“Start paying attention to how your life feels to you, not how it looks to others,” Emma Davis.  This is a perfect goal for moving into the New Year.  In a society obsessed with how things look and wanting to control how we appear to others, our first concern is often how things appear to others.  We spend more time and energy trying to manipulate how people view us, how we appear to them than we do getting in touch with how we feel about our lives.  Often times the things that look good don’t feel good to us but we convince ourselves they are still good because they look good.  The more we distract ourselves, the more it seems normal to go for the things other people want—and some of those things are cool, no lie.  As we move forward, as we see the things that weren’t working before, we need to ask ourselves how we can make them work now and what we need to work in our lives.  I’m not suggesting we continue to try and make things work that have no business in our lives, I’m saying we need to take the time to find space for those things that feel right and spend more time doing those things.  Speaking from personal experience, when something feels right, it fits.

I got myself in the habit of finding what felt right and doing it for a bit and then stopping.  I never knew why I stopped but I think it has to do more with the old habits being more familiar than what I wanted to do.  We need to give new things enough time to become familiar and become routine, part of who we are before we stop them.  This year needs to be about space and grace and getting in touch with those parts of us that show us who we really are and allow us to strip away what doesn’t serve—what isn’t part of who we are but what we adopted as part of who we thought we were or what we thought people wanted to see.  The answers are always within how we feel.  The human instinct, intuition, are always present within us.  We just have to be aware of what our body is telling us.  Let’s take a silly example.  I’m a fan of a particular series that I know another person close to me enjoys as well.  I feed into it and I have never hidden the obsession—it’s fun, it’s truly harmless, and it’s inspiring.  This person enjoys it but restrains themselves and while we were together the other day, I offered them an extra of one of the items I have—and they were hesitant at first, but the more they looked at it, they decided they wanted it.  When we are honest about how we feel, then we allow what we love and what is meant for us into our lives.

While that latter point was a small example, the principle is the same: the more we allow what we enjoy, the more we enjoy.  If something that small, honoring and being honest with what we enjoy brings about such positive results, imagine what happens when we do it with our careers, with where we live, with who we allow in our lives. We align with a different frequency when we do what feels right.  When we do what looks right, we remove ourselves from what actually is right for us.  The more we practice doing what feels right, our life starts to look how we want it to.  We learn it doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as we understand what we are trying to accomplish and we enjoy how it feels.  Joy, the act of enjoying, having fun, and being aligned with who we are is a priceless feeling.  The possibilities that alignment open, are endless.  So rather than worry about creating an image, lean into what feels right and simply be who we are and do what feels right to us.  Learn to listen to our intuition, attract the life we are meant to have by being who we were always meant to be.  That is the greatest feeling in the world.