January Is For Intuition

Contributor: Lacy Phillips
Photographer: Lacy Phillips

The holiday season is finally coming to a close, and after – what feels like months – of holiday treats, feasts, drinks and jet lag, January offers an opportunity to find our ways back to balance and ourselves. In Chinese medicine, January is considered the most yin time of the year. This is a time for inward reflection, grounding, nourishing and listening to our intuition. 

Yet, it’s all too easy to get swept into the river of messages flooding our inboxes and social media feeds to “cleanse, juice, fast, New-Year-New-You.” These messages guide us away from our intuition and ironically, away from balance. Everybody differs drastically from the next, and thus one over-arching cleansing plan or diet regiment cannot promise to bring balance – nor are these plans long-lived. After days of harsh restriction, most often we fall back into unhealthy habits that mute our intuition. When we learn to trash these distracting messages and instead, tune into what our bodies need to feel nourished and cared for, we can begin to heal and find our way back to internal harmony.

Thus, the first true step in a New Year’s cleanse (if we must) is trusting our internal voice – our intuition. And, hearing our intuition – or feeling our intuition (as it tends to stem from the gut) requires self-care, grounding and rest. Learning to understand the PINGS, or messages downloaded during this time both through the body and mind is a topic I will guide you deeper through during the next few weeks of January.

The New Year also presents the chance to reflect back on the year just spent; to reread manifestation journals and to reexamine manifestation lists and past year intentions. Using this mid-winter time of rest and restoration can aid in UNBLOCKING from past inhibitors and focus deeply on manifesting for the year to come.

Most focus on New Years tends to fall on health, yet health is affected by all aspects of our true self. Health, on its own, cannot be manifested, but it can be encouraged. Breaking down internal BLOCKS that keep us from reaching our true authentic self and learning to tune into our intuition will allow us to fully hear and understand what our bodies need to feel nourished, cared for, loved and balanced.