At the beginning of every year I make it an important part of my New Year’s ritual to set aside time to allow my visions and goals to come through for the coming year. This year has been different – in fact, the whole of last year turned my personal life paradigm upside down. It began in January of last year when I revved myself up in typical Titina fashion to inspire and fuel myself with THE NEXT GRAND VISION. And it crashed and burned before it even got off the ground. Not that it wasn’t a feasible or worthy cause. Just that my inner motivation changed. Maybe it’s because I’m approaching 50 this year and the hot fires of my younger years are not as sustainable as they were (well, the recovery time seems to take a lot longer – like recovering from a hangover).

It was a very tough year. I let go of what I thought motivated me – pursuing the creative dream, the next shiny object, the next dopamine-inducing endeavor, I either lost interest quickly, failed to have the enormous energy I’d used in the past to get it off the ground (a lot of “pushing” energy), or it was “taken away” from me. The biggest of all of these was the slow and apparent deterioration of one of the most significant and passionate intimate relationships that I have had in my life with someone I considered to be my soul mate and who I felt would be my last love relationship in this lifetime (the love never deteriorated, just the fantasies and form of expectations I had built around it). Continue reading →