“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”
– Margaret J. Wheatley
As this year draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on just how much 2025 has asked of so many
of us.
For me personally, it has been a difficult year — particularly the last four months. Things around my mom’s care escalated in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and I slowly realised how much stress I was carrying in my body. My sleep suffered. My physical resilience took a knock. I felt a constant sense of responsibility and vigilance that never really switched off.
What became very clear to me recently is this:
If I carry all of this with
me into 2026, I will already arrive exhausted.
And yet — I don’t want to discard the year entirely. Because even our hardest seasons carry gold.
That insight became the heart of our final HSP Reset Gathering of the year:
How do we consciously put down the weight of stressful images, moments, and emotional charge — while keeping the wisdom those experiences gave us?
Watching the Year Like a
Movie
We began with journaling, using the image of sitting in a cinema — watching 2025 play out on the screen, rather than stepping back into it.
You might like to explore these prompts yourself. Make your favourite beverage and spend just 7 minutes.
1. What experience this year taught you something important about yourself?
Choose just one.
If it were a movie, what would the title be?
As you “watch,” notice the
emotions, images, sounds, or thoughts — remembering to stay in your seat and observe rather than relive. Jot them down.
2. What was the gentle wisdom hidden inside that experience?
What did you learn about yourself, or about life?
Will this learning expand your future choices — or quietly limit them?
How might that show up going forward?
3. Strengths you didn’t realise you had
In which moments during 2025
did you surprise yourself — with courage, patience, honesty, tenderness, or another uplifting quality?
What does that reveal about how you’ve grown?
Again and again, I see how much clarity emerges when we separate the event from the learning. How do we do that, though?
Clearing the Emotional Charge (Without Erasing the Learning)
From watching our own movie, we gently tapped through one difficult episode. When we tap, we don't deny or
'delete' what happened. In fact, we acknowledge and validate the emotional intensity, and the tapping helps to release it.
Here's how you can do this at home:
Begin by tapping lightly and continuously on all the EFT points as you move through this process.
Start by choosing one stressful event from the year and giving it a simple movie title.
Do a few quiet rounds of tapping using
only that title — you don’t need words beyond this.
Imagine the title placed somewhere far away, perhaps on a mountain in the distance, and keep tapping as you hold it gently in mind.
Next, while still tapping, watch the “movie” of that event — remembering to stay in your seat and keep some distance.
As you do this, use the 9 Gamut procedure to help your nervous system process what it’s seeing.
(I’ve shared a short video
explaining this step here: https://youtu.be/2vTR5mELouI)
After each part of the process, pause and check in with yourself.
As you watch the movie again from a distance, what do you notice now?
What feels different?
Then, do a round of tapping around blame.
Often we carry blame toward
ourselves or others, and this can keep the emotional charge in place. Sometimes we blame for valid reasons - and still, keeping the blame means we can't move on.
While tapping, allow yourself to rant, complain, or express how unfair it felt — anything you wish you could say. Let it move through and out.
Check in again. What do you notice now when you watch your movie?
If any emotions, thoughts, images, or sounds still feel stronger than about a
4 out of 10, tap gently until they soften.
Finally, return to your journaling prompts and revisit the learning you took from this experience.
After tapping, the learning often shifts — becoming more spacious, compassionate, and less limiting. How do you want to update your learning now?
Choosing What We Carry Forward
We ended the Gathering by anchoring in choice. Often, insight alone
doesn’t shape our future, and conscious choice can.
For brevity, these four core Choices might be helpful to you too:
- I choose to be calm and gentle with myself and others
- I choose to trust myself and my own inner knowing
- I choose to prioritise self-care over fear and urgency
- I choose to step out of the chaos and move forward at my own pace
And then the
most important invitation of all:
What do you choose to carry into the next year — and what are you ready to lay down?
One participant captured the essence of our time together so beautifully:
“The HSP Gatherings give me dedicated space to release limiting beliefs, guided by a wonderful leader and surrounded by teammates who are also journeying. It’s far more calming and freeing to
work on these issues in this setting.”
Another shared:
“It feels possible to rewrite our past and our memories.”
And about the tapping process itself:
“Naming a particular episode, creating a movie out of it, and tapping through it was incredibly powerful.”
As we gently move toward a new year, my own intention is simply this:
to enter it lighter —
carrying the gold, not the burden. May you too, find nuggets (or like my friend Berdine says, "Diamonds"), in the rough patches of the past year.
