A good friend on social media posed this question today and I found myself jotting down such a quick and intuitive, yet telling, response that I thought I would share it here with the aim of prompting your own exercise in self-appreciation, since I suspect many of us have got far more than we realise out of 2020. In many ways, it feels like a seminal year for shifting blockages in how we perceive ourselves and that has everything to do with healing in all its forms.

Her question (thank you Karin) was “Have the difficulties of 2020 made it easier or harder for you to experience and express gratitude?And to end on a positive note – despite of all the losses and struggles – what is something you have gained this year and that you would like to take into the new year?”

My response:

Yes, so much easier, and I have gained so much I hardly know where to start.

1) First, that gratitude, in spadeloads, including for the simple and local (which could mean in and around home or inside of me).

2) Deeper familial love and expression, including over long distances (and much more effort to keep in touch, and I mean really in touch, not always just small talk and flippancy). Those relationships that shine in my life now really gleam.

3) Revived creativity – big time!

4) The profoundest relationship with Nature yet.

5) The frequent experience, with greater ease, of “presence” in all its many versions (which has long eluded me as a compulsive distractor and multitasker, worrier, over-thinker and forward planner.

6) Far more skill at keeping in my own lane!

5) SUCH deep understanding, at last, of myself (that core aim of each of us…to understand self, with deepest respect and compassion, being the route to all healing) including all my health foibles. Now, whether this would have clicked into place anyway at the tender age of 52 I will never know, but I suspect that such a global fixation on health and safety has enabled me to sift out what really makes me tick and all the ways I can make that more comfortable and viable for myself, going forwards.

7) Leading to, deepened appreciation of the degree to which I have become an awakened consciousness plus a master of my own health scenario with all its many challenges over recent years AND all the tenacity and sheer determination that makes me “me”. These tools have served me so well in 2020 and I really don’t know if I could have navigated the year very well at all without them.

8) More LOVE and compassion now consciously present at every level of my being. There has been a softening of “otherness” at so many levels so that my capacity to see from the whole picture and from a vantage-point where multiple sides are taken in at once is only getting bigger and stronger.

9) Finally accepting that slower, intuitively led and more present is my ideal way of being (the very way I used to be, before life nudged me off my path…) and where all the best gifts and useful signposts of life lie. This year has enabled me to reconnect with parts of myself disconnected since childhood and they turn out to be some of my better and most useful qualities!

May we all continue to build on the platform of our newly revealed gifts, whatever they are comprised of (we are all so unique, by perfect design). Happy New Year!