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?

I have to say, I’m rather new to actually using twitter but I’m really getting to love it. This morning I saw a tweet from Wendi Friesen. If you don’t already know about Wendi’s work, she’s an amazing hypnotist, who has the biggest array of self hypnosis audio to help you with anything you can imagine that I have ever seen. I’ve known about her for quite a few years, and have a number of her products. One of them is a set of hypnosis sessions to help solve insomnia. This was an almost magical solution for me, when I was really having difficulty sleeping.

Photo by Son of Groucho

But in any case, this morning Wendi tweeted a special gift, particularly for people who were having a really hard time right now. It’s a video and an MP3 download that she is offering for free to help us release our fears so that we can create the things that we most need in our lives to be who we really are.

Now I know to some people, the idea of the “Law Of Attraction” another manifestation techniques seems very strange, and New Age woo woo ridiculousness. And I understand where that tendency comes from, it’s easy to dismiss something that is so far outside the past experience most of us have had. Also, it’s often discussed in the very new age, flowery language which is a turnoff for many people. But I think to ignore this set of tools is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I could talk about why I believe that everything in the universe is connected to an energetic level, and that this is being proven more and more clearly through research in physics. I could also talk about how these manifestation ideas really come directly out of ancient tradition, retold in modern forms first at the turn of the 20th century and then again in recent years. I’m not to do either of those things, maybe I will in another post someday.

It’s all in your head!

I want to talk to you about is fairly straightforward, and it’s what happens in your own mind, no woo woo needed. The Law Of Attraction teachers talk about how we get what we focus on. This isn’t a big surprise, it’s just how our brains work. Have you ever had the experience of buying a new car, and suddenly it seems like every third car you see on the highway is the same model you bought. Or maybe, you’ve bought an item of clothing, and all of a sudden it seems like everyone around you is wearing the same style. We are creatures of pattern recognition, so once we make an important decision our brains are filtering for related information — other people with the same car, or wearing the same outfit.

Likewise, when we concentrate on our fears, on our experience of being stuck, our brains provide us with all of the things around us that we can use that information and evidence for why we should be afraid, and how stuck we truly are. When we shift what we’re thinking about, even if we don’t completely believe it, we’re giving our unconscious minds new sets of things to look for — things like new possibilities. My experience has been, in my own life, but this is truly the case. When I feel stuck, I tend to get depressed and focus on how depressed I am, and then do things to try to make me feel better like watch TV. I think it’s obvious, how unlikely that is to cause a solution to occur to me — I’m just not putting myself in situations where I would be inspired.

I really believe that the most dangerous thing for us to focus on is fear, because it’s so easy to make that fear grow and become paralyzed by it. This is clearly not useful. And that brings me back to Wendi’s gift. In the video, Wendi tells her amazing story of how she used changing her focus to solve a really scary problem in her own life, and then she leads a very brief, but very powerful exercise to start that process in you. The MP3 download is a 20 minute hypnosis session to take this even further and deeper really releasing fear.

So I hope that  this makes sense. And I hope, that if you haven’t tried any of this sort of work, or even if you have, that you’ll go and take advantage of Wendi’s free gift right now.

It’s at: http://www.planetwendi.com/2009/12/my-gift-to-you/

Thank you Wendi! and Merry Christmas!