Get in psychic shape for 2012

Those days in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve can sometimes feel a bit flat.  The festivities are over and whilst we might be anticipating the New Year, it hasn’t yet begun.

These kind of ‘in between’ days have a huge spiritual significance that we tend to overlook in our modern lives with the emphasis on doing and rush.  Pagan practice closely follows the rhythm of the seasons, with in-built down times, as does the Tao or Dao.  We can see the spiritual importance of nurturing our psychic welfare represented in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, where the Hanged Man is suspended in contemplation with the Neptunian promise that even though it looks like not much is happening, it’s all going on down in the depths.

That time between Christmas and New Year is the perfect time to pay attention to your psychic welfare and set the tone for 2012.

Last year, I talked about setting your New Year’s intentions rather than resolutions, and this year I want to take another quantum leap forward and talk about doing your own psychic audit in preparation for the creation of your year ahead.  Like Janus, the Roman God of beginnings and transitions, we need to look forwards and backwards at the same time to do this.

Grab your journal and begin by taking stock of the year that has passed.  What were the highlights and low points for you?  What were the main themes and lessons?  How have you changed over the past year?  What has changed in your world?

Then turn your focus to the year ahead and write a list out of what you want more of in your life.  Put it in loose terms such as more love, more fun, more friendship, more of a sense of achievement, or whatever is true for you.

Take each thing in your list and make it the heading of a clean page.  Underneath, draw two columns.  On one side, write ‘What stops me from having it’ and on the other ‘I feel this when I…’

Let’s say one of your headings is ‘Fun’.  A little soul searching might reveal that what stops you having fun is that you feel that you don’t have time, or that life is too serious these days to enjoy any of it.  What you are uncovering is the beliefs you have arrived at through continuous repetition of patterns that have then taken root in your mind as being The Way The World Is.  Either that, or you’ve caught a thought virus from someone else that has become your reality.

This is your chance to maximise the ways that you have fun by adding to the list under ‘I feel this when I’.  Maybe you are locked into a continual race against time, but if you do have a huge pile of ironing to get through, is there any reason why you can’t listen to your favourite music or a play on the radio as you do it?  If you can be creative and find ways to have fun whilst you are doing what must be done, you’re on to a real winner in the happiness stakes!

It’s also your chance to root out those thought viruses that aren’t serving you.  Who says you have to feel bad in order to solve a problem?  Who says you can’t have fun whilst you tackle what must be done?  You don’t have to live by such ideas.

The whole point about all of this is becoming conscious about what you need to symbolically release and embrace, and alongside that the way that you run your mind and the choices that you make, so that you can enter into what I certainly feel is a key year in a creative and supportive frame of mind and a strong emotional state.

You can also bring in magic to support your cause.  Get creative about using all of the psychic cleansing rituals that you have at your disposal.  You can be old school, embracing magical practices such as smudging to shift the energy, lighting anointed candles or, if you can do so with the utmost safety, burn what symbolises the old on fires, leaving you free to embrace the new.  Or you can go modern and do a major declutter of any physical object that is part of the old and take it down to your local charity shop.

It’s all about making use of that time so that you can approach the starting block of 2012 in the best psychic shape you can be in.

Loads of love,

Michele x