Welcome to 2024. Can you believe it? How quickly is time going? Seems to me that a year feels like a few months and I wonder if this is from getting older or if time itself is feeling quicker for everyone? I sense both.

Lately, I have noticed myself wanting to slow time down by doing less and being more. To ignite the action of being. I write it this way because it seems in our modern hustle of society it requires intention, effort and action to still the self in order to be more and do less. Not only does this slow time down but it helps self to stay anchored to your inner truth, connection with the divine, connection with nature and to stay conscious and intentional.

Makes sense to me as we enter the year of the wood dragon in Chinese astrology. Wood is all about fruition in the physical (think of a tree). Dragon is all about action, independence, leadership, magic, and confident energy. It is yang energy, action action action.

In numerology 2024 is an 8 year. The frequency of 8 has a few meanings. It is the number of abundance and achievement and it is also the number of karma.

Karma is directly tied to abundance and achievement. As a literal metaphor, think about the difference of the crappy self centered CEO stepping on the heads of their workers to make themselves richer and to achieve more versus the compassionate small business owner paying their employees a fair wage and treating everyone as an equal so everyone can experience prosperity. The latter is true abundance. The former is greed. You can achieve in either direction rapidly this year.

In your own life, if you treat yourself and others with more kindness, tolerance, compassion and understanding you generate true abundance and release the karma of feelings building up in the body and soul that become our metaphorical baggage.

Digging a little deeper…notice where you may be mean, critical, judgmental and fear based when it comes to how you talk to yourself or think about others? Pay attention to your inner and outer speech and thoughts because this year will amplify and put into action whatever we are thinking and believing.

The way you speak and think about yourself, life, and others will be what quickly and abundantly grows this year. We can easily see this happening in the world and in the collective, both in our awakening and positive advancements as well as in the continued horrors and problems around the globe. Can you also see into your own self and life where you might be perpetuating judgement, hatred, criticalness, and negative narratives based upon built up fear, grief, despair, anger, and disappointment in the heart?

It’s tricky business to learn how to feel feelings without wrapping negative narratives around the feelings, which in turn, wind up pushing the feelings into the body. This will make body sick or hurt, which will then make the mind go more negative toward self and others in a loop from mind to body and body to mind. It’s the 8 turned on its side as an infinity symbol. This is a form of karma as an endless loop or vicious cycle. The positive is always available to us, feeling feelings out of the body makes it much easier to narrate and speak from a place of love making an infinity loop of true abundance.

Learning to grieve is a big need for every single of one of us. I won’t go into in this blog but it is a mammoth topic of importance in my not so humble opinion.

Feeling feelings without the morality police coming in the mind to persecute is essential ( for example: “you shouldn’t feel this way, there are people worse off” insert guilt here). I always like to think of feelings as energy poop. You would never say to yourself, “I am not going to poop. I feel guilty for pooping, I shouldn’t poop. I am poopless”. How ridiculous! Pooping is the most natural thing in the world even though it’s smelly and yucky and we really don’t want to mention it or think about it. And if there is no pooping issue, we don’t have to think about it.

Feelings are the same as poop except feelings are invisible energy needing to leave the body on a regular basis. If you don’t poop you get very constipated and sick. If you don’t feel, same thing. Because feelings are real energy, body stores the feelings that aren’t pooped out through feeling them and that can turn into physical sickness, pulled muscles, broken bones, back aches, diseases as well as mental-emotional-soul wounds that turn into neural pathways that embed in the brain and often are passed down to future generations through the DNA. Epigenetic multigenerational trauma is a form of karma too.

Learning how to feel feelings without dwelling in them is key. The dwelling part is the thinking part. If you don’t create a story around the feeling and repeat that story in your mind, the feelings will leave the body and you won’t dwell. Even if the same grief comes in waves for ten years or even a lifetime. Normalizing grief, anger, sorrow and all difficult feelings as a simple part of life like pooping is what I remind myself of, to help me stay out of narrating.

Instead of narrating, I just name. Hello grief. Hello sorrow. Hello anger. Sometimes I have to write a poem or story to get the feeling out. Sometimes I need to paint to get it out. Or sing. Or dance. Or watch a show to cry. Or vent. I always need to move my body to keep the feelings pooping out. We all have our ways and learning them is vital for health.

But reminder, it’s OK to be a messy human creating stories of pain that need detangling and understanding. Hello therapy. Hello journaling. Hello energy work.

This year there will be more immediate karmic consequences and fruition of what you put into action based upon your thoughts and feelings. I am getting into the nitty gritty of feeling feelings because you can’t just positivity-police yourself into loving kindness and confidence in order to achieve and be in the flow of abundance. You can’t just wave your magic wand (unless you are Gandalf), and you can’t ignore the darkness and only look at the light. These tactics are unskillful and will grow more problems.

You know me, I am going to be a broken record reminder of the internal world of you. Inner achievement. Inner fruition. True abundance. True independence. Real magic. Healing.

Inner achievement: being able to feel feelings out of the body and stay out of negative narratives a little bit better than before.

Inner fruition: growing a little bit more self love, self acceptance and loving kindness that will spread into the external world toward others. It can go in the other direction too, extending love, acceptance and compassion toward others can help you feel it for yourself.

True abundance: the internal sense of well-being generated by the power of love and caring that gives back to self and others so that what you create in the world is prosperous for everyone.

Real magic: all of life visible and invisible, internal and external, is alive-conscious-sentient energy being shaped by our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions. We are co-creators of this life and can invoke the divine (or nature) to help us create. You don’t have to go it alone, support is everywhere in the spirit world and in nature.

Using real magic to create abundant inner and outer achievement won’t make the injustice, horrors, and pain banish just like that in our life or in our world…obviously. It’s a slow and steady process over time in the ongoing journey of being human on earth. And I don’t mean to be reductionist. I am only focusing in this specific aspect, for this blog.

This year will be a super jolt growth spurt of what we put out and that is based upon what is happening within. Same goes for the shadow side, untended and unconscious wounds will get worse too, judgement and criticism will create wounds. Shadowed anger, grief, and all difficult feelings will create bigger problems and illnesses.

Back to doing less and being more. By spending a bit more time being versus doing, the nervous system can regulate and calm, we can create space and time to notice what feelings need tending and what thoughts are being perpetuated. This is part of my 2024 plan and I share only to inspire.

Also, I cannot end this blog without mentioning Pluto going back into Aquarius on January 20th (after a retrograde in Capricorn) until is retrogrades back into Capricorn once again come September 1st and very soon to be full on in Aquarius until 2044.

A new era is upon us. Think back to 2008. That’s when the last new era was upon us in Capricorn. So from 2008 until now we have been in a certain Capricorn cycle of death, loss, rebirth and transformation as a society. Now we enter an Aquarius era of death, loss, rebirth and transformation until 2044. More on that later…