What the heck am I taking into 2023?

Today I’m exploring my end of year ritual… it’s all about releasing and letting go of what isn’t serving you so you can start 2023 full of opportunities.

Firstly, how was everyone’s festive season? It is often a challenging time where we get together with people we don’t necessarily want to, buy gifts that extend us outside of our budget and leave us sometimes feeling empty and drained. On the other hand, it can also be an immensely rewarding time where you consciously choose to engage in celebrations and it is a time of joy and healing being around people we love, sharing time together over food and laughter.

There’s no right or wrong way to ‘do Christmas’. Many times, the outcome will be based on the experiences and stressors we have had leading up to the day. Sometimes it’s a culmination of the stress and sometimes it is the release. If it’s the former, those are the days when it’s hard to have gratitude…. and you know what…. that’s ok.

This Christmas has been a mixed bag of emotions for me. The lead up has been stressful as I’ve completed my full-time work to jump into the opportunity to do my soul food and own my own business again. I’ve made beautiful, lifelong friends through my work – have found some more tribe members – and yet I have to let them go. The letting go is hard. I won’t see them every day. I won’t call into their offices and create havoc and laughter. I won’t get to go for coffee walks and chats about life to help ease the stress of the workplace. I won’t get to be the disrupt-her (check out this book by the way - Disrupt-Her by Miki Agrawal, it’s amazing!!) in that space – the one who sees the stress building and actively works to pop the stress bubble; that’s now up to others.

What I do get to do though, is to plan time together with my friends. We’re already planning dinner dates and lunch catchups because those things are important for building and maintaining connection with people we love. Is it going to be easy? Heck, no. There will be things that crop up that drag us this way, and that way and the other way, calling our attention as being more important. So, as I contemplate this cycle we get ourselves into on in our human experience, I’m making a conscious choice to do things differently…. and this is part of my releasing process for the end of the year.

Am I scared by the changes I’m choosing to make? Heck, yes. It’s terrifying. Heading back into business though without a healthy level of fear would be setting myself up to fail. Fear is the bit that keeps your mind on track to achieve your goals. It’s the bit that provides caution so you can evaluate the decisions you’re making and make an active choice to mitigate risk and set yourself up to succeed. For me, FEAR is a reminder that I can ‘forget everything and run’ or ‘face everything and rise’ and it’s from the place of the latter that I’m reviewing my year and deciding what I’m taking forward and what I’m letting go.

End of year ritual

I posted a couple of weeks ago about my end of year ritual and was surprised by the many comments I had wanting to know more about what my process is and why I do it, so I thought this was a great opportunity to open that discussion for you.

As I write this, I’m currently sitting on my brother-in-law’s veranda in beautiful Dayboro. It’s raining and the frogs in the lake next door sound like bubble wrap being popped. There are whip birds calling and cockatoos coming to visit me. A mother wallaby and her baby have just bounded through the garden in front of me. The setting is idyllic. There is a beautiful sense of calm as I listen to rain and the wildlife and soak up the peace and tranquillity. The perfect place and time for me to reset this year and be creative, write and share my process with you all.

Why a yearly review?



For many years I have chosen to have a ritual that purposely ends the year I’m in and sets me up to start the next year in a space of gratitude, ease and grace. I started this ritual when I was being treated for severe depression. The depression was due to many factors, but as I reflected on where I was at in life and decided that living was what I wanted to do; I knew I needed to make a change. I felt stuck in a life I wasn’t happy in. I was super empowered in some areas of my life and totally disempowered in others which led me to trying to please people around me, losing the sense of who I actually was as a person, and setting myself up for failure which deepened the depression.

To be honest, by this stage, I was sick of myself. I had chronic fatigue, was all work and no play and my personal situation was challenging. I was sick of taking medication which made me feel like I wasn’t in my body. Something needed to change.

During this time, I had regular RAW balances with a friend of mine. RAW is Rekindled Ancient Wisdom and is a form of energetic kinesiology. It works on the premise that we know what we need to heal ourselves and sometimes we need some help and guidance in finding the right words to remember how to do it as we listen to that little voice inside us, our intuition. As with other kinesiology forms, it uses lists of word groups to inform the practitioner and guide conversation with the client to release stressors and restore balance to your body, mind and spirit. I can honestly say that it saved my life at that time.

(I won’t go into more detail here about the balancing process as I’m writing a blog post around energetic kinesiology… so stay tuned for additional stories about this fascinating and powerful modality.)

Every month I had a RAW balance and as I got towards the end of that first year there had been lots of shifts in me – mentally, spiritually, and physically. As I’m curious about the journey, not the destination, I started to evaluate my life. At the start of December that year, I made the conscious decision to create a review ritual for me to work through how far I had come in my healing. It was an important turning point in getting myself back to being… well, me.

End of Year Ritual - The Process



I start my end of year ritual at the beginning of December as I don’t believe that this is something to be rushed in a day or two, although you can complete it at any time. Now I am notorious for not writing things down. I don’t journal as it isn’t something that works for me, and I don’t need to have a record of where my mind was at. However, I did grab a piece of paper and did something very different… I chose to write a review list.

I divided my piece of paper into three and added headings:

• What has been terrible
• What has been ok
• What has been fantastic

I chose headings that were extremes of good and bad to highlight to myself the differences between them. In each section I started adding dot points (yes, you may need more than one page… 😊). I’d give myself 15 minutes, then leave the list alone for up to a couple of days.

As I put my mind in a state of reviewing the year, I found that things would bubble up that I wanted to add to the list. So here and there I’d add a bit more and keep going until Christmas. From Boxing Day, I started to review my list of the year that was.

