• Despite what our calendars tell us, now is a wonderful time to engage your new year energy.

    I know we’re in March, and our “New Year” was supposed to be two months ago, but as I’m going to explain, this tradition is actually a relic of bureaucratic decisions made a long time ago. We’re running an old calendar that doesn’t align very well with the natural cycle of time.

    When we re-align with a “natural” calendar, something based on deep time, our actions and energy can work in tandem with the phase the world is actually in.

    This is particularly pertinent to the practice of goal setting and new year planning.

    For over a decade now, I’ve relished the new year tradition. I love the downtime over Christmas, and then the invitation to mark the passing of the year.

    I’ve developed my ritual over the years. It starts with a deep review of the year just passed, with particular attention placed on my wins, successes and appreciations (gratitude is important for me to counter the “never enough” voice).

    And then my favourite part—a deep enquiry into my vision for the year ahead. What do I want to create? What is it that wants to come through this year?

    In more recent years I’ve learned how to then take all this, and “call it in” spiritually.

    What I realised this year, is that January 1st is a really fucking weird time of year to do it.

    Time cycles and ancient bureaucracy

    There is a cycle of deep time. Something that is built upon natural and real events, rather than the more arbitrary models our human culture tends to run on.

    This natural cycle is based upon the actual events that create our global year. It’s the time it takes for the Earth to fully orbit the Sun. This creates our seasons, our solstices and equinoxes. There is nothing arbitrary about this cycle.

    We start our year on Jan 1st, which does not align with this cycle. It’s close to the Winter Solstice, but not really. Why do we place it here? The Romans. Whose ancient tinkering is still coded into the way we think about time.

    Originally, the Roman New Year began in March, which was their first month. The period between December (the final month) and the beginning of the year was left as undefined “winter” time. This is something many pagan cultures did.

    In roughly 700 BC, the Roman calendar was upgraded from a 10-month to a 12-month system. January and February were added, and a 355-day year standardised.

    This screwed up the order, and the numerically named months got out of sequence. September comes from ‘sept’—seven. But where does it fall in our calendar? That’s right, ninth. The same issue goes for October—December. Oops.

    Gradually, more changes were brought in, including the moving of the New Year from March, back to January. This was a key move that is of course still preserved in our calendar.

    Why did they do it? In short—ancient bureaucracy. It had administrative advantages, and allowed them to better prepare for that Spring’s planned military campaigns.

    Which all results in some funky karmic energy still running through our New Year’s magic. As Dr. John Churchill says, we’re still running on empire time.

    A natural quarterly cycle

    As our world heads ever more frantically down the technological rabbit-hole, I feel many of us are called to a re-integration with the natural timing of things. To align with the deep code in our bodies with the cycles of change, expansion and contraction.

    We’ve got most of the right practices, we’re just doing them at the wrong time.

    Rather than follow an old calendar designed by an empire looking for military expansion, I believe we are being asked to remember and realign with the natural calendar that Earth provides.

    This is a calendar that is based on deep time—the actual passage of our planet around her Sun. The solstices, and the equinoxes are natural delineations of time given by astronomical and astrological reality.

    We adhered to this natural calendar for so long we don’t even know when it started. Though the solar alignment of many ancient structures gives us a clue as to how deep this knowledge went.

    And according to the natural calendar, now is a wonderful time to activate your new year energy. As we approach the Spring Equinox (March 21), and new life is sprouting all around us, the natural world is literally inviting us to join the growth party.

    From the perspective of natural time, this makes much more sense as the “start of the year”, and something that many cultures practiced for millennia.

    Making it real

    If you already have a plan for your year—you know what your goals and intentions are—then this is a great time to call it in, commit to it, and feed your soul juju into its bubbly excitement.

    If you don’t have a plan and you’re unclear what you’re aiming at this year, then this is also a great time to do that work. You haven’t missed the boat. You’re just in time.

    What is the essence of this practice?

    • The purpose is to get clear about your goals and intentions. This is what sets your aim for the journey ahead.
    • Source them from as deep a place as you can find. Take your time, let the truth come through you.
    • Write them out in a short list—get specific with your language. Shorter is better, distilling down the essence into simple language.

    Don’t ask AI to generate all this for you. What makes the process powerful is the struggle and learning as you translate what’s inside you into words. The result is infused with your own creative effort and is what sets the tone for the year ahead.

    My favourite way to “sign off” on my yearly plan is to do so in ceremony.

    After I stir up the magical field, I say out loud what my goals and intentions are. I call in the spirits of change, asking for help and guidance as I commit to the path for the year ahead. This is an embodied practice too—feeling the desire in my body as I speak, including the doubts and fears, declaring the commitment in my heart.

    This brings it into the present moment—making it a real and embodied declaration.

