Hello and Joyous New Year

This time of year is that perfect time to looking back on 2010 and forward to 2011. As I look back what I celebrate are the gifts of difficulty that I met and passed through. There were financial challenges, health challenges with family and friends including a thrombosis and cancer. I have friends who lost jobs, lost family members who passed away, lost relationships with break ups and divorce. I know many people around have passed through their own challenges or are in the midst of them.

There were also the gifts of the year. There was a wedding, a hula concert, travel, new friends, re-connecting with old friends, new work, new businesses growing, ideas being created, birthdays and lots of cooking with family and friends. I heard friends say they loved being where they are. I know some found their passion. Others turned their passion up to a new level. For some of these events I was present. Others I witnessed or heard about from afar and sent my intention towards. I felt included either way.

The common gift I received was to see how powerful each person was as they faced those challenges and accepted or experienced the gifts. There was humor, strength, power, joy, tears, grief, triumph and awareness and much more through these times.

The center of it all is realizing that we acknowledged and shared the journey. The badges of our journey may be in photos. But the most important place is in the awareness of our heart. Each one of us realized that we are perfect for the things done and undone; for the success and tragedy; accident and gift. When I see people in their heart, working from love, they find the gift in the moment of living.

As we have been working in the Ha’awina class, one of the topics is working from joy in the moment. How you get there is by centering in your heart and loving yourself for all you do. Loving yourself for the cumulative self that you are who has survived every difficulty along the way. As we move through the Solstice and the shift from darkness to light begins and the New Year is at our fingertips, it is time to rejoice in the moment. To rejoice in the gift of time we each have with ourselves.

The person you spend the most time with is you. May you love every minute you spend with you. May you love yourself and be gentle when you don’t. May your love be returned and grow tenfold from your heart to those around you. That is all we have to choose. Choose to love you and life balance is yours. Start with Aloha and the joy flows in the moment and like a tide, it rises and lifts you up.

May the New Year allow each of us to embrace our whole self; every broken dream, every joyful passage, every minute with a dear departed, every hour with those who are here. May we begin first with our heart and ourselves so that as we act with ourselves, we act with others. May the atonement of the hour become the at-one-ment with ourselves in our hearts and love is where we begin.

Begin in love and love is yours. Amama ua noa. It is given it is free.