[New Year #1] How to pull out the weeds of the old year, before you plant seeds for the new one.

I took myself on a mini-retreat this year.

I think I've never been alone on New Year's before. Nor did I want to be.

But this year is different. I have a feeling 2018 is going to be BIG in some way, and I need to thoroughly let go of old stuff before I enter it.

I noticed I put up with a LOT during the past year, and at the same time I also realized I played "the victim" in some ways, but that all stops now! Well, it has already - for the past three weeks I felt like I'm walking around with an imaginary "No more B.S.!" - T-shirt on :)

A few "friends" of mine are definitely wondering what's up with me, and since I put that word in quotation marks, those "friends" are obviously some of the weeds I'll be pulling out :)

I had no idea how much I missed the sea!!!

So, I spontaneously booked myself into a hotel in Warnemünde, a quaint place at the baltic sea where I spent every summer of my childhood.

Pretty stupid of me - a pisces - to forget that I belong to the sea. I guess after living at the sea for most of my life, until 3 years ago when I moved to Berlin, I thought I've had enough of it for a life time. Noooooope...

I'm taking beach walks every day, and I'm spending a LOT of time with myself, getting clear on who I want to be in 2018, what I want to do, and how I want to feel.

The only time I open my laptop is to post on Steemit, like right now.

The rest of the time it's old fashioned pen & paper. It feels GOOD.

The internet is soooo bad here, though, that I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to publish this post still in 2017...

Well, I'm just gonna keep on typing for now. Because I came here for a reason, which is to share with you,

How to pull out the weeds

Our life is like a garden. In order to grow something, we need to make sure we plant it on healthy soil and pull out the weeds every now and then, so that nothing blocks the space that we need for the good stuff to grow.

So before we think about our goals and plans and dreams and wishes and intentions, we need to remove everything that doesn't belong there and which doesn't serve us anymore.

So here's a helpful list of questions you can use for self-reflection & introspection, in order to identify what you want to let go of. (It may sound like it's the same question over and over again in different words, and that would be true. Our brains often needs different words to tap into different resources.)

• How did I limit myself this year?
• How did I stand in my own way?
• Where did I stay small out of fear of rejection?
• Where did I stop myself or talk myself out of a goal for fear of failure?
• What roles did I play this year that didn't really serve me or others? Which roles do I want to stop playing?
• What didn't grow and flourish as much as I had hoped in the beginning of the year?
• I don't want to feel like this anymore:

Note that this is not about listing "failures".

I don't believe in failures. I believe that everything happens for a reason. So if something didn't work as planned, it holds a lesson for us.

Learning those lessons and making new choices, prepares a healthy soil for everything we want to plant in the coming year.

Your answers to these questions will also set you up for figuring out what you do want to grow from now on. That will be what part 2 of this self-inquiry is about. I'll be writing about that tomorrow or in a couple of days.

See you in 2018! :)