Setting intentions for a better 2025
As we embark on a New Year, it’s the perfect time to reflect and set intentions for the months ahead. In this episode of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, we explore some powerful techniques to help you use your imagination for GOOD as you work towards co-creating your ideal future.
Imagining a happy, healthy and thriving Future You
Take a moment to imagine yourself a year from now, at the beginning of 2026. Picture yourself happy, healthy, and thriving. What does this version of you look like? How do you feel? What have you accomplished? This simple imagery exercise can be a powerful tool in shaping your goals for the year ahead.
Words with extra meaning
Choosing a “word of the year” or using “evocative words” as they’re known in psychosynthesis, can be incredibly impactful. These words act as anchors, helping to focus your mind on your intentions. In yoga nidra, we use “sankalpas” – positive intentions or resolves that come from the heart – which serve a similar purpose.
Harness the Reticular Activation System
Our brains are wired to notice what we focus on thanks to the Reticular Activation System. By consciously choosing what to pay attention to – through intentions, words or imagery – we can effectively “programme” our minds to seek out opportunities that aligned with our goals and what we WANT v what we don’t want.
Permission to dream
It’s crucial to give yourself permission to want what you want. Imagining 2025 as your best year ever isn’t selfish: It’s a step towards creating positive change in your own life and, by extension, the world around you. Remember, your personal wellbeing contributes to global wellbeing.
As we delve deeper into these practices, remember that self-care isn’t selfish. By focusing on your personal growth and happiness, you’re better equipped to contribute positively to the world around you.
Wishing you a fantabulous 2025 filled with intention, growth (of the things you want more of) and positive change!
le grá,
Evei
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Welcome back to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I’m Eve and I’m sharing today, building on the New Year’s Eve-ish episode around your word of the year and going into it a bit more.
If you have the book 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, you can read more about this self care idea on the 4th of January: It’s all about figuring out what you want and how to get it in a really holistic way, bringing in all the different tools I use in my work.
And we’re talking about setting intentions, we’re thinking about what you’d like to be feeling a year from now, where you’d like to be beginning of 2026, working backwards, using your imagination to think about how to move closer to what you want. I’ve been recording a lot of episodes today, so I can’t remember if this is in the future or in the past, but I’ll read out the pages that might be of most interest.
So, in the book, the 4th of January is very much about setting intentions. The 17th of June is about evocative words, so we dealt with the Word of the Year and beginning to deal with that in the last episode of 2024 (episode 38: Your Vibe for 2025).
And we talk about sankalpas the whole time in yoga nidra, it’s that positive intention or resolve and it’s referred to several times in the book (see Index). Just thinking about something as simple as the Relaxation Responses we talked about last week (episode 39) and how you can pick one word for three minutes, it might be a word that you carry with you for a year or a month or a week or a day or a lifetime, I’ve heard about some people who use the same words from childhood before they even learn how to do the Relaxation Response.
Our intention, our thinking about this time next year can be really powerful, so you might want to give yourself a moment to think about this time next year and just let an image form of you really happy and really well and all going good, and just pause this, make a few notes about it.
You might want to think about “evocative words”. Roberto Assagioli, who created psychosynthesis, the kind of counselling I do, was very influenced by Eastern philosophy, and it was the sense that what we focus on grows, so people who talk about the Law of Attraction are talking about this the whole time, like where awareness goes, energy flows.
In terms of the way the brain works, the Reticular Activation System is the part of the brain that will see more of what we focus on (you can read more in my Rapport article). It’s our natural way of deleting, distorting and generalising because we would literally go insane if we were having to properly process every single sensory input that comes at us the whole time.
So when we’re choosing, for example, an intention or a word or a sankalpa, something to help us move towards what we want to move towards, everything we watch, everything we listen to, everything we surround ourselves with, everything we take the time to visualise, to do imagery work around, to use in the Relaxation Response, to use as our sankalpa in a yoga nidra, it’s all amplifying it, it’s all harnessing the power of the unconscious mind by making what you want this time next year or using any time frame you choose just so much easier.
So think about what sprang to mind for you.
