Happy New Year! Here we go.

Tell me... do you feel the intense shift in the energy around? The one that is literally moving us into the New Year? It's a Nantucket Sleigh Ride, we are all along for the journey - but where do we go?

We all know this past year was a doozy, yet it is time to move on. "Move" - that is the keyword here: metaphorically and physically. Time to get centered so that we can take the next step in 2023.

Often at the beginning of the year, I feel this way: a bit tired, overworked, less centered, or scattered. I usually just go into retreat, hunker down, drink hot chocolate, build consecutive fires, and make snow angels. All these things connect me to the spirit and my deep inner core when I feel the momentum - but not the energy.

So how do you center yourself when you don't know where you are going?

I woke up one morning and felt the forces moving everything around me my family, my health, and even the furniture in my house has miraculously reconfigured itself. Well not by itself, I'm not that good of a witch! but everything has shifted. It is as if a magical force picked me up tucked me into a wheelbarrow with my crystals, shearlings, and herbs, and said: "Here we go, I am going to take you where you are going."

But wait! Where AM am I going?

There is a Line from Alice in Wonderland when she asks the Cheshire Cat "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" And the Cat, or rather Lewis Carroll himself, a great writer and clergyman said:

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

So in the past week, I have schooled myself in taking things slow, reminding myself that the journey is the destination even if my covid fatigue has altered my ability to take action.

Here is my little menu of a simple Self Care Retreat:

 Volume I

napping - rest
reading - intellect
eating - energy
cleaning - correction
making fires - release

Volume II

reiki - energy reset
massage - body reset
more napping - rest
hikes - earth energy

Volume III

journaling - calibration
iChing - oracle
meditation - insight

From Source to Root, Root to Source.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat

It is a beautiful cycle and it never fails to revive me from a slumbering hermit to simply a girl taking care of herself.

But wait, there is more! One evening after I finished teaching a restorative yoga class and I was suddenly transported by my spirit, and in the candlelight sanctuary by myself, I started moving my body, in yoga poses that became almost like an ecstatic dance performance.

Here is a little video of my dance. 

I felt weightless. I was moving, or something was moving me in my sacred space, freely and without pre or past tense.

Beauty in Movement, I found in stillness where I must go.

XO Jen