I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. They seem to have a shelf life of about 10 minutes, and thereby are not all that useful. In fact the very specific kind of goal setting that is often recommended has rarely proved useful for me. Instead, I ask myself what do I want? And who do I want to be? And how is what I’m doing right now supportive or not supportive to the first two questions?

This is something I do on an ongoing basis, and that has worked very well for me. I feel like I’m coming to a point in my development where more concrete goals, particularly around business may prove useful, but I do tend to work intuitively and haven’t felt called to do that yet.

So with that in mind, you can imagine that I was interested, but not terminally excited when I first read a blog post by Hayden Tompkins about How To Rock 2010. (Let me stop here and say that Hayden’s blog Through the Illusion is awesome and very worth reading.)

It did take me a little bit off guard when Hayden, as she often does, put her own spin on the ideas. She talked about choosing a word for the year. A word that would serve as a navigation point for the year. Her word this year is “dance,” if you want to know why you’ll have to read her post.

I casually tossed around in my mind what my word might be, if I were to come up with one, and didn’t really get anywhere. Then I read a post by Erica Douglas called 2010 Goals; 2010 #themeword; Big Announcement! (If you’re at all interested in business, particularly business online, Erica’s blog is a must read. I know this post is starting to sound like a blog pitch fest, but I really love what both of these amazing women write.)

In her post, Erica talks about starting the #themeword meme in 2007, the concept is very similar to Hayden’s. I thought this was interesting, but since I had already decided that I didn’t need such a thing, I noted that and moved on. Except that my unconscious or higher self or muse or whatever or whoever seemed to disagree. I don’t remember exactly when, but it popped into my head (and landed there with a significant amount of force) that my #themeword for 2010 is Freedom. I like this roll around in my head for a while, but the more I thought about it the more right it feels.

For me 2010 is about creating freedom

Freedom for myself; financially, from a job that I’ve mastered and I’m ready to pass on, and most importantly from my own limiting beliefs and programming.

This year is also about helping other people create freedom for themselves through my Binaural Journeys guided meditation audios. It’s interesting, I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing when I set out to create audio programs that combined guided meditation, binaural beats, binaural drumming and music. I just knew that I had felt inspired to create programs of this sort, so I did. But, in thinking about my #themeword, Freedom, I realized that Binaural Journeys are really tools for people to use in creating their own freedom.

I am truly excited about the year to come.

So, what’s your #themeword?

In college, I was fortunate to meet and study with Prof. Carol McAmis in the Ithaca College School of Music. Carol is a professor of voice, but she’s also a teacher of something called The Feldenkrais Method, and that’s what I studied with her. Moshe Feldenkrais was an Israeli physicist, judo master and teacher. He was one of the people who created the field which is now known generally as Somatic Education — that is to say teaching the body. The Feldenkrais Method uses very sophisticated patterns of extremely small, extremely gentle movements to help you to learn at a very deep level how to use your body more efficiently.

So what does this look like?

In a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement class with Carol, we would all come in and lay down on blankets on the floor of a large rehearsal room. Carol would sit on a stool and mostly read sets of instructions for the movements that we were to make. The things that is so amazing about doing this work is that you would lay on the ground, following the instructions, often feeling like you are doing nothing of any consequence. Yet, when you would get up and very mindfully walk around at the end of the lesson, I was often shocked by how different I felt, how much lighter or taller or thinner or fatter or what ever — but very different, and always somehow easier and more elegant.

One of the aspects of this work which I found so amazing is that there’s no right way to do it. Carol would never correct us in any direct way. She might give general clarification about something, but you had to figure out for yourself if what she was saying applied to you or not, everything applied to everyone in one sense, and no one in another. This is one of the key parts of the method, allowing people to have their own experience and process of discovery. It was truly amazing how sometimes the various members of our class would interpret the instructions in such radically different ways, and yet still receive powerful benefits.

You want me to put what where???

Often the instructions would become confusing, sometimes even disorienting, Carol’s response to this was always the same “enjoy your confusion.” This turned out to be an extremely profound statement for me, and one that continues to affect how I think today. By telling us to enjoy our confusion, she was suggesting a number of things. The first is that confusion is okay, and that it was not necessary to try to only many it immediately. It also taught us to stay in the experience, to really experience, accept, and embrace the confusion. It also started a process for me of learning that I could get excited when I hit a point of confusion, because most often that was the state which came just before discovery. This is something that has stayed with me, and which I remind myself of to this day. It’s an incredibly powerful thing.

When I was putting together this blog post I found a YouTube video of Moshe Feldenkrais himself talking about the importance of letting each person have their own path of discovery.

So, the next time you find yourself feeling like you don’t know which end is up, let me encourage you to stop worrying and enjoy your confusion.