2024 Personal Practice Theme: Devotion

Hello, dear readers,

Reclaiming Tradition communities often work with an annual theme or story, around which to structure the work of the year in ritual, skill shares, and so on. Not everything has to fit the theme, but it's a way to help guide things and explore a certain area over a given time period. Years ago, I also began working with a personal intention for the year, based on ideas shared by T. Thorn Coyle, who wrote about choosing intentions rather than making new year "resolutions." I have done a yearly intention on and off for about eight years now -- about as long as I've been involved in Reclaiming.

Now I'm part of multiple Reclaiming communities, which will have different themes and intentions for 2024. But aside from all this, I have gotten a nudge from the Universe to have a personal theme. It is kind of also an intention, but it is a broader theme for my work of the year. And, it is a sneaky one for my indecisive and ADHD focus issues, because it is a theme that gets to change focus every few months!

The theme is...

Deepening Devotion to Deities

If you've been following all of my content that I've ever shared, anywhere, over the past few years (I really doubt most people fall into this category lol), then you might know that the topic of devotion has been a big question for me for a while.

Read on to hear more about the path that lead me here, and what I'm planning for this themed work. Maybe you want to do something similar, maybe not for the year, but in general at any point in your practice!

New Year, More Me

Greetings, dear Readers,

It's 2017. A new calendar year. For some reason, even though I know it's an "arbitrary" measurement of time, the New Year does seem to feel like something new to me. At least, it has for the past two years, since I started celebrating the New Year in the way I've always wanted to--at home, with my loves, with no midnight phone calls connecting me to people all over the place, no noise... only what I want to do. It's amazing how, when you create that space you want to be in, create that moment and that experience, how you can feel subtle shifts that never seemed to be there before.

Still, on another level, I don't think of the New Year as anything magic(k)al, in itself. It's still one day leading into another. I do not subscribe to the "New Year, New Me!" school of thought. If you choose to make a change, you can do so at ANY time. And even when you do so, it doesn't mean that you are new, or someone entirely different, or somehow not who you just were. You are different, perhaps, in ways. Some people change DRASTICALLY, for better or worse. They are still themselves.

Viewer Survey! My First Ever!

Greetings, dear Readers!

Now, you may not know this about me... but I'm the kind of person who REALLY LIKES SURVEYS. Frankly, I don't know why I haven't done one for my channel before. I've been thinking about it for years.

But today I finally sat down and made one! Demographics questions, YouTube audience questions, FUN questions, questions to get to know a little more about your lives and what you like and what you're interested in, what your experiences are, what your background is, and so on!

My 2015 Lessons, My 2016 Intention

"What is Your Intention?" asks Thorn Coyle's blog post from a few years ago. I haven't thought much about a single intention for this new calendar year yet, so I'd like to do that, now. Though the whole "Yuletide" season (which for me begins slightly before the Winter Solstice and extends slightly past the change of the Gregorian calendar year) feels like a shift into a new chapter for me, I did feel a significant change in this year's New Year's Eve into New Year's Day, January the 1st of 2016.