Greetings, as we enter 2014!
Hang on to your hopes, my friend.
That’s an easy thing to say, but if your hope should pass away,
Look around, leaves are brown,
There’s a patch of snow on the ground.
—Simon and Garfunkel, “Hazy Shade of Winter”
We did it! We made it through another year. . . .
For decades I’ve recommended ritualizing the closing of the receding year and welcoming the new year. In addition to our collective celebration worldwide, including watching the ball drop at Times Square at midnight, I use my beloved black cast-iron cauldron filled with sand to safely burn away that which needs to be released before moving into the new year.
I’d love to know how you ritualize this important ending and new beginning.
Then I hold the first 12 days of the new year to reflect on what matters most to me, and to plan on how I can best serve you for the coming 12 months.
We are an amazing community of evolving business owners, aspiring entrepreneurs, and visionary leaders who view our global crises as an opportunity for great evolutionary leaps forward. As most of us know by now, this requires nothing less than a profound transformation of ourselves, our key relationships, and our worldview.
Rising up from the cacophony of competing news bytes, I’m sure you’ve also noticed that there is a profound shift taking place for women worldwide.
On the surface its pretty damn apocalyptic to see that our rights rolled back, and women again and again marginalized or made powerless around the globe. But what looks like a foreboding messenger of imminent disaster is in reality a prophetic forecasting of a new destiny for women . . . one fueled by a new “femininity” rising in us all–women and men.
Forced out into the open, we are mobilizing anew to confront the forces that demonize, repress, and have a patriarchal dominion over us. This time we will be even more paradigm changing, because we now have more power and clout than ever before. We women are leading the way to a new feminine greatness, what my beloved mentor Marion Woodman referred to as our “Conscious Feminine.”
More and more of us are hearing the call to our greatness; many of us are raising our horns to sound the clarion call to gather in the name of a compelling planetary vision. Challenge is the opportunity for greatness to birth practical solutions that can lead us in the direction of a greater future.
I truly believe we are being prepared to withstand and survive even greater stress and testing on all fronts as we swing between slippery slopes of continuous discontinuous change. We are caught in the midst of a system experiencing creative destruction.
We all are needed to rally us as we confront the next evolutionary shift of humankind and our planet. Either we are en route to an evolutionary dead-end, where everything we’ve known and held true is up for grabs, or we’ll ride these future trends into a new world of our making.
The great gift of these times of epoch change has been the call to our greatness—to our unique DNA-encoded destiny—individually and collectively.
Everywhere, from around our kitchen table to the boardroom, we are reminded that our self-made reality can crumble in a millisecond. Sometimes the call to stand tall to our greatness is so silent, it is barely perceptible except to the trained ear. Other times, it shakes us up like a cacophonous horn blowing for all the world’s souls to come to attention.
It is critical to not lose hope, so I implore you to not waste your precious Soul energy or investable assets on despairing. Rather, stay focused on what really matters, and what you can control, while continuously improving upon what is now.
Then we will leap beyond, into what can be our new leaps of consciousness. Trust this evolutionary process. Keep showing up. Find what matters in every day. Stay connected. Don’t hide out. Break bread; make community.
Remember we are the game changers and visionary leaders we’ve been waiting for. . . . We all matter, each of us—and together the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
It is we who have the responsibility to lead the way to a new greatness. We now have replaced Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique with what Ali Brown and I refer to as the Feminine Edge.
We have more clout now than ever before as stockholders, entrepreneurs, discerning consumers, and visionary leaders, who are at the helm of for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations that are changing the world and making a difference.
Featured image by Flickr users Puzzlescript
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