feel attached, to not feel that it has to be resolutions, it has to be goals, but it’s about wholeness and it’s about a much more organic way. And something that isn’t so dire, it’s not so serious because we can revisit as much as we want. And we can keep tuning in more and more. As I was saying to Tammy, it’s important to sit in meditation before we create any of these intentions, because so much will arise up from inside of us. From our truth, from our soul, from our bodies. Our bodies give us wisdom as well.

Kimberly: 24:56 And so to me, not overthinking it at all. It’s more of a feeling, it’s more of your intuition that speaks to you through your body, and you’ll also start to notice that some of the things that you think that you want, maybe it’s what other people want for you. Or maybe it’s just a mechanical thing that you put every year. “I’m going to lose another 10 pounds,” or, “I’m going to lose those five holiday pounds,” or whatever it is. And maybe that’s not really what your energy wants to focus on right now. So let it be so personal to you, let it feel so good to you and your soul that it’s an amazing practice this year, not this rigid resolution way that you may have done other years. And that’s okay, because we keep growing and evolving, and I’m excited to see how differently that feels to you.

Thought of the Week

Kimberly: 25:46 So I’m going to close now with the quote of the week. This comes from Paramahansa Yogananda, who I mentioned earlier, the great yoga guru. And he writes, “True friendship is broad and inclusive.” So I keep it really thinking about this idea. It keeps coming up to me that friendship is not about just the people that we know really well, our inner circle, but really this idea of oneness, this idea of community, this idea that we really are all connected to each other. And so we can be a friend to everybody, and we can include everybody we can share with everybody. This is why I’m so passionate about our circle, because I think it’s really important that we come together regularly. Not just once in a while, but regularly to share and to breathe together and to be together. To love each other and to support each other.

Kimberly: 26:47 And that is, to me, what this is all about. It’s not just, “Here’s me and my little tiny circle and my five best friends and my 12 family members,” but broadening it and broadening it and seeing ourselves more in others, and to see the light in others more. And then we will see the light in ourselves more when we do that. And it’s such an incredible shift to make, I think, and for all of us to start thinking about wellness in a broader way, and love in a broader way, and everything will grow in your life. I promise. Your beauty will grow, your energy, and everything will just multiply. Abundance, everything.

Kimberly: 27:31 So think about it. True friendship is broad and inclusive. And think about that perhaps while you’re creating your intentions. And I can’t wait to hear more about your intentions and the process that resonates with you, and we’ll get into more moon cycles in the circle and so on, and as we go through the podcast this year. Please keep your questions coming. They are wonderful, and it keeps the podcast living and breathing in a two-way conversation. I love to hear how I can support you, how we can support each other in the community. What you’re wondering about. You are so important. We’re all so connected, and I love you so much. I’m so grateful for you. I’m so grateful and excited for our upcoming year in 2021. So happy, happy new year. Sending you so much love, and I will see you back here on Monday.