I’m going to go into more depth with the Half Moon membership of the Sole to Soul Circle, and you can subscribe for free at selfcarecoaching.net/sole-to-soul-circle/ to access this bonus content. And then there’ll be another deeper dive video for the Full Moon and Super Moon members of the Sole to Soul Circle and you can again upgrade through selfcarecoaching.net/sole-to-soul-circle/
And that deeper dive is to help ground what we’re talking about further and I love sharing these episodes with you, I really love hearing from you, I appreciate all your shares, likes, comments, questions, emails, rating, review, whatever feels good for you, please do share and let me know if you’ve got questions.
So happy, Happy New Year still and give yourself permission to want whatever it is that you want. Give yourself permission to imagine 2025 being your best year ever.
There’s an enormous amount of suffering in the world, enormous amount of challenges, your suffering does not help anyone else. You’re focusing on the kind of world you want to help create, you’re focusing on the life you want to create, it’s going to help you help others from that more wholehearted way, so the work we’re doing around self care is far from selfish.
It can contribute to your personal peace and ultimately to world peace, but give yourself permission to really recognise the power of your intentions and that isn’t just for personal goals, that is for global goals as well, so look after yourself and see you again soon.
Transcript
Welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Welcome back to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I'm Eve and I'm sharing today, building on the New Year's Eve-ish episode around your word of the year and going into it a bit more.
If you have the book 365 Ways to Feel Better, self-care ideas for embodied wellbeing, you can read more about this self care idea on the 4th of January: It's all about figuring out what you want and how to get it in a really holistic way, bringing in all the different tools I use in my work.
you'd like to be beginning of:h that in the last episode of:And we talk about sankalpas the whole time in yoga nidra, it's that positive intention or resolve and it's referred to several times in the book (see Index). Just thinking about something as simple as the Relaxation Responses we talked about last week (episode 39) and how you can pick one word for three minutes, it might be a word that you carry with you for a year or a month or a week or a day or a lifetime, I've heard about some people who use the same words from childhood before they even learn how to do the Relaxation Response.
Our intention, our thinking about this time next year can be really powerful, so you might want to give yourself a moment to think about this time next year and just let an image form of you really happy and really well and all going good, and just pause this, make a few notes about it.
You might want to think about “evocative words”. Roberto Assagioli, who created psychosynthesis, the kind of counselling I do, was very influenced by Eastern philosophy, and it was the sense that what we focus on grows, so people who talk about the Law of Attraction are talking about this the whole time, like where awareness goes, energy flows.
In terms of the way the brain works, the Reticular Activation System is the part of the brain that will see more of what we focus on (you can read more in my Rapport article). It's our natural way of deleting, distorting and generalising because we would literally go insane if we were having to properly process every single sensory input that comes at us the whole time.
So when we're choosing, for example, an intention or a word or a sankalpa, something to help us move towards what we want to move towards, everything we watch, everything we listen to, everything we surround ourselves with, everything we take the time to visualise, to do imagery work around, to use in the Relaxation Response, to use as our sankalpa in a yoga nidra, it's all amplifying it, it's all harnessing the power of the unconscious mind by making what you want this time next year or using any time frame you choose just so much easier.
So think about what sprang to mind for you.
I'm going to go into more depth with the Half Moon membership of the Sole to Soul Circle, and you can subscribe for free at selfcarecoaching.net/sole-to-soul-circle/ to access this bonus content. And then there'll be another deeper dive video for the Full Moon and Super Moon members of the Sole to Soul Circle and you can again upgrade through selfcarecoaching.net/sole-to-soul-circle/
And that deeper dive is to help ground what we're talking about further and I love sharing these episodes with you, I really love hearing from you, I appreciate all your shares, likes, comments, questions, emails, rating, review, whatever feels good for you, please do share and let me know if you've got questions.
ourself permission to imagine:There's an enormous amount of suffering in the world, enormous amount of challenges, your suffering does not help anyone else. You're focusing on the kind of world you want to help create, you're focusing on the life you want to create, it's going to help you help others from that more wholehearted way, so the work we're doing around self care is far from selfish.
It can contribute to your personal peace and ultimately to world peace, but give yourself permission to really recognise the power of your intentions and that isn't just for personal goals, that is for global goals as well, so look after yourself and see you again soon.