Stop starting over every year
Your life isn’t resetting—it’s accumulating.
It’s that time of year again. Every scroll delivers another invitation to manifest everything—the career, the bank account, the home, the life—starting January 1.
Every year, I feel the pull. Maybe this is the year it all clicks. Maybe if I commit hard enough, visualize it clearly enough, feel it enough, the universe will finally cooperate.
And every year, I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach that there is something missing in this messaging—a feeling of there being a vacancy behind these promises — and that feeling is this:
The idea that when the clock strikes twelve we are handed a clean slate is a fantasy. A seductive one. It positions us as magicians who can summon an ideal future where we can be anyone we want to be, in spite of who we are now and instead of who we have been. It suggests that what we’ve lived, learned, and embodied up until now can be left in the past — it cannot be. Our futures arrive through us. Our next steps are possible because of who we have been and because we digest and integrate the lessons we have learned along the way (even the ones that have hurt).
The belief that the new year is going to bring with it a new you isn’t a timeline jump to success, it’s a delay.
There is no clean slate. There is no new you. It’s the system of nature and spirit working exactly as they were designed to… in cycles, in spirals, in seasons. We have to move through seasons in sequence. Each one is necessary. Each one is connected to what came before and what comes next. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is accidental. No steps exist in isolation, and no new season fully arrives in just one night. Seasons don’t follow a clock aligned with capitalism and office closures; they arrive over the course of the last season in a process akin to titration. One tiny drop at a time until the full change has occurred.
You don’t need to force a new season to begin on January 1st in order to reach your goals, and actually….you can’t. You don’t need to erase your old habits and ways of thinking in order to live out the new shiny ideal ones, and actually…you can’t do this either.
Even the plants whose stalks and blooms die off every fall and grow anew each spring maintain their original bulb through the dark of winter until the right conditions are present. Then, they begin to send out single shoots to the surface — not blooms or leaves, just those beautiful exploratory shoots go up and out into the world above gathering resources and information that helps the plant to adjust, adapt, and stay alive enough to continue to grow towards it’s goal.
And there is actually another key piece of plant wisdom here which is that the slow-by-design approach (vs that all-in-all-right-now approach) is the determining factor of survival. If the plant tried to send blooms out at the first sign of spring, they would freeze off, and the plant would have used up all its precious resources in the wrong place at the wrong time. The parallels to our approach to new goals on January 1st are pretty striking here I think.
Successful growth can only happen when energy output is matched with the pace of energy input and available resources. And, it requires the whole system to work together to integrate the information circulating through the plant and its environment rather than bulldoze onwards.
Your body already knows when it’s time to shed, when it’s time to root, when it’s time to grow, and when it’s time to shine. Your body is already trying to integrate the information around it and responds accordingly depending on what resources and nourishment it is recieving. Every step you’ve taken—especially the uncomfortable ones—has built the exact capacity required for what you say you want now. But only when you can stop yourself from trying to override your system and slow down long enough to listen.
Skipping this truth doesn’t make progress faster. It makes it brittle, vulnerable, and short-lived at best.
The other dynamic going on in the new year new you manifestation space is that dream building is most often marketed as “get to the happiness over there faster”—as if happiness is always elsewhere, as if contentment is a failure of ambition, as if wanting more requires dissatisfaction with what already exists.
That framing quietly teaches us to stay restless and look outward. And restlessness is profitable, but it’s not clarifying, and it’s not connective.
The cost of constantly chasing the next version of life is that you never fully inhabit the one that’s shaping you…you never fully learn how capable you are of accessing happiness in the life you have right here and right now. Gratitude and desire are not opposites—but desire cultivated from a space of lack will always keep us chasing fulfillment.
So here’s what I shift into this time of year instead.
Waiting to feel the spark of alignment.
For me, motivation only truly works when it comes from the body and the spirit, not the calendar. Not January 1. Not hustle timelines disguised as spiritual practice.
Alignment isn’t loud. It’s visceral. It’s an internal yes that carries both excitement and risk.
