Theme of the Year: 2025

Each year I choose a theme for the year - or rather, a theme is chosen for me, and given to me through verbal or visual inspiration. It can be a word, phrase or identity, and when I 'hear' it - either in the final weeks of the year or between January and February - I feel a sense of yes-ness that I know means it is the invitation I have been waiting for.

My annual theme infuses each year with a unique flavour, and my learnings during those 12 months are subsequently imbued with a richness that expands my consciousness. I do not always remember my theme of the year - often I will have completely forgotten it by June, only to be reminded of it in a dream, or surprising event - and I tend not to make any concrete intention to action the theme. Rather, I trust that having the theme in my subconscious will lead me into the correct invitations and situations for my soul to grow. I share the theme only with those closest to me, and occasionally with no-one at all. But what I have come to recognise is that what I draw from the experience of theming the year is worth sharing; it has meaning to me, and it may, therefore, have some meaning for others.

Last year, in 2024, my theme was the Year of the Nomad: I travelled a lot, lived in many different places, and went on extraordinary spiritual journeys which led to a change of name and character. My learnings and life experiences were beautiful, striking; some even pulled the rug from under me in a way I did not particularly like. And while I wrote extensively about my learnings from Year of the Nomad, it was all done privately. For 2025, I wish to offer it openly - here, and to you.

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I always knew, with the theme I had chosen for this year, that 2025 was going to test me. In an Instagram post on 13 January, I wrote:

My resolution is really challenging me and we're not even two weeks in ... the power of my intention has already opened the door to change ... which means transformation is on its way, inevitably ... I have promises to keep - promises to myself and the person I am always becoming ... Now I am a Nomad, I must keep moving."

And as I moved through this year with my 2025 intention, I have very often felt lost, unsure, scattered, uncommitted; I have felt like a failure. So many times - even up to the last 72 hours - I felt sure I was messing it up, doing it all wrong; that I was embarrassing myself, spreading myself too thing, pick 'n' mixing rather than truly deciding. This year I have often felt ashamed that I could not seem to succeed because I was inconsistent and lacked resilience; I was too petulant, demanding, unwilling to do boring things to 'win' at life. I felt shame that I began volunteering projects and did not continue; made dates and broke them; was late - so bloody late - to every appointment; dreamt up schemes with incredible people and then just did not, could not follow through. I saw myself as talking a big talk and then inadequately, insufficiently or simply never walking a big walk. I felt sure that this made me a failure.

I began to see 2025 as a year of deep inner work, but without the external changes to my manifest circumstances which bring me pleasure - and which happen to be visible to others. I often felt insular and isolated, imagined myself without community, struggled to reach out to friends or communicate wholeheartedly with the ones I loved. I felt tested, over and over - by myself, pushing so hard at achievement; by others in this big city who were slick and polished and shiny compared to my muddy, mundane, scattered self; by my ego's desires compared to the yearnings of my soul; by seeing zero pounds in all my bank accounts for the first time with no idea when this would change. Tested too by my closest and most intimate relationships, as the man who is my rock crumbled so he could be remade - remake himself into the man he knows he is, not the character that trauma and conditioning has created; tested by the dissolving of my maternal connection to be replaced by who knows what; even tested by the emergence of a new love which invited me to question who I thought I was, and how attached I had become to an identity that was ignoring the healing of the gnarliest parts of me.

My faith in life was tested in every single area possible. Nothing was free from doubt or fear or frustration. And that was the point of the year.

Because my intention for 2025 was Devotion. This year was the Year of the Devotee.

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To be a true devotee, you must know to what you are devoted. And to know this, to know what you are truly devoted to - what stays with you, day after day, month after month, no matter how much you seem to be failing or falling or losing or limiting yourself - to know that true object of devotion you must explore many objects. You must taste of life, guzzle this down, spit that out, sift through the buffet and work out what is truly nourishing to you. You must pick things up that look delicious and appealing, bring them close to you in anticipation, only to realise that no, this is not right; this is not what I truly need or desire; this will not satiate me. From the outside perhaps this will look like indecisiveness, fussiness, a lack of commitment because you are willing to nibble a little and change your mind, rather than gorge yourself on something simply because it is within arm's reach.

To be a true devotee, you must also be willing to experience hunger, a deep gnawing need and emptiness of spirit, and then be open to the wisdom that, in the very moment of soul starvation where you believe you will be empty forever, you look and see what is still feeding you; you witness what is still there, allowing you to go on. Because right at the bottom of the hunger, the pit, in the cavernous blackness that is feeling shame, and failure, and lost and scattered and stagnation - right down there is something. Something remains even when all else seems to fail, and be laughable, and distant. It may be small, and quiet, and to make it out you have to plug both ears and squint 'til your eyes water - but it is there.

That something is You. Not the you who has a good job, and makes good money; not the you who is handsome and pretty and sexy and desired; not the you who runs a thriving business, or just got a great promotion, who works hard and buys things and stays on top of trends; not the you who loves their family and their partner; not even the you who helps others, who is kind, who cares for their community; not even the you who cries in the night and prays, desperate for forgiveness.

It is the You that burns as a flame at midnight, who outshines the moon, who has their fingers in the earth and speaks to the trees, who swims in the ocean so the ocean may swim in You, who is stone, and light, and wind, and nothing, and everything, all at once; the You who does not speak with God but is God made flesh, who is divinity embodied. This You is never lost, or ashamed, or confused, or stuck. This You never fails - cannot fail. This is the You that I see when I look at You - and, this year, it is the Me I have discovered in myself.

This is the object of my devotion: the Me that exists beyond all this materiality, beyond time and space. It is the Me which lives in You, and the You that lives in Me. I have tasted so much this year and this is what continues, what remains and sustains: the divinity that resides within Me, as Me; and love; and this beautiful life.

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So now I am a Devotee, I must keep making this object of my devotion holy. I must keep sanctifying my life, consecrating it and remembering that every test of faith, every desire to exit or run or fall into comfortable, unhappy habits is not, in fact, a test of faith itself, but of my devotion to that faith. Faith does not leave. The flame does not go out. The shining star that is You is never extinguished. But we forget, and turn away, and close our eyes to the incandescence we know we are capable of, that is already within us. Now I am a Devotee, I know and trust I will not do this. I will instead tend to the holy flame of my life, feed and protect it, allow it to light my own path and, perhaps, find that it is even a beacon for others. This has been the Year of the Devotee, and I am blessed to have experienced it.

I wish you the most wonderful New Year, and all that you need and desire in 2026.