Now that we are fully into 2016 it seems that everyone is setting their intentions or creating their resolutions for the new year. While I love a good intention setting session, especially around the start of a new year, this year I felt myself wanting & needing to do something a little different.

My favorite life coach Christine Hassler, has created a New Year's Ritual that I've been religiously participating in throughout the past four years. It has all of the elements of an amazing practice - meditating, journaling and ample time for reflection. As I began the ritual, in the same pattern that I always begin, I quickly got stuck on the part where you take a blank sheet of paper and write down all of the things you don't want to carry with you into the New Year. In the past, I would breeze through this part pretty quickly. I'd fill my blank sheet of paper to the brim with all of the things that had no business being in my life anymore, the things that were causing more havoc than good. This year however, I felt myself wanting to marinate on these things a little longer than usual. What would typically take me 5-10 minutes, ended up taking over three days.

How did all of these things end up in my life this past year?

Why was I still stuck on the things that I didn't want to bring into the new year?

Why did it feel so difficult to let them go?

Didn't I want to set my intentions?

After some serious meditating, I realized that I didn't want to let them go because keeping them was easier. Choosing to let them go and leaving them behind meant that I had my work cut out for me. I'd have to actively choose EVERY.SINGLE.DAY not to engage in those things. I'd have to make a commitment to myself that I was going to show up as my best self as often as possible.

I tell you this because I think that many people are like me. We get too busy, we fill our lives with so much "Stuff" that when we do take a moment to come up for air, we find that we've taken a path we didn't intend on taking and have been carrying around a lot of unnecessary baggage. We forget to have regular check-ins to make sure that our choices and habits are in alignment with our higher purpose. We get too used to being on auto-pilot that when we switch over to manual we are in shock by what we see.

2015 was a spectacular year, with so many important lessons learned - the most important being that I had to wake up from my coma of busyness sooner, I needed to be more self-aware and leave room for the juicy, passion-filled stuff that had been calling to me. No wonder I couldn't finish my paper of "let goes" I didn't even realize I had acquired all of them!

So instead of sharing my intentions for this beautiful new year, I'm sharing the things I am letting go. The things I'll actively be kicking to the curb.

I wish you so much love & light as you let go of the people, habits & things that aren't serving you so that you can fully step into the life you were born to live.