    There are many ways to do this kind of ceremonial commitment. The form is less important than the authenticity—making it your ritual, following your intuition. What makes it powerful is the pouring of your sincere intention into the vision.

    New life is sprouting all around. What wants to be born through you and your work this year?

    What will you create?

    I will be taking the goals and planning I did on December 31st, refining them into my plan for the next year, and invoking the spirit of Spring to help me create it.

    Would you like to join in?

    Ewan Townhead

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  • You have the ability to change time.

    You can change it, because you can think about it, and change the frame. No other creature we know about can do this.

    Our ability to think in time is one of the super-powers we are given as human beings. A lizard is perpetually stuck in the now. A complex adult can project their imagination billions of years in either direction.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about time-frames recently. I think they have significant implications for our work in the world and the way we go about realizing it.

    Let me explain.

    The entire expanse of history in a single map

    I remember when I first got interested (actually somewhat obsessed) with the work of integral philosopher Ken Wilber. His huge maps of reality saved me during a time of existential soul searching.

    One of the huge gifts that I got from his work, was that I started to think about human history in terms of epochs.

    Modern humans have been around for about 180,000 years, which is a stupendous amount of time, and hard to grasp. But when it was broken down into a handful of major paradigms, I could start to see the broad strokes of the evolution of human consciousness.

    It meant I could now look at the existential conundrums that had been plaguing me inside a huge context. It was not that I now had the answers, but rather that my frustration was dissolved inside a container big enough to hold the questions.

    Here’s another example of the power of time-frame manipulation.

    The earth has been around a while. It’s hard to grasp just how long. So let’s switch the time-frame.

    If the entire 4.5 billion year history of the earth were condensed into a single year, here’s what we see.

    Life arrives as single celled bacteria around the beginning of March. And things move pretty slowly for quite some time!

    In the middle of November we get the oceans filling up with multi-cell organisms.

    At the beginning of December, amphibians venture onto dry land.

    On December 13th Dinosaurs arrive on the scene, and stick around until 26th when they’re wiped out. Mammals come along the following day.

    It’s not until December 31st that the first hominids (apes on 2 legs) appear.

    Modern humans rock up at about 11:35 pm.

    And the industrial revolution happens in the last 2 seconds before midnight.

    Why are time-frames powerful?

    When you change the context of something, you simultaneously change the content.

    In other words, change the frame, and you can look at things in a completely different way.

    This is definitely true with time-frames.

    For example, let’s look at slavery. It can look like a very different issue if I change the time-frame.

    If I look at slavery through a 500 year time frame, I will see it as a horrific, barbaric thing that powerful white people did to defenseless black people.

    If I look at it through a 180,000 year time frame, I’ll see it as something that is common to every single human culture we know about, regardless of race, until the industrial revolution, when it was outlawed on a mass scale in a relatively short period of time.

    When I expand the time frame around a particular topic – when I stretch the edges to increase the canvas – I see a different picture.

    What time frame are you thinking about your work in?

    The next few hours of urgent to-dos you have to get through?

    The remaining few weeks until your next vacation?

    The 2 months until your big launch?

    The next 10 years as you build your legacy?

    The next 10 lifetimes as you unwind your evolutionary destiny?

    When I look at my business in the time-frame of the next product launch I’m performing, then success looks like nailing that launch. It looks like hitting the financial targets I have in mind, converting the right number of people into customers, persuading enough people of the value of my offer.

    When I look at my business in the time-frame of the next 30 years, it doesn’t matter if the next launch fails. In fact, I’ll learn much more from an abject failure than I will from a success.

    When I look at my business in the time-frame of the next 30 years, then I don’t want to persuade as many people as possible to buy my thing, I want to build relationships of intimacy and trust that will have people become customers and partners for decades to come.

    Stretch your frame

    You’re here for some particular work. It’s your work. It’s your life’s work. What happens if you examine that work in the context of the rest of your life?

    When you take things out of the context of financial success during this calendar year, and place them in the context of a lifetime of discovery and growth, what picture can be painted?

    Your dreams are big. Too big to hold sometimes. So put them in bigger hands. Put them in a time-frame of the rest of your life. What is possible now?

    Or go really creatively out there. Stretch the time frame beyond this life-time.

    What would happen to your work, if you knew that the mission would be taken up again, after you die, by a version of you that forgot all your memories, but retains all your implicit learning and ability? How would that change things?

    In other words, your work is so important, that you don’t have to rush to nail it all today, or this week, or this year.

    You have at least the rest of your life to work on it.

    Expand your frame. Give your dreams a big enough field to play in, and your stress a long enough journey to be belittled by.

    Now the frame is different.

    What picture do you see?

     

    Ewan Townhead

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