A 3-Actions Steps to Give Yourself Time to Create New Space in Your Life

Every year on New Year’s Eve, Icelandic families and communities come together by a big bonfire to celebrate the end of the year.  We stand, generally in the ice-cold, with drinks that keep us warm and sing Icelandic traditional songs as we watch the fire burn out the old year.  History tells us that its origin is to make peace with the hidden people, the elves and trolls, which many Icelanders believe in.  I have used the bonfire to reflect on good and difficult memories from the past year and mentally burned the ones I don’t want to take with me into the new year into the bonfire.

Now, I’m not going to tell you to create a bonfire in your living room - on the contrary, but what you can do to create new space is these three points.

1 - Post-it notes!

Get yourself a Post-It-Notes and write down on each note a feeling, memory, or sentence that describes your 2022. Write everything down, the good, the bad and the ugly times.

2- Pick notes that inspire!

Take a good look at your notes and pick out the ones that inspire you, the sentences, events, and thoughts you would like to have more of in 2023 and put them on one side of your table. These notes will be part of your clear intentions for the new year. Read one at a time in presence tens. I am… pay particular notice to the feeling that each sentence gives you.

3- Mentally burn the other notes!  

Take the other pile of notes. You can now consciously decide not to take these thoughts, feelings, and sentences into the new year. You don’t have to burn them if you don’t have a safe environment to do so; instead, you can look at them for one last time, close your eyes and imagine you are in Iceland in front of that bonfire. You see all of these notes being burnt. 

Pay attention to the release of feelings inside your body as you do as Oprah inspires you to do, giving yourself time to be more present.

And by the way, if you translate the Icelandic word for being Perfect (fullkomin) directly to English - it means ‘Being fully present’ now; how perfect is that?  

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