Reframing New Year’s and 2026

Finding coherence and aliveness by honoring what’s real

I’m increasingly being drawn by coherence for more aliveness. This description fits with what I experience:

“Wholeness, coherence [is] a sense of all parts of yourself being connected and pulling together. You can tell when it’s present, either in yourself or others. There’s a profound sense of inner peace, an all-rightness with whatever is going on. When you’re in the presence of wholeness, you don’t need to strive to be honest or to manipulate yourself or others. Your inner and outer worlds sparkle with a level of coherent presence and embodied authentic power that is very magnetic and can’t be manufactured.” (Excerpted from “The Biochemistry of Following Your Bliss”, by Iver A. Juster, M.D. Written as the “Foreword: A Medical Point of View” to the book Empowerment: When Romance Marries Reality, by L. L. Brown, 1990).

On New Year’s Eve, I participated in two ceremonies. One was a live, virtual, guided inner journey, masterfully crafted and led. The other is a written document with very insightful, thoughtful, heartful questions that can be shared with friend(s).  As an example, it starts with these statements:

“This guide is an invitation to stop running and look around.

To look back at the tracks you left this year.

To notice where you were brave.

Where you were tired.

Where something in you grew wild and true. . . .”

I was very surprised that neither one of these ceremonies connected or resonated with me like I thought they would. These are the kinds of things I value a great deal and am usually enlivened by participating in.

I feel like a bear who needs time in the cave to winter in, to hibernate, gestate, and incubate in order to allow “what has been” to come apart and compost. It means letting some elements go and letting others rearrange into new forms of aliveness. That happens completely “underground”,  below my awareness, which is appealing, nourishing, and life-giving.

Julian Norris’s essay “In Praise of Darkness” gives some good context for this:

“. . . the darkness itself - not as an absence, but as a presence. Not as something to just endure by merry yule log fires until the light returns, but as “a great presence moving near.” A darkness that is fecund, gathering, enclosing, generative . . .

“Darkness as the Great Mother of us all. . .

“. . . The overculture is addicted to the light – to illumination, clarity and constant visibility. . .

“. . . But the darkness pulls in everything . . . [it is] the vital understory of all renewal. . . Composting. It’s not a trite metaphor, but the very process through which complexity makes new combinations possible. . . .

“Darkness as the very womb of metamorphosis. . . .

“. . . the bear dreams in the fertile darkness. Not because nothing is wrong, but because this too is part of how life endures. The dream is no escape. It is regeneration and preparation . . . A nervous system unwinding and relaxing, safe in the absence of light. Time thickens. Energy gathers. And when the bear wakes, it will not be in a hurry. It will emerge when conditions allow - not sooner, not later - carrying the darkness as it walks earth’s own dreaming through this ever-changing world. . .

“. . . what makes darkness fertile is our willingness to open ourselves to its teachings.”

I realize that now is not the time for “yay, yay, rah rah!” celebrating or going back into striver/driver/producer/achiever mode, at least for me. That feels out of sync, out of alignment with nature and life’s energy, because I am, and we are, part of nature, not apart from nature. Trying to celebrate the New Year now in that way feels arbitrary, like trying to step over what gives us real life.

Ben Katt says it beautifully:

 “The Gregorian calendar forces a shift that our bodies and minds are not yet ready for. Where I live in Wisconsin, December-January (and usually February too) is a single season. It is dark. Cold. It is a season that invites us to hibernate—to rest and recharge for all that will follow.

"From my perspective and experience, to treat the changing calendar year as a time to look ahead and set goals interrupts this necessary wintering. It rushes things we’re not yet ready for. It interferes with our capacity to receive what we need to in order to be fully ready to step into what’s next.

". . . the best thing I can do as a new calendar year begins is to claim a posture of constant receptivity—curiosity, openness, and devotion to living in accordance with my highest self.”

In my mind, having a “posture of constant receptivity—curiosity, openness, and devotion to living in accordance with my highest self” is a potent, important quality to be cultivating no matter what time of year it is!

My sense is that a real New Year will happen in the February-March-April timeframe, when nature wakes up and life births, hatches, and sprouts new forms. External expressions of celebration would feel right then.

Meanwhile, I’m enlivened by listening, feeling, sensing, paying attention to what’s real, being open to the fertility of the dark, and inwardly “gathering myself together” so that when it’s time to emerge, I’ll be ready and able to fully embrace that phase with embodied authentic power.

The Connection Field, the Global Coherence Pulse, the Imaginal Souls Chrysalis, the Catapult--a planetary rite of passage for coherence and emergence--and a presentation “All Abundance: The Future Coherence Economy” are some of my supports in this process. The Connection Field is "comprised of many aligned organizations committed to building a unitive field of coherence. . . the truth of Prigogine’s statement is the quintessential guiding principle and purpose of the Connection Field: 'When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.'" ~ Illya Prigogine, Chemist and Nobel Laureate

May we all experience and express more coherence and aliveness during 2026!