The Power of Words

For years now, as I’ve approached the end of each year, I cast my mind forward to the new year, which is about to begin, and I ask myself, usually in a journaling session, what words are going to be my compass, my lodestars, for the coming year. So, the question really is …

What is it that I want to bring into my life in the coming year?

This is not about acquiring stuff, or getting a promotion, or going on holiday (although there was a time when those sorts of images would appear on my vision board!).

No. For me, choosing the word or words for the year is all about energy … What is the energy that I want to bring into my life? What are the intentions I want to hold in my heart?

Choosing words for me, is about how I want to feel, not what I want to do, or achieve, or get!

Devoted 2025

It was so easy to choose my words for 2025. I had signed up for the Devoted journey in late summer of 2024, so my words for 2025 had had plenty of time to bubble up naturally.

Devotion, Patience, Ease and Freedom

See! Easy to choose. And they turned out to be absolutely perfect.

2026 and a Whole New Journey

On the 6^th of January 2026, I’m embarking on a whole new journey … The Sage’s Journey with Richard Rudd.

This is me, going right back to the beginning of my Gene Keys Golden Path and starting again. Only this time, it’s going to take even longer … 16 months to be precise.

You would maybe think that I would want to have patience as a word again, but no. I don’t need to have that as energy I want to call in, because it is already here! I have learned deep patience in my Devoted 2025 journey. Patience is a natural state for me, one which I practice every day.

I Need More than Patience and Devotion

The Sage’s Journey is going to ask more than patience of me. It is going to ask for an even slower, deeper pace of work. Richard Rudd is going to be introducing hundreds of new sutras to the Gene Keys lexicon.

(sūtra means a distilled collection of syllables and words, any form or manual of “aphorism, rule, direction” hanging together like threads with which the teachings of ritual, philosophy, grammar, or any field of knowledge can be woven. Thank you, Wikipedia)

So, there is going to be more, and deeper, reflection on each of my Gene Keys and Lines, so patience is a given.

Devotion is also a given, because I am, once again, making a commitment to being devoted 100% to this work.

It was through my devotion to the inner work in 2025, that the first two words for 2026 became clear to me.

Stillness

When I was in my Culture sphere back in November, I was contemplating my Culture Gene Key as the catalyst point for prosperity. I was writing about how the Culture represents how I walk out into the world wearing my cloak of Leadership, no longer hiding behind the inner work, but stepping boldly into plain sight, and saying, this me, I have wisdom to share, I have stories to tell, I have love to give, I have trust in life.

I was writing about our glorious website, which we had just launched at that point, and looking at this culture energy of “stepping boldly into plain sight”, suddenly scared me!! For all the excitement of the launch of the Cauldron, I was way more comfortable in the creation/gestation phase. Now we were OUT THERE … what if no one likes it? What if no one is impacted by it? What if I don’t find love because of it??

It was at that point, right there, that the Salmon, which is the Fear Key for my Culture Gene Key of 25, leapt into my consciousness. The Salmon is “The Fear of Not Finding Love”.

I have these glorious Oracle cards which Meghan made me for my Gene Keys profile, and as we travelled through each month of Devoted, I had the cards for each key in front of me on my desk, as I journaled and contemplated that particular Gene Key.

So, I had been looking at that Salmon card for a couple of weeks, when suddenly it was really as if it leapt in front of me and said, “I’m important!!”.

So, I read the message from the Dream Arc, and it was as if it had spoken directly to me …

I am Salmon. Of all creatures I am one of the most resilient and persevering. You too will need these qualities for the journey that lies ahead of you. Our journey will be one of great effort and trials, punctuated with frequent rests in quiet pools of calm and pause. In truth, your journey through time and space on this Earth is such a journey. Each life is a great effort to evolve, and then you rest in between your lives. This life, you have before you the opportunity to play out this journey in full awareness. Instead of just reacting to the forces of fate, now you are mature enough to begin to actually shape your own journey. I recommend you take more rests and pauses. Pause often each day, and each year take as many longer pauses as you can to get away from the journey and just unplug.

And that there … that is the energy I want for 2026.

The Salmon is a Journeyer, and that is me! My life is a journey, and it’s a journey that I don’t want to stop making … when I stop moving forward with purpose, whether it is upstream to my source, or downstream to the ocean of the whole collective, then I’ll be dead, and not ready for that yet!!

But the thing that really stood out for me was this … “Our journey will be one of great effort and trials, punctuated with frequent rests in quiet pools of calm and pause.”

That is so important for me, that rest, that peace that comes through being still.

While I may have been able to bring lots of patience into my Devoted journey, and while I became adept at harvesting the pauses that life gifted me, I wasn’t very good at resting. In truth, resting has always been hard for me.

But the deeper I go o this journey of self-discovery, then the more rest I realised I need.

And for me, “stillness” is the natural precursor to rest.

If I cannot bring stillness to myself and my environment, and to my own nervous system, then I am agitated, and then rest is simply not possible.

Like the Salmon, I must look for those calm pools and swim into them to find rest.

But much more important that that, I must create stillness, I must cultivate it. Not just grab at the fleeting moments of it, but make the space for stillness in my life.

Slow down.

Make space.

Create stillness.

Yes, there will be work to do on this journey, but part of that work will be carving out pools for stillness to grow.

I am heartened by Salmon’s message that “effort leads to effortlessness” the closer to your own source you go.

This is not the stillness of inertia I am seeking; this is the balm of deep trust that I am on the right path. And there is a difference.

Trusting in rest means I won’t fight it; rather I will savour it and it shall become the fuel for the next part of the journey.

