Every Monday in 2025 there will be a new journal prompt in the Year of Hope classroom in the Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership.
Get this week's journal prompt here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Leave them in the comments at the bottom of that page so we can discuss this as a group. Practicing hope in community is MAGIC.
I am still doing my Year of Hope project. But I am behind.
I have this HUGE (9x11”) planner with a page a day plus an extra page each week and this project was to fill it over the course of the year. I didn't say I would ALWAYS fill a page every day. I knew I would get behind sometimes, and then catch up... but I have been consistently behind for a while and only getting further behind.
It would be easy to say to myself “It’s fine! You SAID you wouldn’t necessarily do this every day, but by the end of the year you would fill this! You could always end the year with a huge journaling binge at the end of December! It would be fun!”
It would be easy to just… tell myself not to feel this way.
Especially since, on the spectrum between hopefulness and hopelessness, I am living solidly on the side of hopefulness.
I feel all the things I had hoped the Year of Hope would bring me this year.
But there is no magic in avoiding our feelings, or telling ourselves to feel differently than we feel.
So what is this inner knowing telling me?
Taking my feeling that I am a failure into the Un-Sticking Station…
My feeling that I am a failure is 5 years old. Dressing up as Holly Hobby. I give her a hug and I can feel the anxiety radiating from her.
OMG! I was sitting with this… and then I suddenly noticed that I was on Facebook! So funny how resistance takes over and I don't even notice I've let the process to go scroll.
Coming back to it. There are so many layers here around perfectionism and worthiness.
It’s soooo heavy.
And my five year old self is trapped in it. It’s like iron was melted and poured down her, though it wasn’t hot and didn’t hurt, but then it solidified at her feet and now she’s completely stuck.
(In this mediation, I am imagining that iron is the most heavy material in the universe, doesn’t matter if that’s true, that’s what is happening here)
There are so many layers here around perfectionism and worthiness. Like the more I look, the more layers there are.
And no matter how much work I do on this, there are still so many layers.
This time when I step away from the meditation I do it more deliberately.
I go make breakfast (I had frozen blueberries sitting in a bowl to thaw, so I just add yogurt and granola) and then eat my breakfast thinking about this.
This is cultural and personal and I think about all the ways I have internalized perfectionism. And I have freed myself from it in so many ways, and yet there is more work to be done.
This is where I notice that I’ve been defining “working through this feeling of failure” as “getting back on track with this journal”.
Which is actually just LETTING MY FEELINGS CONTROL ME.
The feeling that I am a failure for not keeping up is saying that I AM A FAILURE... UNTIL I catch up... and so THE ONLY SOLUTION is to catch up.
But when I was contemplating how old and layered this perfectionism is and the places where I have freed myself of it and the ways I would like to be more free… there was space there to not feel like a failure AND not catch up with the journal.
But yes I think I did go into this meditation, unintentionally, with the goal that it would “get me back on track” with the journal.
Healing would ask me to explore what it would mean to be ok with NOT getting back on track.
Then something shifts in me.
There is a lightness in my chest, kind of a radiating energy.
When I look at my 5 year old self, she is wearing iron shoes but she can lift her feet. She is not stuck in iron now.
When I went to offer love to the inner 5 year old, I just ended up with all these different thoughts and ideas and I followed that instead of finishing the meditation.
It’s always better to be with your experience than necessarily work through the guided meditation.
And we can always come back to it.
Like, this deep and layered perfectionism is not healed in one 15 minute meditation.
But I received a new insight around it, and I shifted something, and I am going to hold this idea… that letting go of perfectionism and NOT catching up with the Year of Hope journal IS HEALING, whereas making myself “get on track” so that I don’t have to feel that feeling of failure - is letting my fear of uncomfortable feelings control me.
And underneath that is a real desire to be spending more time with the journal.
I feel like I am holding hope in a new way in my life, but I also want the journal time, you know?
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