Life isn’t always easy. Each of us has been hurt in various ways. In the early history of your incarnation lie the first woundings. Likely they preceded language, but made deep and complex impacts on your beingness and sense of self. This week is a powerful time to release their hold, so you can grow beyond how they’ve influenced your psyche and behavior.

The Angel of Change is at your door. You can answer the challenge to grow, or accept the slow, ongoing death of staying stuck.

Now’s a great time to look at parts of you that’re long past their pull date, but that you still allow to influence you, negatively and disproportionately. Ways that you still reinforce an old identity you say you want to shift. Entrenched ideas, behaviors, or situations that aren’t good for you and keep you stuck.

What does it take to say, I will no longer be the person I have been? To end an unhealthy habit, leave a dead-end job, or change an intimate relationship? What does it mean to actively choose change? Do you even believe it is possible? Because this is the moment to make that choice. To choose growth over your history of wounding.

So if there’s any part of you that is hesitant, questioning, or unsure, now’s the time to look at it very closely and decide if you’re going or staying.

A necessary step is to acknowledge, witness, and name your earliest woundings. To look them in the eye and then to relinquish their power over you. If you look at your patterns carefully, you can trace the lines back to their source. It might be overt abuse or something far more subtle. But no matter how important something has been to your history, or how intrinsically it’s embedded in your identity, if it no longer serves you, now’s the time to let it go, to move it firmly into your past.

This is a great time to say: This is who I’ve been and how I got here. I’m ready to release myself from old hurts, and choose to create a new me. If you’re moving into change, whether you are framing it as birthday or new year’s resolutions or a deeper molting, you cannot skip this step. It’s the time to choose change over any other part of who you’ve been. To become You 2.0, 3.0, or whatever upgrade you are ready for.

Answer these questions: Can I identify old hurts and see how they’ve shaped me? What would it mean to let go of them? How would I talk differently to and about myself? Who do I want to become? Am I ready to choose that me? What path leads me there?