After an incredibly busy summer leading into an intensely chaotic fall followed by a typically jam-packed holiday season, I felt a deep need to spend my January doing a different kind of work, work that gives back to my community and not just to my wonderful family. I reached out to my Facebook community and offered to do 31 free Calendar Readings, one for each day in January. I was pleasantly surprised by the immediate response! Whether truly excited to receive a reading or curiously intrigued about what that really meant, I ended up with 23 “clients” within just a couple of days. What a gift for me!

I treat myself to a Calendar Reading each January as one of the handful of rituals I choose to start the new year. It is a reminder that this new year is a blank slate and gives me what I need to assess where I am coming from and get a vision for where I am headed. Getting to do this for others also enables me to really see the patterns that are emerging in the new year and how the energy of this new year is different from previous years.

I was relieved to be able to tell immediately that 2014 is a gentler year. The past couple of years have been intense in the way where it can be hard to keep your balance. While I certainly know people who found their sea legs relatively quickly, for the rest of us it has felt a bit like we were in a small boat on a rough sea getting tossed about. So while this year has a gentler energy, that does not mean it is any less powerful. It feels like we were drinking from the fire hose and we finally figured out how to control the nozzle — there is still a ton of momentum catapulting us forward, but we are learning how to direct the flow instead of having it barrel over us.

This year we’re being asked to stop letting our left brains run the show quite so much. The left brain is a bit of a workhorse — it serves a very important purpose, but if we see the world only through its eyes, we lose sight of the magic and mystery of life and the joy of the present moment. We are also being asked to let go of our need to be in control — when we trust that things will be okay without our micromanagement, we open ourselves up to allowing even better things to unfold in our lives, things we might not have been able to imagine all on our own.

It is a year where many of us will come into our own — when we listen to our own inner wisdom instead of the expectations and judgments of others, we step into that unique place that only we can fill and new opportunities start to open up for us. Hand-in-hand with this is the reminder that we need to be patient — new seeds are getting planted through this process and as exciting as this is, we need to trust that they are doing their jobs (growing) while we do our jobs. Just as a garden needs tending, this is not passive waiting — we still have steps to take along the way to keep things flowing, but there is no need to push or rush things along either. The seeds will bear fruit when they are ready!

And for me, it is a year where I am personally being encouraged to make sure I’m doing a little bit of everything instead of my typical “focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others” approach. So far, January has been even busier than I could have imagined, but this approach enables me to move forward on all fronts instead of just a handful, which ultimately means I get to do more of this Work that makes me feel so awake and alive. So thank you to all of you who have accepted my offer this January — it means a lot to me that I get to do this for all of you. And if you haven’t raised your hand yet and you’re interested in a reading, I still have a few spots left! Namaste.

Photo: heart + intuition canvas print by Mae Chevrette