2025: A Year of Choices—And What I'm Choosing Now

As I sit down to reflect on 2025, I'm struck by a principle I've taught countless times in yoga classes: how we do something matters. Not just what we do, but the consciousness we bring to it. The intention. The awareness.

This principle extends far beyond the yoga mat. It's about life itself—about the choices we make, often without realizing we're making them at all.

The Illusion of Different Choices

We like to think we're making new choices. We change jobs, relationships, cities, diets. We start fresh. We turn over a new leaf. But if we're honest with ourselves, many of these "new" choices are simply variations on the same theme—the same cake with different frosting.

Why? Because most of our choices emerge from our subconscious mind, where patterns based on decades of experience are deeply embedded. These patterns were formed to protect us, to help us survive, to make sense of the world. They served us well. But they also keep us locked in familiar grooves, even when those grooves no longer serve who we're becoming.

This year, I came face-to-face with this truth in ways I couldn't ignore.

The Business Reckoning

I started 2025 enrolled in an expensive coaching program. I'd invested significantly—both financially and emotionally—in the hope that it would catapult my coaching business forward. I was looking for the formula, the strategy, the secret sauce that would make everything click into place.

It didn't work.

Rather than stay the course, I made a choice: I found an exit strategy. But here's where the pattern showed up—I didn't stop there. I immediately enrolled in two subsequent programs, each one promising what the last one hadn't delivered. I was still operating from the same subconscious pattern: if this doesn't work, try harder; if this strategy doesn't fit, find a better one; if this guru doesn't have the answers, find another.

I did gain some clients during this time, so it wasn't a total loss. But the misalignment was undeniable. These programs were telling me to do things that contradicted who I am and what I've spent 30 years cultivating—a deeply transpersonal journey of self-discovery. How to authentically share that with others was the real challenge, not how to implement someone else's marketing playbook.

Then I found Positive Intelligence.

What struck me about this program was its fundamental approach: it invited me in as a participant to experience the work firsthand, without requiring me to pay upfront. This model aligned perfectly with my core principle—you cannot authentically teach or share something you haven't embodied. The program wasn't about slick strategies borrowed from other gurus. It was about giving people an experience and then trusting them to decide their next steps.

No pressure. No sales tactics. No transactional energy.

This was the alignment I'd been searching for.

The Spiritual Pivot

While my business was going through these iterations, something equally significant was happening in my inner world.

For nearly 30 years, I've been a dedicated student of the yoga tradition and related systems. For two of those decades, I studied with only two teachers. My approach was deeply intentional and focused—a narrow path that I walked with devotion and discipline.

Last year, I realized it was time to move on.

Both teachers had always advocated for this: eventually, become your own guru. Stop looking outside yourself for the answers. Trust your own direct experience. And so I did.

What followed was a cascade of shifts that I'm still integrating.

My meditation practice underwent a complete 180-degree transformation. For years, I'd recited lengthy mantras and honored the deities and energies they represent. There was beauty in that practice, and it served me. But now, my meditation has become something simpler and more direct: a deep dive into pure awareness through self-inquiry and stillness. No specific tools. No external references. Just consciousness observing itself.

I also started attending Tai Chi classes to complement my yoga practice. My spiritual journey, which had been somewhat linear and focused, became multidimensional. I began participating in communities where the prevalent theme is awakening—unfoldment, transcendence, enlightenment. (Though I've come to believe that the English language doesn't quite do justice to what this actually is. It's deeply experiential, beyond words.)

And here's what I've discovered: there's no one way to the mountaintop. Some people find it through organized religion. Many more of us find it through a blending of traditions, practices, and teachings. The ultimate goal is the same—to tap into your higher self, to be freed from the trappings of the lower, conditioned mind. That part of us that we think we are: our thoughts, our identity, our body as "me."

What lights me up now is how quantum physics affirms so much of what ancient Eastern systems and the teachings of Jesus Christ (stripped of religiosity) have always pointed toward. There's a coherence emerging across traditions, across centuries, across cultures. And that coherence is deeply reassuring.

The Family Reckoning

Alongside these professional and spiritual shifts, something else was calling for my attention: my relationship with extended family.

I'd distanced myself from my extended family years ago. I thought I'd healed most of the issues related to that distance. I'd done the work. I'd processed the pain. I was good.

I was wrong.

This year, I took a couple of trips home. Each one was powerful in its own unique way. Each one cracked me open in ways I didn't expect.

After the second trip, I went through a deep grieving process. Not the kind of grief that comes from a recent loss, but the kind that emerges when you finally allow yourself to fully experience what could have been. The relationships that might have been. The connection that might have been. The family I might have had.

