Female dancer wearing a bright blue top and black pants, standing with her torso stretched over her left leg, her head looking up over her right shoulder to the blue cloudy sky and right arm stretched up towards the clouds. She's dancing on cement ground with large rocks behind her to her right, green grass and trees int eh background with an industrial bridge drawn up to the back left of the photo.

Thoughts on the new year…

Happy 2020 to you!

As we continue to embark on our journey into the new year, I’m feeling compelled to share some gentle reminders with you.

We live in a world where most of us are living in our heads (and not our bodies) where we want quick fixes to what ails us, and all the while demanding big expectations of ourselves and others…especially during the first month of the new year. There are many social messages during this time of year that encourage us to aspire to be our best selves, make major goals and resolutions, and ultimately be a better version of ourselves.

Big dreams are wonderful and something to aspire to. A healthy body is important for living life to the fullest. Living the best version of ourselves contributes to all sorts of goodness in our lives. Yet, if we’re pushing ourselves too hard and expecting big changes to happen overnight, we’re cheating ourselves from actually **_living_** our lives because we’re acting out of balance with the natural ways of the world.

Big visions can come to our mind’s eye quickly, yet life lived in reality while we ground these visions can move at quite a different pace.

If you can think upon the bodywork you receive as a reflection of how to live your life in the day to day, some simple, yet powerful insights may come to mind. An example of what I’m talking about is when you come in for a session, we are breaking pain cycles by releasing held tension in your body. Step by step, the more you receive sessions and/or incorporate self care techniques, your body starts to get the message that the broken pain pattern feels better than the pain pattern itself. Yet there is a period of time where the body goes back and forth between the pain pattern and healthy pattern before it gets the message on a consistent basis to keep the healthy one.

It’s a step by step effort and can take time to manifest in the day to day.

So when you find yourself not living up to your (or society’s) expectations or you find yourself taking two steps forward and one step back on your resolutions, just remember that _true_ healing and _true_ progress are not linear experiences, but rather experiences of a spiral-like movement. Taking baby steps towards your dreams and goals, can take you a few steps forward, along with a period of time revisiting where you came from in order to see that place from a different perspective only to move forward from that new awareness.

To that end, please enjoy a couple of [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/hlfraelick/) worthy messages I posted in honor of the new year…

Happy New Year’s Eve! Big dreams are important yet without the small action steps needed to bring the dream to fruition causes them to become flights of fancy. Cheers to a new year of taking small steps towards your big dreams. #chicagostreetart

In a world of pressure-filled “new year, new you” messages, let us instead remember this gentle, yet powerful, reminder… #Repost @hawkcouture with @get_repost

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