06/01/2025
New Year 2025 Playbook for Happiness: Choosing Presence, Awareness, and Love
As we step into the new year, I invite you to take a moment to recalibrate your focus. If you’ve forgotten to center your attention on presence, awareness, and love, it’s natural—but it’s also time to bring your focus back.
The Gift of Being Human
We have these human bodies that house consciousness. This is a profound gift, and with it comes the responsibility to cultivate practices that align us with this truth. Daily mindfulness practices—whether yoga, dance, running, weightlifting, or even a simple walk—remind us to be present in our bodies and honor the connection between body and mind.
But these practices are just the foundation. Throughout the day, the real work begins: keeping our minds clear, our hearts open, and our choices aligned with compassion. Compassion is, after all, the most grounded and actionable expression of love.
Navigating Emotional and Mental Challenges
For those of you facing emotional or mental pain, remember this: emotions are like visitors. They flow through us, not to define us, but to teach us. When we sit with our emotions—without judgment—and allow them to move through us like a waterfall flowing endlessly the beginning and the end. It’s like taking a shower. Cleansing us from the inside out as we feel the emotions without judgment and release them. Sometimes we can ask ourselves when else have I felt this way to release other past emotional experiences. Sometimes, revisiting moments in your life when you’ve felt similar emotions can remind you that these feelings are temporary. They’ve come and gone before, and they will again.
We have a similar practice with observing our thoughts we allow them to be like boats floating down a river or clouds passing through a vast blue sky of awareness. In this way, we are not absorbed by our thoughts. We are watching them from the shore of present, loving awareness, just like we watch our breath or scan our bodies.
Living with Physical Pain
Physical pain can feel more challenging—it’s rooted in the body and demands our attention in ways that emotional pain doesn’t. Having endured chronic physical pain myself, I deeply empathize with those who are suffering. Yet even in these states, there’s an opportunity to listen to what the pain is telling us, to honor it, and to practice acceptance.
It’s not about denying the difficulty but rather staying rooted in clarity, presence, and compassion. These are the anchors that keep us steady in the storm.
The Path Forward
Happiness, peace, and love are not destinations—they’re practices. They’re choices we make moment to moment. If we can do our best each day to:
1. Ground ourselves in the body,
2. Keep our hearts open,
3. Practice compassion (for ourselves and others), and
4. Stay anchored in present-moment awareness,
…then we are moving in the right direction.
An Invitation
Whether we’re working together one-on-one or you’re reading this as a follower on social media, my hope is that these words guide you toward a meaningful, present, and compassionate 2025. Life will always bring challenges, but our ability to face them with love, awareness, and presence is what shapes our experience.
This year, let’s choose clarity. Let’s choose compassion. Let’s choose love.
With deep respect and care,
Timothy
