In last year’s letter I said that 2013 had been largely focused on realigning our personality with our soul and beginning to get rid of the kinks in the garden hose that blocked our inspired experience, while 2014 seemed to push us toward the next step: collecting our consciousness and receiving the new energy. We were trying to feel: What is my new “home frequency” and what do I want to do with it? Where does the energy itself want to go? Perhaps we were learning to be still, to enter the silence, to connect with the inner voice available in the present moment. After that, 2015 felt like a beginning but with a variety of things yet to clear, new habits of consciousness to stabilize, and though we were able to walk forward, we still had to practice-practice-practice looking both ways as we crossed the street.

Many people I spoke with felt a clogging of the flow in the second half of 2015 and especially in the last three or four months. I compared it to going through a bottleneck: the physical world was bringing growth, but ever so slowly, and at a deep and subtle level. It was easy to feel blocked, distracted, or stuck. It felt like we were finishing up various bits of karma, or taking a final exam in How present can we be with the Flow and How much do we trust its innate wisdom? Are we going to forever be treading water, waiting for the "time to be right," or caught in indecision or boredom—or is there freedom even in this?

The acceleration of energy on the planet continued to raise the vibration in the world, and it seems quite a number of people decided this was a good time to ride that wave right out of their body toward the end of the year. Many people died, and some suddenly, my own mother included. Perhaps because of this, for the first time in my life I experienced each of the 2015 holidays as "just another day" and felt the underlying continuum of life's process under the surface of the celebratory hubbub.

As 2016 began, however, I experienced a blast of fresh air as though two windows in the house had been opened to allow a cross breeze. My body began to feel joy bubbling up from within, even though I was still heavily involved in the slow physical work of clearing my mother's belongings from her home. On the surface it seemed we were in the same end-of-the year focus on freedom within restriction. I couldn't help but notice the passing of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, both the same age, within days of each other and I thought, "Maybe some sort of portal opened between the dimensions over the turn of the year, making it easier to shift out of form."

In spite of the carryover from 2015, 2016 feels positive—full of new movement and creativity, even in arenas that have been full of suffering. People who have felt they were stuck or unable to change something key in their lives will, in some random moment, drop into their experience in a fuller way and an insight about what to do next will pop to the surface along with the motivation to do it. It may be a physical action or a mental-emotional one. They will take attention off the idea of being stuck, stop making excuses, reconnect with the idea of freedom and entitlement, and their Flow will move again. With renewed Flow will come new ideas or combinations of old ideas that will excite change and innovation. We are likely to encounter new perspectives and pursuits that truly shift our reality.

One of the complaints I heard most often from clients last year was that they felt they were misplaced, had outgrown their current situation, or were having to deal with mundane things that prevented them from having the spiritual experience of connection they yearned for. They had been taking classes, reading, doing yoga, and watching teaching videos on youtube, but still didn't feel what they knew was possible to feel. The key here is that they knew what the experience of spiritual connection was going to feel like but they were blocking themselves from experiencing it because their left brain's limited view of the world was projecting the experience into the future, or making it conditional upon moving to a new location, getting a new group of friends, or quitting an "ordinary" job to become a healer or something similar.

When we remember to bring the experience we want to have into the present moment, and just feel it (since we actually do know what it feels like and we do know how to imagine it), then feel it some more, we realize it's always with us, just waiting patiently to be experienced. Nothing is in the way except our excuses and choice to allow ourselves to be distracted.

I experienced this when my mother's health quickly worsened and she died suddenly late last fall. It would seem that dealing with her suffering and the inefficiency of the hospital's emergency doctors and nurses would be a great excuse to say I couldn't have a spiritual experience. And after, dealing with the estate and her many beautiful belongings—which kept my mind buried in the physical detail of sorting, organizing, and distributing for months—might be a credible reason to feel cut off from higher realms. Oddly though, some part of me kept remembering to stop and drop into the moment, to feel through the surface into the energy patterns underneath, to feel the souls' purposes in each phase and the way the completion process was unfolding perfectly. The spiritual experience was there all along, tracking parallel and interwoven with the mundane. Paying attention to this became a practice. We can punctuate the superficial with the profound and change tragedy, exhaustion, and boredom into gratitude, respect, and even humor.

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