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Charlotte Amalie
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsArchivesCoach Paradise: Keeping the New Year's Spirit Alive 365

Coach Paradise: Keeping the New Year's Spirit Alive 365

The New Year is still humming two weeks into 2010, and I’m greeting those I haven’t yet seen with "Happy New Year." It’s a fresh start, it’s celebratory and it feels good. I want to keep the good feeling alive 365 and see no reason to limit the excitement to New Year’s Eve.
I’ve been noticing what helps me to return to a feeling of gratitude and eager anticipation when I’m in a funk. I see how important it is to have a practice – something that we do on a regular (daily) basis to promote well-being and positive energy. It doesn’t matter so much what we do as that we do it.
People go on different diets, play different sports, embrace difference exercise programs, have different spiritual practices and unique paths to finding balance, inner peace and connection to source energy, and many people get where they are going—or don’t—with many practices.
Practice makes perfect. This is true whether practicing the violin, drawing, doing Yoga, or creating new habits of thought. The thought part is the basis for all the rest. When our thoughts are of success and on enjoying whatever we’re doing in the moment, it’s so much easier to stick with what we’re doing.
It’s always our negative thoughts that start any kind of falling off the wagon. Practices that encourage us to notice how we’re feeling and what we’re thinking can help us shift our focus when we’re stuck in ruts and losing heart.
I wrote myself a letter on New Year’s Eve 2009 and dated it Dec. 31, 2010. It began, "Wow, What a Year! On every front I stepped through a glass ceiling. Everything’s clear, full of energy, more colorful, smarter, and more creative, more loving and much more fun."
I continued, at length, to jump for joy and express gratitude for the wonderful experiences, relationships, travel, creative ventures, prosperity, good health and spiritual evolution that I enjoyed over the course of 2010. I just reread it last week, and it warms my heart and makes me smile. Writing it (and rereading it) makes me want to STEP UP, own and go for what I want.
I’m going to take this Ideal Scene out on a regular basis and read it aloud. It serves as an affirmation and as a drawing board. I’m already itching to add things and get into more detail about others. It’s a great way to plant seeds for experiences, people, places and things I want to enjoy this year. By rereading and watering my ideal scene with love and positive energy – the seeds will bloom and bear fruit.
When we plant vegetables and flowers we plant many seeds, water them, protect them from danger and go about our business. We tend to worry our seeds of desire to death—pulling them up to see what’s going on and wondering when we can eat the fruit.
Writing an Ideal Scene is a powerful act of creation. It plants seeds and waters them at the same time. It’s like entering a giant universal try-on room. We can imagine what it would be like to be, do and have anything at all. We write them in the first person and in the present tense. We write them to create our futures and to feel good right now.
Ideal scenes help us get clear about what really matters and what we really want. We can write them as I did, to pre-pave this next year, or we can date them next Saturday and pre-pave the week. We can write about all the amazing things that happened, lessons learned and opportunities welcomed. It’s a way of thanking the universe in advance. Our wishes are granted. There is nothing to worry about.
So, while I’m still jazzed about making my dreams come true and about Hang Zen in 2010 (my theme for the year), I’m going to strike while the iron is hot and use Ideal Scenes to help me to stay clear, inspired and feeling good. Happy New Year. Happy New Day!

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