How do we review our growth from one year into another when things often stray far from the plan?
When we go into a new year, we may hold the hope or expectation that the intentions we set for the year will wrap up certain areas of growth or external fruition into neat little bows. “Okay, I got there.”
But life has a way of waiting to reveal things to us only when the timing is perfect — and that timing is usually meant to get us more in touch with the present moment. Meaning that even when we can see or “just know” aspects of the future (and that knowing IS what’s real — so we must follow that), we aren’t able to know how it’s all going to go down until we get there… until it’s all going down.
Still, we keep setting intentions. Because our intentions have their own creative energy, and when they’re set with a firmness of choice and trust in the divine, our intentions always come true.
We may get to the end of the year and wonder, “What happened?! Did they really come true?”
Oh, they did… just maybe not as you envisioned they would.
Intentions are a form of co-creation — and co-creation cannot come from the expectations of the mind or the ego, but only from our soul’s truest desires.
In fact, when we allow it, we’ll usually find that the imagination of co-creation itself holds far greater awareness of what we truly need.
And because of the age-old personal growth cliché, “you can ask for what you want, but not for how,” each year will always have room for subjectivity in how we choose to view both our internal growth and our external accomplishments.
Rarely will the outcome of your intentions from a specific year look exactly like you expected them when the year began. (Of course, it might be doable if you’re hell-bent on controlling your world, but this will likely result in a state of misery that won’t be worth it in the end, goals accomplished or not.)
This doesn’t mean that by letting go of the “how” or the outcome we don’t get everything we desire. In fact, just the opposite.
It’s by letting go of our expectations while they’re in the process of taking form that they’re able to take form.
Let me explain…
Three years ago, on the eve of greeting 2014, I set a solid intention for new levels of self-love that went beyond the “self” and had me feeling connected to myself as Source more consistently.
In my mind, I both assumed and imagined it would also be a year of alone-ness. When I set the intention, I was with a group of close girlfriends, all of whom had set intentions involving romantic love and partnership. I, instead, proclaimed “This will not be the year of partnership for me, because this is the year of new levels of connectedness to myself. And I need to find that before I’m ready for a partner, so I’m going to have to go it alone.”
But because life knows what we need better than we do, after the first 4 months of solo-adventure, very much out of the blue, I fell in love. And not the kind of love where it takes time to figure out what will be — we’re talking the kind of instantaneous “every cell in your body tells you this person is what you were waiting for, even when you didn’t know you were waiting for them” kind of love. Not infatuation, but soul-resonance that must be played out in this lifetime to help you grow.
Though I knew I was doing what was right, I feared telling my girlfriends who had been there the night I proclaimed my intentions.
It took me a couple of weeks to get over the confusion around forfeiting my alone time. It was only when I began to see how this man showed up with me that I realized I had been wrong about one thing.
That year was the year of finding new levels of connectedness to myself as Source, of that deepened self-love. But my proclamation that I was going to go it alone wasn’t actually part of the intention. It was my assumption of how I believed the intention was going to have to come to fruition.
Once I realized this and surrendered to the partnership I had been guided to, I discovered that it was through this man that I would find what I desired.
And I did. I found it through his example, through how he pushed me to become even more self-sourced, and through the many dynamics of our love that led me back home to myself.
When we get to the end of a year and evaluate, is it really that the year’s chapter isn’t complete? Or, rather, could it be that the chapter simply didn’t go down as you expected it would — as you actually needed it to?
This year has been an interesting year for both myself and MDS. It’s been one of those years where calculating how much has been accomplished is dependent upon perception more than an ability to crunch a bunch of numbers or outcomes.
Because, again, life had its own plan beyond my human imagination. In order to grow in the kind of achievement I had envisioned (my word for 2016), MDS showed #TeamMDS that it required more structure, more preparation. It showed us that achievement must be prepared for.
And I know by now that when I choose something, Source will guide me to become it, first. Because through the becoming lies the automatic and effortless fulfillment of it.
So for me, achievement wound up looking not like getting my book on the shelves — but instead it looked like spending the entire year deep-diving into the manuscript. I wrote voraciously, but for the sake of how the manuscript wanted to grow me, not now I wanted to grow it.
And for MDS, achievement in 2016 looked like developing an even happier Sorcerer School with even happier participants, Sorcerer School becoming an accredited institution, and growing all sorts of foundations within MDS to be a company of fulfillment and success in order for future achievement to happen.
What about your life? Though the start of a new year is less about needing to wrap things up in perfect bows and more about new beginnings from wherever you stand, I’m still willing to bet you’ll find more pretty bows of “ohhhh that actually DID happen!” from your previous year’s intentions than you may have thought.
And in taking stock of how those intentions came to fruition, you’ll likely find increased trust in just how much the “co” in “co-creation” actually knows what it’s doing.
