The Delicate Dance of Visioning a Life

As we enter a new year, many of us instinctively reach for our lists, setting goals and mapping out what we want the year to hold.

But there is another way to vision for the year ahead.

One that begins not with plans, but with listening.

Not outwardly, but inwardly.

When your attention turns inward in this way, you may begin to notice something subtle already moving inside of you.

A living relationship between the soul, the mind, and the body.

What begins to reveal itself, when we listen this way, is that visioning is less about deciding where to go, and more about sensing what is already orienting us from within.

The soul is responsible for that orientation.

It knows what feels alive, meaningful, and true.

The body is responsible for signaling.

It registers that orientation as sensation, ease, contraction, energy, or resistance.

The mind is responsible for interpretation.

It gives language, structure, and form to what is felt.

Whether we are aware of it or not, these three parts of us are always in relationship and in motion together.

The question this invites is simple and profound: which part of us is leading?

When the soul is leading, there is a sense of coherence.

The body reflects this immediately.

Often as ease. A quiet pull forward. Expansion rather than contraction. A subtle, unmistakable sense of yes.

When it comes to visioning, the soul speaks in the language of yearning.

Not demands or instructions, but deep, tender pulls toward what wants to be lived.

Toward self-expression. Connection. Love. Meaning. Freedom. These yearnings are less specific and more felt. They may take shape and form, but they are held loosely, without urgency or insistence.

This is the felt baseline when your soul is leading the way.

When leadership begins to shift to the mind, the body is the first to notice.

The sensations change.

Tightening replaces ease. Pressure replaces presence. The breath shortens. Energy narrows.

When it comes to visioning, the mind speaks a different language.

It speaks in plans and timelines. In comparisons and outcomes. In distance and destination. It carries an energy of striving and chasing, of trying to secure relief somewhere ahead.

The body registers this shift clearly, often long before the mind is aware of it.

You don’t have to analyze it to know it.

You feel it.

Attention collapses onto the future. Happiness gets deferred. Relief is placed somewhere ahead. When I get there, then…

And the body keeps responding.

It tightens. It tires. It resists.

It sends quiet signals that something is off, even when the plan still makes sense on paper.

There is nothing broken in your body.

What you are sensing is simply a shift in leadership.

And that noticing is the heart of a different way of visioning.

Not forcing clarity. Not perfecting a plan.

But learning to listen.

To notice what part of you is leading in any given moment.

To return, again and again, to the intelligence already moving through you.

This is the delicate balance of visioning.

Not choosing soul over mind. Not silencing strategy.

But allowing the soul to orient, the body to signal, and the mind to support.

So the year ahead is not something you chase, but something you live into, one felt step at a time.