“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”

– Margaret J. Wheatley

As the year 2025 drew to a close, I took some time reflecting on just how much it has asked of so many of us.

For me personally, it was 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 carried all of that with me into 2026, I would arrive already exhausted.

And yet — I didn’t want to discard the year entirely. Because even our hardest seasons carry gold.

That insight became the heart of my 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:

Step 1:
Begin by tapping lightly and continuously on all the EFT points as you move through this process. Tapping keeps the stress down.

Step 2:
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.

Step 3:
While still tapping, watch the “movie” of that event — remembering to stay in your seat and keep some distance. Use the 9 Gamut procedure to help your nervous system process what it’s seeing.

I’ve created a short video explaining this step here:

Step 4:
Test yourself. 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?

Step 5:
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.

Step 6:
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.

Step 7:
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? Jot that down.

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?

Even if we’re almost halfway into the new year, my own intention is simply this:

To continue with more lightness, carrying the gold from the past year, not the burden. May you too, find nuggets (or like my friend Berdine says, “Diamonds”), in the rough patches of the last year.