2025: What are you devoting yourself to?
And what to do with those pesky intentions that keep showing up again year after year. Also: You are already enough.
Dear beloved readers,
New Year’s greetings! I took great delight this morning in writing 1/1/2025 for the first time in my dream journal as I wrote down my first dream of the year. We made it. We woke up. We lived to see the turning of another calendar page. What a gift!
I woke up thinking about the practices that sustain me, practices I devote myself to- such as meditation, writing, and dream journaling - and want to share more about those over the coming year as we move into our third year of Enchantable. The Making December Magic series is an example of one life-sustaining, affirming, regenerative practice I’ve shared here, and I woke up with this creative impulse to do more of that. More about all of this in a moment…
As I was making December magic this season, I was thinking about the intentions that repeat themselves year after year but never quite make it to being integrated or completed. For me, there are two recurring intentions that make an appearance in my end-of-year process repeatedly, which are:
More singing
Less phone
I love to sing, and I feel most myself when I am singing a lot. I haven’t sung a lot in a while. Years.
And less phone, well…you have a smart phone, dear reader. You know. I think this is one that the vast majority struggle with with this technology. It was designed to be addictive, and it was not designed for us to be in right relationship with, making that intention really, really hard - even with app limits, scheduled downtime, etc., even with the best of intentions and pretty solid discipline.
As for singing, I have been struggling with a lost voice since the end of the semester (not totally lost but very raspy and not fully there), making this gift of being able to sing all the more palpable. I can’t sing at all right now, making me realize what a gift it is to be able to sing every chance I get. Every day I can sing, I should, I made a note to myself the other day, and this is what I vow when my voice recovers (at this moment, I still need to let it rest as much as possible, and I need to be patient).
It reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching around the non-toothache, which I have written about before, and how when you have a toothache, you realize how pleasant it is to not have a toothache, and how a non-toothache is a condition of happiness. But we often only realize this when we are in pain, when we are experiencing the opposite. Same goes for the voice. I cannot sing (can barely talk) right now, making me realize what an absolute gift it is to have a voice that is rather beautiful and that I enjoy using and that others even enjoy hearing. That makes me feel alive and come alive.
All of this brings me to my 2025 word of the year: DEVOTION1. Devotion etymologically relates to the word vow, a word I love (this semester, we had a whole big class discussion about the word in the context of sharing Mushim Ikeda’s vow not to burn out. Some people hate the word vow, and some love it. I fall in the latter camp).
Side note/tip: Choose words that resonate with you. They don’t have to resonate with anyone else. A resonant word can be a great motivating factor, something to put at the center of your life and keep circling around. A compass. A heartbeat.
My word of the year leads to a question of the year, which is:
What are you devoting your time/attention/energy to?
Is that what you want to be devoting it to?
This feels like a potent question for me, one that bears repeating, a great check-in question for myself around anything, not just the phone. With my time, energy, precious attention. With setting boundaries, with deciding what opportunities and relationships are aligned with my heart and purpose, and which ones I need to say no to or let go of.
When I think about devoting time to my phone, it sickens me. It’s ludicrous! Yes, the phone is useful for many things and I want to use it. But do I want to be devoted to it? Heck, no. I want to be devoting my time to Daphne and singing and writing and creating and looking out at the canyon and laughing with friends and eating good food and exercising and experiencing more joy, play, and freedom. None of that is happening through the phone (with the exception of messages, voice memos, and calls to beloveds).
adrienne maree brown talks about attention liberation, a phrase I love, and that has been on my list as a practice for a few years. Attention devotion is an extension of this, a play on this. I have written before about attention attunement, and this year, I am experimenting with attention devotion as an organizing phrase to orient my life around. Our attention is a precious resource, one that the tech companies and billionaires go to great lengths to capture. Practicing intentional attention devotion is a liberatory practice. It is an act of resistance. I will let you know how it goes (and invite you to join me in it, if you feel inspired or if this calls to you, too! Let me know :)
What are you devoting yourself to in 2025, dear reader?
To support my practice, I wrote this vow:
I devote my attention to that which grounds me, centers me, fills me with light and love and joy.
I devote my time to practices that make me feel alive.
I devote my life to loving the earth and all people and cultivating peace and joy with every action I take for collective healing, well-being, and liberation.
When intentions keep making a recurring appearance in our annual intention-setting processes, there are two ways to approach them:
Double-down.
Let it go.
As the saying goes: Sit or get off the pot. There’s a lot of truth in this folk wisdom.
We can ask ourselves why it keeps making an appearance. Why are we having such a difficult time making this a reality? Is it doable? What is keeping us from doing it? Is it something we really value, or is it something we think we should value? What is holding us back? Are we actually serious about it? Can we be OK with just letting it go? Or is it time to get serious about it?