Do I want more from life? Yes. But I want it in the same salt-of-the-earth kind of way that I want my carrots grown—honest simple steps with sweat and dirt and observation, and trial and error, and responding to the needs of the system every step of the way (including when the system needs me to step back wipe my hands and walk away—lots can happen when we let go of constant control and management. If you don’t believe me, just look at a thriving garden or forest, and you will see just how much of an artist nature is when we get out of the way). I want my dream life to always be coming to life and for it to be coming from a place of moving towards greater alignment with my own truth and true essence, vs from a place of deleting the old me and trying to build a shiny new one from scratch every year.
Every year, there are lessons and wisdom to review and reflect on. There are pearls we get to only after crunching through sand (and taking note of it). There are intuitions and insights, aha’s and I want to’s that come from a place within all of us that is deeply connected with source and universal life force. What I’m saying is there is incredible nourishment we miss if we try to jump the timeline and jump to the future planning. The year passed is like your compost pile—in the garbage all the nutrients leave the garden ecosystem. But let them cook, add a little air and a little water, and a few pile turns (i.e. self-reflection, patience, compassionate honesty) and you have a perfect concoction of super-fuel for next years roots and blooms—fed by everything they let go the year before).
We don’t receive the nourishment of all that if we get on a loudspeaker or even in a journal simply projecting out all that we desire and all that we feel we deserve and trying to summon the feelings of success while we are still hurting from a season of drought.
We receive the nourishment of the garden of our lived experience by becoming quiet, by putting pen to paper and asking the truth to flow out, by feeling our way towards the pulsing force that is alignment and aliveness — a steady force that is always guiding us around the cycles of seasons and years.
We receive the nourishment we need to get to what is next, by listening to what is here now. By having the willingness to feel what’s already true instead of projecting what should come next.
The truth we hear will feel like a salve, but it will also scare us.
The truth we hear will be energizing, but it may also ask that we give more than we thought we could.
The truth is destabilizing but only because life always shakes loose what’s not meant to stay so we can see more clearly what is underneath waiting for a space to clear so it can reach for the light.
The next season doesn’t begin when the date on the calendar says it does and it doesn’t begin when you come to it simply wanting more—it begins when you’re willing to live in full relationship with what’s already here and recognize the fact that your life is a garden, an ecosystem that you are the gardian of in partnership with unseen intelligent spirits. Every season is nourishing this one. Every hibernation, every death, every unexpected new direction of growth, every failed harvest, every fallow garden bed, and every beautiful bloom are all working together to create a resilient productive intelligent adaptive and ALIVE system that fully represents your unique and continuous journey.
So my invitation here in this Haven, away from the noisy manifestation techniques, is to shift your perspective to one where you become the guardian of the garden of your life. You can begin by simply sitting and looking at the amazing way the system of your life and your relationship to it have led you to this moment here and now. Notice what has been unexpected, what has been out of your control, notice what has worked in what conditions and in proximity to which bedfellows. Notice where your hard work gets you, and where you have perhaps overwatered or over-pruned. Notice the symbioses, the stubborn roots, the weeds, the empty spaces that are resting, the patchy spots where new growth comes up.
Above all else, notice that the system is and always has been working, and beautiful, and beautifully different every year and in each season. No perfect plan can produce those kinds of results, only a relationship based on love and respect and trust and commitment and patience.
You’re here, so you already have all of those qualities and you already have a thriving garden for a life, though you might only now be realizing it and realizing just how many faces and shapes that can take.
The work you’re looking for is already here, waiting for you to get still enough to take notice, and perhaps to shift your perspective just a little so you can truly see the beauty that exists in spite of the plan.
xo
Emma Rose
Listen:
If this email landed, don’t rush past it. Come sit with it. Listen for what’s asking for your response. Haven episode 7: A practice for letting go that is rooted in the wisdom of your biology and the simple truth that the only conversation you need to get from this season to the next — is with yourself. Listen Here