Welcoming the new

Opportunities for connecting with yourself in 2008

By Amethyst Wyldfyre
NH Mirror Contributor

The New Year is always a special and magical time – a time to reflect on the joys, blessings and challenges that have been surmounted and opportunities that have been taken in the previous year. It’s a time to celebrate the year past.

It is also a time of freshness and newness, a time of contemplating possibilities and your own capacity to create and to change.

Traditionally in our culture we create a New Year’s resolution list, setting goals for ourselves at a time when the energy is most supportive for the work that goes along with making changes in our lives.

Here in New England we are blessed with a noticeable difference in the seasons. The winter has arrived, inviting us to move inward – in to our homes, in to ourselves, in to our hearts, in to that place of stillness where we can connect most deeply with ourselves.

All change is initiated from within. By going within and consciously choosing to make a connection to our spirit, we are granted the gift of insight. Here, deep within, we have the opportunity to see who we are and where we are going.

Here, too, we can see with compassion and great self-love those areas of our lives that are not in alignment with our true self.

When we allow ourselves the time and the space to contemplate deeply who we are, to assess where our way of living is out of alignment with our truth, we are energized to make the necessary shifts in our patterns of behavior that will allow us to more fully express our deepest essence.

Take some time in your sacred space today. Sit with a journal and some meditative music to set the mood. Shut off the outside world (yes, this means the cell phone, the regular phone, the computer, the TV!) and withdraw your senses. Come into your center, to that place of stillness where there is nothing but the breath.

Don’t strive to find out anything. Just be. Allow the nature of who you are, of your essence, to arise naturally and beautifully in the moment. Give yourself the gift of silence. What you find there may surprise and delight you.

Enjoy the newness of this time and be grateful for your own gifts, gifts that the world is waiting to receive from you when you are ready to emerge from your cocoon. Take a deep breath and enjoy just being.

Amethyst Wyldfyre is a healer, teacher, artist and writer living in the Merrimack Valley. She can be reached at 594-2744 or at www.amethystwyldfyre.com.