Stillness is Part of a Balanced Approach

It was also during our Culture sphere, that Hayley talked to us about “how boldness is the balance between outward action and inner stillness.”

I really love this concept of outward action and inner stillness being a balanced cycle. It is not sustainable to be in outward action all the time. I love the vision of filling my inner cup up in the stillness of contemplation, then pouring it out in action. Then filling it up again. Isn’t that just perfect?

Acceptance

My second word for 2026 also dropped into my consciousness during my Culture sphere. Richard Rudd describes the Culture sphere thus …

“The Sphere of your Culture on the other hand describes the environmental relationships that curl around you in response to the activation of your genius … It describes your natural role within the theatre of the wider human community.”

Again and again on this journey, that word “natural” comes up. The Gene Keys are pretty esoteric teachings in some respects, but when you boil them right down, they are about you being your natural self in your ordinary life. And isn’t that perfect?!

The gift of my culture is Acceptance, and it’s all about accepting love. Richard says that Acceptance is based on taking the soft approach to life, which I really love. He also says that I carry the seed of love inside me, and that acceptance is the grail that I am seeking. 🤯❤️‍🔥

When I can finally accept everything in my life just as it is right now, then I will have embraced the human wound.

The more I can accept myself and others, the more love will bloom in my life.

This has been a pivotal gift for me because it’s not just shown itself here in the Culture sphere. It runs like one of the golden threads through my entire chart. Allow, accept, embrace are tenets of the Gene Key’s work. So this is a gift that has run through every other gift in my whole hologenetic profile. And my whole Golden Path, all of the Gene Keys work of the past three years, and all of the deep solitary work of the 25 years that came before that, it’s all been leading to this Gift, not as a destination, but as an energy that wraps itself around me and that wraps itself around every other Gift.

It softens the edges of all of my Shadows, if I can accept myself. It eases the pathways I’ve walked if I can accept my dharma and my karma. And it supercharges all of my gifts if I can truly accept that they are part of my makeup.

If I can accept my Dynamism, there’s no end of joy that I can bring.

If I can accept my Authority, all of my fears and self-doubt loosen.

If I can accept my gift of Leadership, then I can step into it boldly.

I cannot look outwards for acceptance, if I do not first find it and embrace it and nurture it for myself. I have to accept myself, all of myself, before I can move my attention out into the world. Because truly, this energy of acceptance is exactly what I want to see more of.

We all have flaws, but we are all perfectly imperfect. Accepting ourselves exactly as we are opens the door to loving ourselves. Accepting and loving ourselves opens the possibility of accepting and loving others, even if they are different from us. But it all starts with ourselves.

So, choosing Acceptance as my second word was easy, it feels perfect!

Creativity

This word came straight from my heart, from my playful, wild inner child.

There is no Gene Key Gift or Siddhi called “Creativity”, yet it is woven like sparkly golden thread through the whole of the teachings.

Again and again, you will hear Richard Rudd say things like “and you access this gift through creativity” (only he says things much more poetically than I!!)

My whole life, I have yearned to be creative. I always used to think I wasn’t . I thought, I’m the brainy one, I’m not creative.

But that is complete bullshit!

I AM creative. I write, I take photographs, I make books, I make prints, I built a website with Meghan.

Everything I do is creative.

So, why, you might ask, am I making “Creativity” a word for this year, if I’m already doing it?!

It’s because “creativity” is a vessel for so many of the energies I want to weave through my life this year.

Meghan has many such vessels and she calls them her “creative cauldrons”, and I just love that idea, that imagery, because we dooooo love a cauldron round these parts!!

So, Creativity is my Cauldron for 2026. It holds my writing, this website, our Podcasts. It holds the handbound books I make and the photographs I take and the prints I create. It holds the books and the stories I write and will write in the future.

But more than that, it holds my Pearl Gene Key of Initiative, my EQ Gene Key of Imagination; and mostly it holds my SQ Gene Key of Freedom.

“Creativity” is what will give me the freedom to keep showing up with my words and my creations.

And it is what will give me the freedom to keep on playing here in the barn with Meghan (aka A Cauldron of Crones), making mud pies and creating whole magical worlds that I can have adventures in.

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Dream Arc Helpers

I am calling a cadre of Dream Arc animals to travel with me in 2026 (and probably into 2027, because some of them will accompany me through the whole of the Sage’s journey).

There is the Salmon, of course. I have the most perfect talisman to wear every day, so that I never forget to seek stillness. I commissioned a wonderful local artist I know to make my Salmon pendant. I told her a little about the Salmon from the Dream Arc and about the significance of the salmon in Celtic mythology, and she has fashioned the most wonderful pendant. I burst into tears when I saw it, it’s so perfect. (She asked if she could have one of my journals in payment, rather than money … what a perfect creative energy exchange!)

I have the Lion, the second Dream Arc Animal for my Culture Gene Key, which is Loving Self-acceptance. “Your task now is to rediscover the vast love that lies in the heart of your being, in the heart of all beings. You are a vessel of this awakening.”

I have the Weasel, which is my Pearl Gene Key … Ingenious Initiative. “The 51^st Gift is engaged whenever the human competitive spirit is put into the service of creativity.” “Every Gift is inherently creative and original … the Gift of Initiative is about having the courage to trust in the direction of our own feet, and it’s about how we deepen that trust.”

And I have the Moose, Gene Key 43, the Creative Rebel … “Deep relaxedness and solitude … trust your inner voice, no matter the consequences”. The Moose is the masculine creative structure that will hold all of my feminine creative juices.