Episode Details

Setting intentions for a better 2025

As we embark on a New Year, it's the perfect time to reflect and set intentions for the months ahead. In this episode of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, we explore some powerful techniques to help you use your imagination for GOOD as you work towards co-creating your ideal future.

Imagining a happy, healthy and thriving Future You

Take a moment to imagine yourself a year from now, at the beginning of 2026. Picture yourself happy, healthy, and thriving. What does this version of you look like? How do you feel? What have you accomplished? This simple imagery exercise can be a powerful tool in shaping your goals for the year ahead.

Words with extra meaning

Choosing a ‘word of the year’ or using ‘evocative words’ as they’re known in psychosynthesis, can be incredibly impactful. These words act as anchors, helping to focus your mind on your intentions. In yoga nidra, we use 'sankalpas' - positive intentions or resolves that come from the heart - which serve a similar purpose.

Harness the Reticular Activation System

Our brains are wired to notice what we focus on thanks to the Reticular Activation System. By consciously choosing what to pay attention to - through intentions, words or imagery - we can effectively 'programme' our minds to seek out opportunities that aligned with our goals and what we WANT v what we don’t want.

Permission to dream

It's crucial to give yourself permission to want what you want. Imagining 2025 as your best year ever isn't selfish: It's a step towards creating positive change in your own life and, by extension, the world around you. Remember, your personal wellbeing contributes to global wellbeing.

As we delve deeper into these practices, remember that self-care isn't selfish. By focusing on your personal growth and happiness, you're better equipped to contribute positively to the world around you.

Wishing you a fantabulous 2025 filled with intention, growth (of the things you want more of) and positive change!

le grá,

Evei

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Welcome back to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I'm Eve and I'm sharing today, building on the New Year's Eve-ish episode around your word of the year and going into it a bit more.

If you have the book 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, you can read more about this self care idea on the 4th of January: It's all about figuring out what you want and how to get it in a really holistic way, bringing in all the different tools I use in my work.

And we're talking about setting intentions, we're thinking about what you'd like to be feeling a year from now, where you'd like to be beginning of 2026, working backwards, using your imagination to think about how to move closer to what you want. I've been recording a lot of episodes today, so I can't remember if this is in the future or in the past, but I'll read out the pages that might be of most interest.

 So, in the book, the 4th of January is very much about setting intentions. The 17th of June is about evocative words, so we dealt with the Word of the Year and beginning to deal with that in the last episode of 2024 (episode 38: Your Vibe for 2025).

And we talk about sankalpas the whole time in yoga nidra, it's that positive intention or resolve and it's referred to several times in the book (see Index). Just thinking about something as simple as the Relaxation Responses we talked about last week (episode 39) and how you can pick one word for three minutes, it might be a word that you carry with you for a year or a month or a week or a day or a lifetime, I've heard about some people who use the same words from c