It is often said that “new year, new life”, however, the opportunity for evolution and change requires self-inquiry, humility and reflection.
In this article you will learn about the mythological origin of this festivity and how you can use it to enhance your personal development process.
In this podcast Enric Corbera explains that any process of change is reinvention, readaptation and rebirth to a new identity. In order to do so, we have to increase awareness of who we are and who we want to be in the face of what happens to us.
In this video Enric Corbera reviews what the cycle change implies, how we can take advantage of it and the importance of being grateful for everything we have experienced in the stage that is about to end.
If you want to learn more about the la method and how to apply it in your life to increase your emotional well-being, follow us on our social networks: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
Have you ever wondered what meaning these dates have had throughout history? Why do we start the year in the month of January? What exactly are we celebrating?
As with virtually everything we celebrate today, understanding it requires going back several thousand years to find its origin.
The origin of the new year
The new year as an end and beginning
The first month of the year was called Ianuarius (later derived from Janeiro and Janero and, from there, later to January) in honor of the God Janus. A Roman god with two faces, One looked to the future and the other to the past.. He is the god of beginnings, of transitions, of transformation.
In January two processes take place in parallel: leaving the old year and entering the new. We know that mythology represented parts of our own nature in the form of gods.
It was a way of metaphorically manifest our internal processes through deities on which we project human attributes.
In this sense, the god Janus symbolizes the transition process that we experience, inviting us to observe the stage that we have just completed. And to reflect on everything that happened to use it in the new phase that we have just begun.
On December 31 we do not celebrate a revolution of the earth around the sun, we celebrate the end of one phase and the beginning of another In our life.
Even today, what do we do at the turn of the year? Look back, see what the year left us. We see in the media compilations of the best and the worst that the cycle that has just ended left, what changed the world we knew.
New year and resolutions
Too we define the for the new year, setting ourselves new objectives and goals for the new stage that we are beginning. That is what this moment of transition consists of, living a full stop.
stop for a moment, observe the stage that ends and use all the that he offered us to develop an improved version of ourselves in the coming year.
The beginning of the year depends on how we face it
We all have to choose if we want to experience this transition from fear or from trust.
From the point of view of neuroscience, both feelings share the same brain areas to function and, therefore, they cannot be active at the same time.
In a way, in every life situation we have to assume the responsibility to decide live it from fear or from trust.
“The man who has lived the longest is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one who has experienced life the most”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is a healthy and necessary turning point, a delimitation that we apply to the space/time continuum in which we live in order to be able to perceive ourselves in perspective.
This was an ideal year to become aware that we live in a world of uncertainty. Everything can change from one moment to another. Far from being a pessimistic or dramatic statement, is the basis of our freedom and the greatest virtue of all living things.
As Mel Schwartz says in his book “The Possibility Principle”, “When we become addicted to the need to we live life in a formatted, structured way, we are less present and we are not aware of what we could be”.
As thousands of people from different cultures have done, let us continue the tradition of experiencing this time of year as a rebirth that manifests the triumph of light over darkness.
Let’s celebrate this transition as a tribute to our nature, to the deep and wise part of ourselves, to our ability to reinvent ourselves, to be reborn.
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