The Year Compass - Looking Back & Looking Forward

 

It will soon be time to complete my Year Compass book.

If you’ve never heard of this, it’s a wonderful, free, online resource to help you evaluate the year that has passed and plan for the year ahead. It asks questions so you can reflect on what happened throughout the past year and what you hope for in the next. I usually complete mine on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, it has become a ritual for me now.

It’s going to be a markedly different one for 2020, merely getting through the year to this point seems to be an achievement! I, like many other yoga teachers, have not taught many live classes this year at all. I already had an online stream to my work, and this has now taken over as my main work and source of income.

The Year Compass looks at all aspects of life though, not just our work life. In that respect it can help you to see if life has been in balance or not. For the record I don’t think we ever get perfect balance; well maybe for a nanosecond, I think it’s more that we are constantly “balancing.”  Our lives are like very sensitive scales – easily tipped in one direction or the other.

There is something special about the contemplation of the questions in the Life Compass, but also the physical writing down of thoughts and feelings in response to the questions. But the real fascination for me is reading the previous year’s book. I’ve been doing this for about 4 or 5 years now and even from one year to the next I’m intrigued by what I’d written down 12 months prior. Some things I don’t even remember writing! On occasion I’ve felt some things I’d written were penned by someone else…we can change and evolve so much during a year.

What is clear, though, is that there are some predictable things that happen in any one year; but also, there are always unexpected events – this year being the absolute epitome of the unexpected!

One of my favourite quotes is by Joan Didion, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” – this is very true for me, sometimes my mind is a tangled jumble of thoughts, but spilling it all out on paper helps me to process, organise and integrate it all. Whether this is my weekly email to my subscribers, my blog or simply a scribble of thoughts in an old notebook. Free writing has also brought me some incredible insights, but I only started doing that after using more structured techniques like the Year Compass.

I would encourage everyone to check out the Year Compass website and print the booklet, get a brew and go through it, but remember to put it somewhere safe, so you can find it next year! I have a feeling 2021 is going to be another remarkable year, hopefully for better reasons than 2020!

To print out The Year Compass, visit: www.yearcompass.com

For more info about my classes visit:  www.yogiclaire.com