For many years I hosted New Year InVisioning Workshops, using guided meditation and art-making to help groups make visible their intentions and invitations for the coming year.
This year I am giving the gift of an audio experience you can use in your own home to guide yourself through a reflection of the gifts of 2018, and to invite in a new story seed for 2019.
Here’s what you will need:
Find a place where you can sit comfortably and quietly without disturbance as you listen to the guided meditation. I encourage you to choose a place that is not far removed from your daily living space. I recorded this on the balcony of my home, with sounds of birds, neighbors’ animals, water in a fountain, and the occasional passing car (and one airplane!).
Gather your preferred materials that you will use after the guided meditation:
a notebook or loose sheets of blank paper or a surface to attach collage materials to
glue stick or rubber cement
markers or crayons or oil pastels
a stack of assorted magazines or images from magazines
Turn on the recording of the guided meditation.
At the end of the recording, pick up the art supplies that speak to you right now. Allow your hands to move and your eyes to select the colors, patterns, textures, and shapes that speak to you, without needing a reason to select them. You may find yourself writing, scribbling, drawing, coloring, cutting out shapes from the magazine pages, arranging the cutouts and gluing them down, or you may surprise yourself with some other activity. Maybe your body wants you to get up and move around. Maybe your voice wants to tell you something out loud. You may want to turn on your favorite music playlist as you do this!
When you are done, you will have recorded an experience of celebrating who you are, what you have, and what you are still becoming with each year of life. Made into visible form, this is a powerful symbol of your intentions, conjured to the surface through this meditation.
By the way, feel free to repeat this as often as you feel called to do so. Or to record your own voice guiding you in your own self-created meditation.