I attended a breathwork session this morning and it centered on ambition in the new year.
What is possible if you’re willing to soar? What is your ambitious vision for 2024?
The facilitator reminded us that ambition is good, allowed, beautiful, and it was an invigorating and inspiring session…but I kept encountering a block.
Part of the block was just the word ambition - for me it’s come to mean ego, grasping, and dissatisfaction. This is partly due to the bro-culture and girl boss hustles that dominated my consciousness the first years I worked for myself. Semantics or not, it’s a loaded word and someone else mentioned this too - the facilitator reminded us that we can replace the word with another that works, like expansion.
But the word wasn’t my whole issue…I also felt a tension between the idea of expansion and my words of the year: slow, trusting, and sacred.
I chose these words to counter my tendency to always be doing, striving, building - to stop trying to win a race where the goal post always moves. I want to be here right now in 2024: really SEE my life, my relationships, my kids…to notice how absolutely precious it all is.
And these remain my intentions, but as our session went on, I realized the tension I felt is because they felt like opposites:
I can’t be slow AND ambitious
I can’t be present AND strive
But as I breathed, I felt another path open up: these seemingly conflicting ideas can actually be embraced together, one in each palm, pressed together at heart’s center:
I can be slow with the words I type right now, and trust that if I don’t finish this email before my kids walk in the door, that what I strove for (a finished email) was still enough.
I can see each moment as sacred while also building in time to create the projects, health, and world I want in the future - ideas and circumstances that aren’t earthside yet because it will take right-sized effort on my part to make them so.
Much like how I felt as I grew my babies, doing my part to feed and stretch and care for my body while also knowing that I wasn’t in full control of the outcome, we can hold multiple truths at once.
We can be grateful and have goals.
We can do our part to create and also release control of the outcome.
We can go slowly and keep moving…inching our way toward beautiful dreams.
Another realization I had during this breathwork: I don’t actually need three words this year. Though I’m all about being flexible (I had two words last year and that worked great) I realized that part of why I chose three is that I was trying to cover all my bases. "If I don't choose three I will forget and mess things up!" So underpinning those three was a familiar one...fear.
I am boiling my many intentions down to one: trust.
It lies beneath slowness, sacredness, and is a simple anchor for the year - a year made up of months, weeks, and days. Singular days that can arrive slowly if within each one we decide what is most important - which might mean choosing a word for just that day. Maybe one day it’s a feeling, like patience, and another it might be a goal - like DECLUTTER.
We can have goals for the year AND a word. They don't have to be in opposition. We can have visions for the future AND ground over and over into the moment.
Some questions for you to consider on a daily basis this week:
What is my word for today?
Who do I want to BE today?
How can I hold my dreams in one hand, and my gratitude in the other?
I hope my download from today’s breathwork journey was helpful for you too. If you’d like to experience the connections of your own that can be made in just an hour of guided breathwork, I hold virtual breathwork every month - this type of clarity is a common result.
I hope you’ll join us - click here to do so.
You are so supported, dear one.
Xo
Melissa
ARE YOU ASKING THE QUESTIONS YOU’LL WISH YOU HAD?
We all contain multitudes, and I sure wish I’d thought to ask my mom more about hers while I still could. Consider writing down answers for your kids, asking questions of your family members, or sending one of the Questions You’ll Wish You Asked journals to a person you care about today. Don’t forget about the one designed for the longest and deepest relationship of your life: the one you have with yourself. Find them here.
