I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I stopped doing them years ago, and I substituted it with a more sustainable practice: Choosing Your Word of the Year.
Visit my IG post to share your Word of the Year – I would LOVE to hear it!
What is My Word of the Year for 2022?
SING. I’ve loved to sing since my earliest memories, which start at 3 years old.
When I listen to music, I have always, always created a harmony to match the melody. Whether I sang it in my head, heart, or out loud for everyone to hear, music has always been my go-to balm. I don’t recall anyone teaching me how to sing harmony, I just knew how to sing it from the time I could make a sound I guess.
Singing can make me cry ugly tears, happy tears, but most of all – hopeful tears.
Wherever the ability came from, it certainly deeply enriched my life to have musical family members, my aunt as the church pianist and my grandfather as a choral and barbershop quartet singer and banjo player. I didn’t go to the same church as them, but it didn’t matter…
On Sundays we’d crowd around the small upright in my grandma’s 1940’s tiny house with clapboard siding and without air conditioning; with a potbelly stove in the middle of the room to heat the cozy house my grandpa built with his own hands after he returned from 4 years in the trenches fighting in the Army during WWII.
It was after church, and after lunch, when we’d sing, sing, sing.
It makes me sob happy tears to think about those days gone by now. My aunt’s hands are too arthritic to play, her voice weaker now from the hardship of loss and pain.
My grandfather long since gone, his legacy and wisdom still touching us all.
But the music, oh my gracious the music, it lives on.
I sing when I am happy.
I sing when I am ecstatic.
I sing when I am sad.
I sing when I feel like I can’t go on.
Music just isn’t for happy times.
Listening to sad music, research tells us, helps us become more empathic, more compassionate, more in touch with ourselves and our family and world. And Music’s biggest power – music heals.
So as we go into this 3rd year of COVID, of this pandemic, I can think of no better Word of the Year for this New Year.
What is Your Word of the Year for 2022?
We all need healing and better mental health, well-being, and overall self-care this year.
We all need financial stability and fiscal well-being and assurance this year.
We all need joy, peace, calm, and just enough adversity to keep us strong and resilient.
So what is your word of the year?
Please share, I cannot WAIT TO HEAR YOUR WORD OF THE YEAR!
The First Work Day of the Year
On the first workday of the year, I plan to embrace my Word of the Year by drawing from the wisdom of poetry.
The words of David Whyte, my favorite living poet:
In the midst of overwhelming circumstances,
David Whyte
no different from our own tumultuous times,
human beings have always been called to a form of radical simplification,
to returning to a true foundation from which they can step into a new life:
to the making of new promises and the letting go of old ones.
I plan to spend time working on:
- ????My eudemonia (a place beyond happiness)
- ????My pelvic floor health (because you can NEVER do too much of that!)
- ????Being more mindful
- ????My core strength (from the voice to the pelvic floor!)
- ✅Coming up with NEW ideas to treat patients with pelvic floor (read: hip and back issues too, because pelvic health just isn’t pelvic floor health) soft tissue issues!
How will you view your first day back to work in 2022?
I’ll leave you with more words from David Whyte:
To hear another’s voice, follow your own voice, wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another.
David whyte
Start right now take a small step you can call your own don’t follow someone else’s heroics, be humble and focused, start close in, don’t mistake that other for your own…
What is your Voice saying to you for this New Year?
To support YOU in 2022, please join my community on IG and enjoy my free gift to you: Subscribe to my YouTube Channel!
I regularly post new content and will be focusing on Three Diaphragm Health in 2022 – all about the Vocal, Respiratory, and Pelvic Diaphragms (which includes the low back, sacrum, hip too!), the key to a vibrant mind and body!
