I’m not a great Christmas-enthusiast, but there’s something about New Year that always delights me. I imagine it’s simply the promise of newness: things may have been a certain way last year, but that needn’t prove anything about this year. It’s a grand, sparkling invitation to remake habits and patterns, to re-imagine and recreate – a recharging of everyone’s optimism-battery.
Then, of course, there’s the cliche of the New Year’s resolution and what happens to it by February. Real renewal turns out to be trickier than we imagined; those old familiar habit-grooves, worn smooth and deep over the years, are not so easy to escape.
And this – unsurprisingly! – is where oracles help, not least the one called Change. People seem to know this intuitively: my calendar’s always full of reading appointments in January, often with people who’ve reached that point where something has to change, and blandly ‘tolerating’ is no longer an option.
Yi opens up the possibility of real change because it offers radically new ways of seeing. Those habit-grooves are maintained by our perceptions and the stories we tell ourselves, more or less consciously, in a constant, self-reinforcing loop.
Take my tired old conviction that I must do everything myself to be sure of getting it done properly, for instance. A reading that tells me I’m ‘rich in my neighbour’ is a constant challenge, every time I start to settle back into the comfy old groove rut.
I often recommend people cast readings asking for guidance for the year ahead. Not ‘crystal ball’-type readings, ‘What lies in store?’ – those might be helpful, too, but not in the same way. No… questions like,
- What should I be attuned to in the year ahead?
- How can I participate more fully in life this year?
- What to nurture in the year ahead?
- What to do differently this year?
These are big readings: the kind where you want to take your time, offer your full attention, and allow yourself to receive the response. Eliana and I actually conceived of the Opening Space for Change event in the first place as a ‘New Year’ occasion: creating a more spacious, clearer container for your annual reading, lending it a more powerful ‘charge’.
And you know… there actually isn’t a rule to say that big, spacious, change-inviting readings can only be asked on or before December 31st.
And today is the final day for the ‘early bird’ discount on Opening Space for Change.
Also… Happy Chinese New Year!