One reason this could be happening is if we are setting too many intentions, and this one just isn’t getting prioritized (see my list above, lol). If we are in an intention-setting practice, we want to make them reasonable, doable, attainable, and one barrier to this is if we set too many. Choosing one thing to focus on can really help us in achieving it or integrating it into our lives.
But it is a worthy question to ask ourselves, “Is this really what I want? Or do I need to let this go?” Maybe it is an intention we’ve outgrown, or maybe realistically it no longer fits the stage of life we find ourselves in. Maybe it’s something we think we should want due to external forces but internally, it might not actually be what we want for ourselves. It is OK to let a goal or intention or dream go, and sometimes we need to, like pruning a plant to keep it healthy and vibrant. Letting go of aspirations - as much as making them - can be a regenerative practice, getting real with ourselves about what we really want and desire for our lives.
Or, maybe it’s time. Maybe we need to get serious, to double-down, to listen to the repetition of this intention and finally take it seriously, giving it the attention it deserves.
I am not ready to let phone discipline or singing go. So, we double down.
All of this leads me to New Year’s Day, when I woke up and had coffee and was preparing to meditate. I was thinking about all of this, and how meditation was one of those things for me - something that sat on my list for at least five years before I finally got it to stick. I tried to get a daily practice going for a number of years, and finally, on New Year’s 2008, I devoted myself to it and got it down (what finally worked for me that year was making a commitment to sit through the 40-day Winter Feast for the Soul program, which starts on January 15th).
I have offered an intro to meditation series in a number of formats. I used to teach a four-week workshop series at a yoga studio, and offered a similar series a few years ago through MommaStrong, so I have the basic content ready to go. This year, I will be sharing it through Enchantable! I hope this will serve everyone, but especially those who have an aspiration to have a daily meditation practice.
Daily sitting meditation practice is one of the foundations of my life, and I want to support others in cultivating a daily practice, so stay tuned for this series, which will be coming weekly over the next few weeks on Enchantable. I also anticipate creating other series on other core practices in my life, such as writing and dreamwork. When I had this idea, I felt a flood of creative energy and inspiration around it, one of my favorite feelings in the world. The energy is telling me I should do it. More coming soon!
I wanted to close with a post-script for making December magic, which really should be a preface, but is better said now than ever. Amidst setting intentions and affirmations and aspirations, we must remember:
We are perfect just as we are.
We are already enough.
You, yes, YOU.
You are perfect just as you are.
You are already enough.
Just as you are, in this moment.
Making December magic is a practice of healing, of releasing what we don’t want to carry forward and what no longer serves us, and calling in what we want to welcome into our lives. It is about collaborating with forces, seen and unseen, through reflection, intention, and action. But the preface for all of this, coming to you in January, is: we are perfect just as we are. We don’t have to change a thing. We accept ourselves just as we are, in this moment, with all our imperfections and beauty and shortcomings and gifts.
The beautiful thing about making magic is that you can make it at anytime. While I love the portal that December offers us (see the series for more), magic is a daily practice that we can enact every day, simply by paying attention and being intentional. Making December magic is a year-long process, a daily practice, and I will be sharing more about that over the year, too.
There can be a tension between growth and feeding hungry ghosts, between wanting to continually become more ourselves, and continually feeding the capitalist self-improvement machine that leaves us perpetually feeling empty and inadequate and needing to consume more to fill the void. It’s a delicate balance, a dance, in honoring our capacity to change (and knowing we are always changing), in shaping this change in the direction we want to go in, and having it slide in the direction of not accepting ourselves, of never being OK with who we are in this moment.
By perfect, I don’t mean flawless.
I mean enough.
I mean acceptance.
I mean not needing to be changed or fixed or improved.
It is from this place of acceptance from which our magic can flow.
In the words of the great Octavia Butler, “The only lasting truth is change.” This process is about actively shaping and guiding change in the direction of personal and collective liberation, well-being, and thriving.
A daily meditation practice is an amazing ground for cultivating acceptance in our lives - accepting ourselves just as we are, accepting the practice just as it is, no need to be perfect or different. Meditation at its core is a practice of being with what is. Through it, we learn there is no perfect, only practice. It is an amazing ground for cultivating our attention, and for becoming adept and intentional at what we are devoting our attention to.
On that note…stay tuned for the series :)
Wishing you infinite joy, abundance, thriving, rest, play, and laughter in the coming year.
May all your wishes, hopes, and dreams come true! And in doing so, may they be of benefit to all of life thriving.
With love and care and more to come,
Stephanie
For those on the December magic call, this may come as a surprise, because I declared with certainty that the word was THRIVE! After sitting with it further, the full phrase came as DEVOTION (to thriving). I also realized in going back through the past several years of process notes that devotion has made a recurring appearance in subthemes and was due to be centered :) (the same is true of thrive, though, too!)