Why do we hope at this time of year? Hope is an ancient tradition from the not-to-long-ago era of our ancestors.  They hoped for the sun to bring spring and food back to their families and villages.  Winter Solstice marked the shortest day of the year.  Its celebration included bonfires, lit candles, merry making, sharing food with friends and family.  It was a dark and usually cold time. The only food a family had was what it had gathered the previous harvest or what the family could catch in the deep winter.  We hoped for more warmth. We hoped for more sunlight. We hoped that our family would survive until the shoots of spring could give us needed nutrients.  We hoped that our children would live thru the winter. 

Nowadays for most of us, life is easier.  We still hope for a better year of health for our families. We also hope for weight loss and success.  Hope is ingrained in us as is the work ethic to help those hopes be manifested in this 3D world.  It is a powerful drive – to want more assurance that the variables of life will keep us healthy, wealthy and wise. 

What is being wise?  Is it just knowledge, stuff written in books or on the internet?  Or is wisdom something internal, something accumulated, something known before it can be articulated.  There might have been a time where children were taught to trust that inner knowing, but it was not in my upbringing or I think in my parents’ upbringing.  My experience was that the adults knew what was best for us and we needed to listen to them to succeed. So, we did. We ignored our own inner voice in favor of the direction and advice of our parents, our community, our church, our government.  The advice rolled out in books, in newspapers and magazines.  It is still a strong voice that many follow…the latest diet, the latest exercise program, the latest business success program. They all claim that they have the magic to create a wonderful future for everyone.  Only problem is that they can’t possibility do that. Each person has a unique history, unique and essential gifts to offer. 

We must first learn to listen to our own inner knowing which can appear as energy, as emotions, as language.  It tells us what is life-enhancing for us and what is life-defeating or dangerous for us.  The problems is that we were never encouraged to listen to our inner knowing. So, we don’t know how to listen or to respond to the sentient information when it appears.  It is worth the effort to finally listen to your own system’s wisdom. This is a 24-7 presence that tracks what is occurring inside your body and outside of you.  When we start to note our own registers for these different signals from our own bodies, we can inhabit our own wisdom. We can live from that wisdom and be that wisdom in the world. We can make choices for weight loss, success or exercise based on our own body’s wisdom.

Even in ancient eras, there were people who accessed their own intuitive knowing better than others.  They were at home with nature and with themselves.  They knew the power in nature and they knew how to be in community and good relations with others.  They might have been called grandma or maybe auntie. They may have been called a witch or a herbalist.  They might have had a ‘green’ thumb.  Whatever name people gave them, it didn’t matter.  They listened internally and to nature. They honored their own unique gifts and worked to polish those gifts so that those gifts became skills and capabilities, strengths and capacities. We can too!

We can do this today, in this new decade. It’s time to listen within. To discover our own unique gifts and to develop our strength, our stamina and our capacity to be more of whom we came here to be, do and have.  Welcome to the new era of hope both internal and external. Let’s grow our wisdom and help others grow theirs.  In that we can assure a bountiful harvest in the coming years for more people, more families, more communities and more countries.