New Year, Same World, New Practices of Care

I want to start this January by telling the truth.

This new year doesn’t feel clean.It doesn’t feel light.It doesn’t feel like a fresh page.

For many of us, January arrived carrying the same weight we were already holding—political unrest, racial harm, grief that never fully made the news, and the quiet pressure to keep functioning anyway.

If you didn’t wake up energized or inspired on January 1st, there is nothing wrong with you.Your body is responding wisely to the world it lives in. The invitation is not to override that reality, but to return to SELF and meet it with gentleness, honesty, and embodied care. January doesn’t have to be about reinvention, domination, or productivity resets.

A Gentle Truth: Our Bodies Are Paying Attention

When we live under ongoing social and political stress, our nervous systems don’t get a break. Even when nothing “bad” is happening in our personal lives, our bodies are still tracking:

• Threat

• Uncertainty

• Injustice

• Survival

This is what we call collective trauma—stress that doesn’t originate inside you, but still lives in your muscles, your breath, your sleep, your digestion, your patience.

Psychoeducation moment (softly):When stress is prolonged, the nervous system stays in a low-level fight/flight/freeze state. This can look like:

• Always feeling “on”

• Difficulty resting without guilt

• Emotional numbness or irritability

• Tight shoulders, jaw, hips

• A sense that rest feels unsafe or undeserved

Your body isn’t broken.It’s trying to protect you.

Healing, then, isn’t about pushing harder.It’s about creating safety—internally and collectively.

January Intention: Care Over Control

This month, we are centering:

• Somatic care (listening to the body)

• Collective care (we were never meant to do this alone)

• Justice-rooted rest (rest as resistance, not reward)

Not because the world is calm—but because it isn’t.

Rest is not disengagement.Care is not avoidance.Regulation is not complacency.

These are survival skills in a system that asks us to burn out quietly.

A Grounding Practice for Heavy Days

(No fixing. Just tending.)

Try this once a day—or whenever the world feels loud:

1. Sit or stand with your feet connected to the ground

2. Place one hand on your chest, one on your belly

3. Inhale slowly through your nose

4. Exhale longer than you inhale

5. Gently say (out loud or inside):“I am allowed to be here. I am allowed to take up space. I am allowed to pause.”

Small moments of regulation add up.They are acts of resistance.

January Journal Prompts

(Read them like letters, not assignments.)

• What has my body been holding onto that my mind keeps minimizing?

• Where am I asking myself to be “strong” when I actually need support?

• What would justice look like inside my own life this year?

• What rhythms help me feel more like myself—not more productive?

• Who or what helps me remember that I don’t have to earn rest?

Let your answers come slowly. Let them contradict each other. Let them be real.

A Note on Collective Care

Healing does not happen in isolation.If capitalism teaches us anything, it’s to individualize our pain and privatize our exhaustion.

Collective care looks like:

• Asking for help without explaining yourself

• Checking in on friends without fixing them

• Letting someone else hold the plan

• Creating spaces where softness is allowed

You are not weak for needing community.You are human.

January Listening: Sounds for Regulation & Remembering

Music can help the nervous system do what words cannot. This playlist is inspired by immigrant and diasporic artists whose music holds memory, grief, joy, displacement, faith, survival, and hope—the same things our bodies are carrying right now.

These are songs to sit with.Songs that remember where we come from.Songs that remind us we are still here.

Let this playlist accompany journaling, slow mornings, grounding rituals, or moments when the world feels heavy and you need to feel held.

Let this be background music for:

• Morning routines

• Gentle movement

• Journaling

• Doing nothing at all

Think warmth, grounding, truth-telling, and spiritual anchoring—sounds that remind your body it belongs.

Closing Reflection

If January feels quiet instead of ambitious, that makes sense.If hope feels tender instead of loud, that makes sense.If you’re tired—and still showing up—that makes sense.

This year does not require your depletion.Your healing matters.Your rest matters.Your liberation matters.

At Revived Soul Wellness, we believe care is political, healing is communal, and your body deserves to be listened to.

We are walking into this year together—slowly, intentionally, and with love.

With care & solidarity,

Felicia Prince, LCSW

Revived Soul Wellness & Consultation