In 2020, what if you... Prioritize your self-care. Do the things that center you now, rather than waiting for when you are centered to do them. Say “yes” often but only when you actually want to. Speak “no” when you want to speak it, and let “no” be enough. Eliminate the word “just” when it serves as self-diminishment. Invite your own voice into the room. Allow and treat your feelings as guides. Allow yourself to be exactly where you are within, exactly when you are there. Get more intimate with and curious about your feelings to see what they reveal to you. Welcome your exiled emotions - be it your anger, your grief, your sadness, or your joy - as messengers. Allow their visits to bring pieces of you back to you. Honor your embodied experience. Appreciate this as a connection to the divine. Remember your innate belonging to and within nature. Reconnect with the wisdom of your intuition. Evict the internalized patriarchal values. Honor that you hold and need both the masculine and feminine energies within you to walk whole in this world, and wield both with care and reverence. Expose the constraining lies that you tell about yourself. Loosen from and release the beliefs that steal your power. Feed the beliefs that empower and expand your being. Unapologetically express both your needs and your boundaries. Choose self-love and compassion over self-domination. When you do things, do them with the same energy you wish for them to carry into the world. Fill your time with what truly animates and excites your being. Be more fully who you are, so that others may be invited to do the same. Embody and own your existence in this moment in this place in this time. Listen to the guiding voice that you hear from inside your core, in the many ways it speaks to you. Give that voice your trust and your allegiance. Release the old dramas and stories that you’ve now tired of re-enacting and telling. Invite in the ability to retell the story that you are living now. Drop all stories and be present to what unfolds. Live your life according to your ability to dream a better reality than we’ve yet created. Become aware of the sacredness of your dreams. Hold their flames close to your heart, growing in strength until one day you carry them into the world. And in doing that, find more of yourself. Owe nothing of yourself to anyone, but give freely when it feels right. Be generous and kind with your spirit. Risk the loss of your perceived safety. Take the leaps you ache for. Approach life from possibility. Revisit the contracts of behavior and patterns you’ve signed from fear. Tear them up, whenever you can. Release your personal grip on the social wound of shame. Let it go. Drop the energy vacuum of false guilt, the under-kick you give yourself when you choose what you truly want. Let go of the skins that you ache to shed but still cling to. Break the chains of your own repeated, self-reductive narratives. Craft new narratives that feel like a home you can both live and expand in. Let go of every “them” versus “us” mentality. Keep your vision and your heart more open than the lowest common denominator of our instincts. Invite nuance into your perception, rather than attachment or rigidity. Invite yourself again and again to open beyond the perception you hold. Be willing to see more where you thought there was no more to see. Know that we are always making meaning. Meaning is subjective and yours is often not the same as the person’s next to you. Fill all of your space instead of playing small. Take calm claim of your worth rather than hustling for it. Stop whittling down your worth by people-pleasing. Feel the power of owning your choices. Experience that your presence matters more than your productivity. Value the quality of your “being" as much as the tick marks of your “doing”. Cease to grasp for either love or recognition. Accept and allow all of your beautiful contradictions, and so those of others. Take off any masks that you hide behind. Be real and kind, rather than nice. Choose presence over pretense. Stop chasing a phantom self you think you need to be. Witness yourself, lacking of nothing, in the full wholeness of your here and now. Remember and revive the dormant parts of yourself aching for expression. Validate, rather than trivialize, the deep yearnings of your being. Call them forth to be lived. Be open to support; invite and allow yourself to be supported. Practice receptivity as much as you practice action. Become an even better, more present listener. Drop the need to be understood or accepted by anyone. Liberate yourself from the approval of others. Stop explaining yourself. Give yourself more latitude. Let fear be familiar company on your journey, not the reason to stop. Allow for something being ‘right’ to not always mean it is ‘easy’. Be willing to be wrong and celebrate your failures. Invite yourself, again and again, back to begin. Be humble rather when presented with a real opportunity to grow. Hold yourself as love even when, especially when, you’re learning. Discard your habitual apologizing, but do give your sincere apology when it’s needed. Develop a vaster sense of your identity, beyond the narrow roles you play, no matter how much worth or safety they have given you. You have more. Notice where empathy is found and gift yourself everyone who will be there to hold and support you. Also be honest when you cling tightly to your wounds as a social currency beyond the healing value of your sharing. Ask if you are making yourself richer or poorer with it. Set intentions and pay close attention to your motivations in all you do. See more clearly the walls you’ve built around you, and brick by brick, dismantle. Ditch the perpetual cultural story of scarcity and not enough. Nurture and share your gifts, rather than denying or withholding them for the sake of yourself. Value your heart and your gut more than other’s opinions. Begin even when you have no idea how it will go, where it will end. Watch for winks from the universe. Rise to challenges. Forget about figuring it all out by yourself. Tell your perfectionism to take a hike. Release control of outcomes and over the precise details of how everything happens. Banish your ‘shoulds’. Keep breathing inside of uncertainty and the unknown. Let in the power of vulnerability as an ally. Dare to open when you want to close. Find a kind of softness that holds more inherent strength than any armor. Be willing to take the armor off. Let surrender find you. Be available rather than untouchable. Navigate disagreement with love and kindness, rather than avoid it. Respond, as much as you can, rather than reacting. Listen and then listen better, rather than assume. Notice when you are distracting yourself. Go back to the guide of your feelings. Know that right now is not how it all turned out - it’s simply right now. Attune your attentiveness to what’s good. In you. In others. In your life. Accept some apologies will never come. Give yourself the love, the forgiveness, the witnessing you might wish for from others. Be accountable for your feelings, words, reactions and actions. But not for those of others. Be willing to see through the lenses of your past that project into the present. Know the future you are toiling towards never matters more than right now. Conspire with yourself and your true desires, rather than self-sabotage and dismiss them. Express what you want more often than you express what you don’t want. Acknowledge privilege. Acknowledge differences. Acknowledge preferences. Seek similarities. Be willing to meet eyes and have uncomfortable conversations. Focus on connection, not blame and defense. Choose being more aware over more right. Embrace the disturbances as revealing more of who you are to you. Keep faith even when it’s not all happening on your timeline. Do not mistake your worry as action, or as helping. Instead, re-focus your attention again and again on the path. Know that you are often ready enough and it’s rarely just the right moment to your mind. Drop into your heart. Risk being too much, but finally more of you. Practice choosing expansion, rather than staying comfortable in contraction. Let some things go. Let some things be. Let some things in. Come from a center of love, and when you trip over yourself - forgive yourself, wake up a little bit more and come from love again. What if you? What if I? What if we?