Driving home from that trip, something shifted. The emotions welled up, and instead of pushing them away or managing them, I chose to let them release. I was astounded at how much grief was there, and for how long those tears flowed. It was hours. It was cathartic. It was necessary.

In that release, something healed. Not everything—healing isn't linear—but something significant shifted. I was able to grieve what was lost while simultaneously opening to what is possible now.

The Power of Conversation

One of the most unexpected gifts this year has been the power of genuine conversation.

My spiritual and business journey have introduced me to people doing work that inspires me. People who are awake, who are asking the big questions, who are committed to their own unfoldment. I've made it a practice to reach out to these people and have real conversations with them.

Dozens of these conversations have happened this year.

And here's what I've discovered: these conversations have helped me grow more than all of those expensive coaching programs combined. They work in two ways simultaneously. First, they act as a compass—showing me an inspirational pathway forward that is entirely of my own design, not borrowed from someone else's blueprint. Second, they act as a mirror—reflecting back to me who I am becoming.

In listening to others' journeys, I see my own more clearly. In witnessing their courage, I find my own. In their questions, I find the questions I didn't know I was asking.

This is the real work. Not the programs. Not the strategies. The conversations. The connection. The mutual witnessing of each other's becoming.

The Midlife Pivot

At 60, I'm entering a new decade with a clarity I didn't have before. And I want to speak directly to anyone who is approaching or in the midst of midlife, because I believe something significant is happening at this threshold.

There's a pivot point in midlife where the Soul begins to ask for a seat at the decision-making table. For the first half of our lives, the ego has largely been in control. And this is appropriate. The ego helps us figure out who we are, make our mark, establish our name and titles, accumulate resources, and set ourselves up for stability.

The ego serves us beautifully in those decades.

But in the second half of life, something shifts. The Soul is proposing a greater role. It wants a say. It wants to steer. And if we're willing to accept that pivot—if we allow the Soul to shine through—we're on a pathway to greater fulfillment and joy.

But old habits die hard. The ego won't want to give up too much control. It will even play a cat-and-mouse game about this, trying to maintain its dominance while appearing to cooperate.

The challenges I've faced this year don't come as setbacks the way they would have in my earlier years, when my ego would have been bruised and defensive. Instead, they present as opportunities for growth and becoming better. I choose to see them that way. And that choice—that reframing—changes everything.

I'm no longer hard on myself for not achieving everything I think I should have accomplished in a given day, week, month, or quarter. Instead, I celebrate the steps forward and the achievements I make every single day. This is how we stay young and vital: we look after our bodies, we attend to our minds and emotions, we engage in personal development of all types.

And we choose to see challenges as invitations rather than failures.

Resting in Trust

One of the most profound shifts this year has been learning to rest in the knowing that the Universe has my back.

The Universe has a timeline of its own. It doesn't have to align with the desires of my ego for wanting it all now. This knowing includes not beating myself if I haven't achieved everything I think I should have accomplished, but celebrating the steps forward and achievements I make every single day.

I'm choosing not to be hard on myself.

Even as I've joined a new coaching program at the end of the year to accelerate my momentum, I'm better able to rest in this trust. The program is a tool, not a savior. My growth is not dependent on external circumstances aligning perfectly. My growth is dependent on my willingness to show up, to be honest, to make conscious choices, and to trust the process.

This is a radical shift from where I started the year.

The Gift of Solace

As I wrap up this year, I've made a choice about how to spend the holidays: in solace.

No visiting of family. No commercial hype. No obligation to perform or produce or achieve. Just simplicity. Stillness. Peaceful presence.

And in these quiet days, I find so much gratitude and love flowing that at times it's almost palpable. It's not the frantic, performative love of the holiday season. It's the deep, quiet love that comes from being at peace with who you are and where you are.

It's the love that comes from choosing yourself, choosing stillness, choosing alignment.

An Invitation for You

As you reflect on your own year, I invite you to ask yourself: What choices have I made? Were they conscious choices, or were they driven by old patterns? Where am I still operating from the same subconscious grooves, just with different frosting?

And more importantly: What choices am I ready to make differently?

Are you willing to let your Soul have a greater say in your decisions? Are you willing to see challenges as invitations rather than failures? Are you willing to celebrate the steps forward rather than punish yourself for what hasn't happened yet?

The year ahead is full of possibility. And it all begins with a choice—a conscious, aligned choice about who you're becoming and how you want to get there.

I wish you peaceful and love-filled days ahead, from wherever that love comes.