5 Intention-setting Ideas to Support Counting Your Blessings
This pandemic has no doubt brought change into our lives. Now the challenge is to see how those changes brought beauty as well.
With all of the loss that we have experienced since March, it can be difficult to see the silver linings in the clouds of grief. It is in times of loss that I remind myself there must be destruction before conscious construction. Equinimity can only be achieved when we hold both in our awareness and honor both sides of every coin.
As we enter the month of December, we have entered into the final eclipse season of the year. In addition to the eclipses, December also brings a rare and special planetary alignment on the 21st that suggests the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, referred to as the Great Conjunction, where Saturn and Jupiter meet at the same degree of the zodiac. This event is going to kickstart a new era for us human beings, supporting our global intention for equinimity. (To read more about the Great Conjunction, click here!)
So, below I offer 5 intention-setting tools to support drawing your awareness to the other side of the coin, where there is light in the darkness, wherein there lies beauty. I hope you will consider trying one!
- Reflect. Consider setting aside some time to sit in reflection with the intention of identifying what has changed for you and how you have navigated that change. The simple act of labeling what has changed, along with noticing how you responded to it is quite powerful. What space may have been created by the destructive energy and what filled up that space in the conscious construction phase? Remember to release any attachment to judgment and keep in mind there were no ‘right answers’ to the question of how best to navigate a pandemic.
- Recognize. If you accomplished something that you have had on your ‘To Do’ list for awhile or maintained a personal goal during this time, perhaps take a moment to give yourself some recognition! Possibly you learned to cook, a new language, a musical instrument or completed some required CEs, returned to, maintained or expanded your self-care practices or discovered a new found joy in connecting with the other beings living in your space. We don’t offer take time to congratulate ourselves on our accomplishments and instead tend to minimize them and raise our expectations, sometimes to superhuman impossible-to-meet levels. Whatever it is we have been able to do during this time, even if it is to get up every morning and do our best to move through the day, celebrate it!!
- Reframe. A simple, yet not-so-easy tool for finding the beauty in the destruction is reframing your experience. Reframing creates a different way of looking at a situation, trying to consider a different perspective in order to change its meaning. It’s the old glass half empty/half full scenario. For me, one of the things I miss most is connecting with friends over tea at a local eatery. However, the restrictions around indoor dining created space for more outdoor dining, which I absolutely love. Instead of a local eatery, we started meeting at the beach or at a local park where we could bring our take-out meal and sit on a blanket physically distanced in order to connect. I could either look at this as an inconvenience or I could look at it as an opportunity to have more picnics in the park. I reminded myself how this change brought two loves of mine together – eating and nature! Perhaps take a scenario that has felt disappointing to you and see if you can see it in a different light. If you are not able to come up with any different perspectives by yourself, consider reaching out to someone and ask them for their perspective. You might ask more than one person and write down the various angles to stimulate the change in lenses to support future opportunities for reframing.
- Reconnect. With so much restriction in what we can do, it has created opportunities for more being. So consider who you have been being with more. Who might have you deepened your connection with – your child, your spouse, yourself, nature? What have you learned from this chance to reconnect, about yourself, about someone else, about the world in which we live? We were heading down a pretty disconnected path prior to Covid-19 and the last nine months have shown us clearly that the ideal of independence is a myth. It has laid bare the fact that humans are wired for connection and has created space for a paradigm shift towards an ideal of interdependence. In this paradigm shift, we can find space for growth through our relationships.
- Refocus. Destruction often brings what we value most forward into our more conscious minds. Consider what your priorities were a year ago. Have they changed in any way? If so, how? What has that shift in priorities created in your life now? In a culture that values multi-tasking, it is not uncommon to feel like we had competing priorities, juggling so many balls in the air, that there was no time to focus or give anything our undivided attention. Perhaps this pandemic caused us to simplify, scale back, reduce, or limit in order to refocus our energy. This refocused energy often become a powerful force for conscious construction. What do you want to construct moving forward into the new year? If it is not quite clear yet, no worries. Perhaps plan to do a vision board before the end of the year to allow the beauty to be co-created!
As always, if you try any of these intention-setting ideas for holistic health, I would love to hear about the impact they might have had for you. Please send me an email at linda@sanctuary4compassion.com to share!