Firstly, I would look at the ‘fantastic’ column and remind myself of all the great things that I’d achieved that year. When in a depressive state, even a high functioning one, it’s sometimes hard to remember the good things we achieve. This was important for me. I’d read each dot point and think about how that made me feel. Did I change the world? Did I help create a safe space for someone? Was it time with my kids? What were the things that made it great? Was it simply that I got out of bed every morning and showed up? Then I celebrate these achievements…. Anyone who knows me knows that one of my catchphrases is ‘go me, high 5’… yep, I high-five myself for the things that are fantastic. A physical, emotional and spiritual reminder that there are awesome things to be grateful for.

Next is my ‘OK’ column. I repeat the process with each of these and look at what makes them ‘OK’. I’ve found it’s easy to slip into the ‘things I didn’t do right or perfectly’ component so I consciously flip the script to consider what each of these ‘OK’ things has left me feeling grateful for. As an example, let’s say I’ve got ‘family holiday’ in the ‘OK’ list… first of all, why isn’t it in the fantastic list? Well sometimes spending time with those you love is stressful, outside of people’s comfort zones and just plain uncomfortable…. the preparation, the stress of packing, getting the house ready…. meh…. that’s the ‘didn’t go right’ bit out of the way…. So, what am I grateful for in this scenario? Well, I enjoyed the time away from home. A bit of a break is great with new scenery and new experiences. Whilst there were challenges and potentially disagreements, we also got some great experiences for the kids, had nice meals, and hopefully made some memories.

My advice to you is to be real about it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t be nice about it because you feel like you should, just think about it as it is. The ‘OK’ list has things where the good and not so good could be fairly even.

Then the last list. The ‘terrible’ column. Now we are doing this last because there are things here that were not great parts of your year. Maybe you lost a pet or a family member. Maybe you had an accident, you separated, divorced, your child got suspended from school. Honestly, the list could be anything.

For this list, I want you to do a similar thing to the ‘OK’ list, except you get to choose only one bad thing for each point. Then I want you to choose three good things or learnings for each point. Let’s unpack that a bit with an example.

Example I was involved in a car accident

Bad Thing I was left with serious injuries which have changed my world

Good Thing/Learnings

1. I am alive 
2. Even with serious injuries there are things that I CAN do still, so I get to be creative and focus on those 
3. I get to explore what is available to me to help me to be the best version I can and live my life to my full potential, even though it is very different.

This is a real example from one of my lists. It was super hard reflecting on the moment and finding three things to be positive about such a life changing event. Sometimes all you can get is one thing to be positive for… so start there and be kind to yourself in the process.

Next step: The Flip Over



The flip over is where I look at the experiences from the list and evaluate what I’ve learned from each of them. All experiences teach us something. Then I evaluate how I can use what I’ve been taught in the future. Is this something I want to remember and take forward with me, is it something I want to store or is it something I want to let go of?

As I evaluate my list, I might make a new list of things I’ve learned. In my example above, I learned that I am patient and resilient. These are two traits that serve me well, so I want to take them into next year with me.

I’ve also learned that I can be unkind to myself during my healing process and that I get frustrated and angry when I don’t heal as quickly as I feel I should. Who knew that I’m actually human right?? These are things I want to work on in the next year. I want to foster self-compassion and kindness towards myself to remove the judgement about where I should be in a healing process.

My learnings also led me to understand that when I’m immense amounts of pain and can see that I have lost a lot of things that bring meaning to my life, I can be mean to those around me. I get angry and hurtful. Are these normal aspects of experiencing a traumatic event? Absolutely, so I don’t want to stop the normal feelings or suppress them, but what I do want to do is work on how I communicate with those around me. Whilst I’m feeling sorry for myself, grieving and healing slowly, my family and friends are also parties to that journey, so I want to communicate with that in mind and be clear about my needs thus reducing the frustration. Am I good at this? Heck, no – well not always. But I acknowledge it exists and I apologise when my behaviour is bad, and I consciously try to do better.

I then take a green highlighter and highlight the things I want to take forward into next year. Those things that aren’t highlighted are the things I’m actively going to let go. Will they come up again? Probably because they are part of our human experience, but I don’t want to start the year holding onto them.

The Release



The final step in my process is to review my list and have a RAW energies balance either in the last week of the year or early in the new year (at least by the end of January). Now the way I show up for my balance is this:

• I don’t usually take my list with me (you can if you want to) but when my friend asks me what I want to work on I will just say ‘the things that came up in my yearly reflection that I don’t want to take into next year’
• Other things usually bubble up between when I complete the review and when I do the balance, so we include those too
• And then the best, most cathartic bit for me. Once the balance is completed, I go home, and I burn the list. Yep, burn the whole lot. I don’t want to hold onto that energy as the year flips over.

And there you have it. My yearly review. The process isn’t perfect, and you will find things that work better for you, (for example, you might like to write a letter to yourself) but this works well for me. Let me know how you go.

Summary of Yearly Review

1. Create three lists

• Things that were terrible
• Things that were OK
• Things that were fantastic

 2. Review each list in this order:

• Things that were fantastic
• Things that were OK
• Things that were terrible

Things that were fantastic

Think about why there were fantastic

Go me, high five

Things that were OK

What makes them OK? What are the good and bad things for each

Think about what you’ve learned that you want to take into next year

Things that were terrible

For each dot point work on 'flipping the script' and identify:

• ONE bad thing
• THREE good things

Think about what you’ve learned and what you want to take into next year

3. Highlight the things you want to take into next year. You will be clearing anything that isn’t highlighted.

4. Have a RAW energies balance to clear the stuff you don’t want to take forward.



5. Burn your list after your balance.