Happy New Year! Happy Renewal!

Happy New Year!  Monday, January 7 will be the day that 2008 becomes a concrete reality for many people.  For a great many, it’s the day that kids go back to school, and the day that work really “gets serious” again, after perhaps a more relaxed time over the Holiday season.

In many ancient cultures, such as ancient Babylon, the New Year was a time of great religious meaning.  Often, it was believed that the world ended and began anew with the coming of the New Year.  What is the New Year for us, in our culture?

Often, the experience of the first real working day in the New Year can bring a sense of how little has changed.  For many people, the sense can be of a return to the “same old same old”.  Like the Babylonians of old, we yearn for a renewal, for something to give us a sense of meaning and vitality.  Yet often it can feel as if things just go on and on in the same way, and that we’re missing whatever it is that we really want.  We can end up just accepting what we have, in a mood, almost, of quiet despair.

Yet often, there is something in us that won’t quite leave us alone, that won’t let us off the hook.  What is it that we’re yearning for?  What is it that we really want?  What, coming out of our past, remains unresolved for us?

The New Year issues each of us an invitation.  Now is the time to keep hope alive, and to search for the things in ourselves that can give us the sense of meaning and value that we long for at the deepest level.  Now might be an excellent time to seek out the help we need to access the places in ourselves where the answers lie — in our dreams, in our unconscious, in our own as-yet unlived lives.

I hope that the New Year will be a time for you, of renewing your journey to wholeness, the journey to yourself.