You won a big award today! An Awakening award!

Truly! Well done, you!

Stay with me! 

Awakening, becoming consciously awake and more fully alive and present, is a really big deal. And hard work. Yet most of your incredible labor and endless dedication – usually 24 hours a day – goes unseen, unrecognized, and seems to have little place of value in our mainstream culture.

I am here today to tell you that:

“You Are Incredible!”

“I See You!”

…and that, “I truly understand, as one who has walked this path, the immensity of what you are doing in your transformation, the rigor and intelligence with which you have to approach it, and the sensitive tracking skills you have developed to constantly find your way in the dark.”

As 2025 comes to a close, I would like to surprise you, my beloved community, with a Simple End-of-Year Awakening Awards Ritual in honor of your Awakening and your sacred labors in 2025, or perhaps for the entirety of your lifetimes.

To start, we have made you this little list of potential awards below that has its own downloadable set of gold stars, ribbons, and certificates (both beautiful and fun!).

You are hereby lovingly honoured and encouraged to award yourself with the following sacred awards and recognition:

🥇 Award Yourself a Gold Star

For traversing the dark nights of the soul
— learning to see in the darkness
— following the pull of your own breath when there were no breadcrumbs

For hanging in there when the going got tough
— and for discovering that giving up was sometimes the way through

For forgetting what you learnt in your struggle and learning it again and again
— until it stopped being a lesson
— and became who you are

For recognising that it takes courage to dedicate to this path
— and allowing courage itself to become your ally

For trusting
— when there was nothing to trust
— and trusting anyway

For meeting traumas in your own being,
— alive for many lifetimes and many generations,
— met in the juncture of your own sacred being.

For wrestling, what once felt impossible
— and discovering the spiritual muscles you didn’t know you had
— and being victorious 🌟

Download all your gold stars here

 

🥇 Award Yourself a Scratch-and-Sniff sticker 

• • Curating the right self-love.
  • Forgiving the impossible.
  • Remembering and taking care of the body, the container, your health.
  • Surrendering the unimaginable: surrendering to the unimaginable, surrendering yourself, every day, over and over again.
  • Your daily meditation on melting away.
  • Your dedication to this path.
  • Learning to be impeccable, realizing it is possible, while also slipping up here and there. 

Download all your scratch-and-sniff stickers here

 

🥇 Award yourself a Ribbon of Joy

• • For transforming yourself into a sacred work of art:
    • even if at the moment you are the only one who can see your beauty
    • or the night sky whispers to you that, like stars, it can see your radiance.
      
  • For becoming more loving and accepting than you thought was possible.
    • Each day grows and meets more of what you once called ‘unacceptable ugliness’, with such a light kiss, warm embrace and astonishing easefulness.
      
  • For becoming less afraid of so many things, maybe everything.
    • For becoming less afraid of who you really are and how quirky you are,
    • and that quirkiness is exactly right, even if others, or an earlier self, would say it is “weird.
      
  • For staying in the down times 
    • and trusting that ‘up’ would reveal itself
    • and it would be more vast and generous, more filled and abundant than anything you imagined till now. A Ribbon of Joy for the “Ups!”

Download all your ribbons here

✨ How to Award Yourself:
A Simple End-of-Year Awakening Awards Ritual✨

Firstly, I encourage you to download, enjoy and print your awards. Cut them out and make yourself a little altar where you can place them to honor what you have fulfilled in the unfolding of your Awakening this year. So that you can treasure your efforts, honor your suffering, and acknowledge what you have let go of. 

I encourage you to perform a ritual that can alchemize into wholeness all of the dissolving, the being lost in the emptiness, the processing of trauma, the liberation of Self, the piercing insights, the detachment, and the cultivation of the elevated observer that can perceive everything more fully, spaciously, and lovingly – especially the most wounded parts of yourself. 

🕯 Step 1: Create a Tiny Sacred Space

A simple ritual might look like: creating a little space on a bench somewhere. Perhaps a candle, lit. Some elements of nature–flowers, leaves, sticks, stones, and water. Maybe some incense. Maybe, if you are daring, a picture of yourself! Maybe one from the past and one from the present. And to this, add your new cut-out awards. 

You can choose the awards where we have put the accomplishments on them, or use the blank ones where you write your own accomplishments, or a mixture. 

🌬 Step 2: Arrive & Call in Support

Take a breath. Rest before your altar in the meditative state. 

Call in all your allies, your guides and angels, nature, Buddha, Jesus, Allah, the infinite, pure awareness, the creator – whatever stands beside you and whatever name you call it. 

Thank them for their support and all the times that their leadership was hidden but truly there. All the times that they healed you, though you were in too much pain to see it. All the times where it was obvious that they were the only reason that you made it through the crevasse and into the new patch of light. 

Take a moment to be grateful for yourself this year because it is likely that you were the only one who will ever be this grateful for you. The only one who will ever truly know the travails that you have met, passed through, thrived within, and are maybe still entangled in.

You are the only one who knows the traumas that you met and the ancestors you soothed, and the shared collective sufferings of humanity that you set from yourself and therefore also for others.

Your Awakening journey is not only a liberation for yourself but also for everyone and everything. 

🏆 Step 3: Begin the Awards

Pick up one of your awards from the altar. Read it out loud. Make an intention that this little ritual is deeply healing and helps to complete this year and align you for the next one. 

Award yourself. 

Read it aloud and think of the times when you truly did this. Maybe there were high points, maybe there were big struggles, maybe it was a theme you worked on all year.

Well done. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. 

Place it back on the altar and pick up the next one and continue till you have really honored yourself and really seen who you are and what you are doing, what you are accomplishing, and the fact that you are on this choiceless path and will continue to be on it. 

Do this ritual before your allies. Ask them to honor you and bless you and bless your awards.

Take a moment to think of the gifts, skills and internal spiritual muscles that you have built this year.

What have you become from your wrestling?
From letting go of who you were, and making space for who you are to become?
For you are an expression of Awakening seeking to come into form in your being. 

🌱 Step 5: Acknowledge What You’ve Become

What you have forged, who you have become, the Awakening skills you discovered or mastered, and what you have accomplished will be your foundation for the coming year. By acknowledging it, blessing it, and being grateful, you consolidate that awakening, that it has got your back, and is beneath your feet, and you can push into it and have its power move you forward into the beauty, the bounty, expansion, and challenges in the coming year that is before us all.

✨ Step 6: Close with Intention

Finally, you can ask all of this bounty to be your deepest resources and allies. You can call on your allies themselves that surround you in this ritual to bless you and bless the year ahead. You can complete by taking some meditative minutes to ask the allies to weave all your gifts, awards, and insights together into you, in wholeness. 

I wish you a wonderful end of this year, a sacred solstice, and I will be here witnessing you, traveling beside you and blessing you in the year to come.

You are my Awakening friend, my colleague, my inspiration, and you are never alone. 

If awarding yourself in the moment feels edgy and hard, think of what Awards you would create and be inspired and honored to give to others on the path.

Let us know what other awards you discovered and created, and share them in the comments for all of us to celebrate. 

Let’s celebrate together.