“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.” Dr. Maya Angelou

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Prayer: May 2026 be rich with promise, fulfilled dreams, and God’s abundant blessings and grace. May this year bring you clarity, fresh motivation, and new opportunities. Wishing you and yours a very happy, healthy, and productive year!

NEW YEAR

NEW YEAR: A Happy New Year to You and Your Loved Ones! – Time truly flies by when we are busy living through the ups and downs of life. It seems like only yesterday when I posted a happy New Year message. Can you believe that was in 2022? Four years ago! I didn’t abandon my beloved blog. I went on an extended hiatus that led me in other directions, including world travel, attempts to create new work, more marathon running, and connecting with a new circle of people/friends in my ever-growing local community. I will share more on that in a future post.
From time to time, I would check in, tweak a few old posts, read some comments, and have the Happiness Engineers fix any issues. I thought about the old days when I banged out weekly posts and how much effort went into what so many people do online. I paused, weighed the commitment, and parked my thoughts until today. To start this new year, I have decided to share 5 quotes, 5 prayers, 5 poems, and some words of wisdom (4 Life Principles/12 Life Tips) from my Beloved Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi.

Poem: To the New Year – By W. S. Merwin
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now, whether or not
anyone hears it, this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge, such as it is
and our hopes, such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible via PoetryFoundation

“May the new year be one in which peace and happiness dance across the world. May we be able to realise a meaningful 2026—one that brings us closer to our goal. May divine grace bless all my children to achieve this.” Amma

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Prayer: May 2026 be a year of great hope, growth, peace, fresh starts, fruitfulness, and purpose, bearing much fruit in all areas of our lives.

PEACE & PRAYERS

PEACE & PRAYERS: In Amma’s New Year Satsang from Amritapuri, India, she shared 4 Important Life Principles and 12 Tips to Live by in 2026 and beyond. Given the current state of affairs globally, we need to be acutely aware of the role each of us plays in contributing to peace or chaos. It all begins at home, in our hearts and in our heads. Amma’s four principles are everyday, commonsense ones, because we need simple reminders on how to share this world/planet. Her twelve tips offer great food for thought, and all are doable, actionable, and reasonable. Read them. Digest them. Share your own tips in the comments, as I’d love to hear your feedback.
4 Key Principles: Awareness. Compassion. Effort. Surrender to God.

12 Life Tips: 1. Since time cannot be saved to use in the future, use it with utmost care. Create a daily routine/schedule and follow it sincerely.
2. Write down your negative tendencies and shortcomings on a piece of paper. Set aside one specific day a week to consciously work on controlling each one of them.
3. Compared to yesterday, try to bring a little more maturity and excellence into at least one aspect of your life today.

4. Every day, spend some time cultivating awareness of nature. Imagine that you are loving the entire creation.
5. Awaken the selfless love within you and allow it to express itself daily. Take care of at least one plant.
6. When praise or insults, victory or defeat come your way, reflect deeply and remind yourself: “In truth, I am beyond all this.”

7. Cultivate the virtue of forgiveness – make an effort to forgive and forget the mistakes of others and try to correct them with understanding. Just as when a child makes a mistake, adults know that it is due to ignorance and guide the child gently. Forgetting may not always be possible, but correction should be attempted. Sometimes, people say, ” He is too foolish, ignorant, and immature. I let him go, Amma.” Falling into others’ foolishness reflects our own lack of maturity. These tendencies exist in everyone – at times even in us.  Look within and ask whether these traits do not arise in you as well.
8. Every day, spend at least a little time performing your actions with complete awareness.
9. Use natural resources carefully and responsibly. In life, place greater importance on what you have given rather than what you have received.

10. Practice humility and simplicity. Respect the views of others and move forward through cooperation.  There will be times when cooperation is impossible; when dealing with such people, remain patient.  If you see that continuing will only weaken you, there is no harm in stepping aside and creating a gap in your interactions with them. You may ask, “Why should we endure everything?” First, stand aside and look into yourself. Then perhaps acceptance of others may be possible.
11. Each day, spend a little time remembering the form of the Guru/of God. Then sit quietly and observe your own nature.
12. Cultivate gratitude for the good you have received in your life. Take responsibility for your own mistakes, hardships, and losses. What we need is not a mind that is content with a narrow outlook but a broad mind that moves forward steadily without faltering. Work on them.

Poem: Burning the Old Year – By Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies. Via PoetryFoundation

Continued Below
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Prayer: May your dreams/wishes/desires bear positive fruit this year and every year. May your life be filled with happiness and meaningful progress, both in small and great moments, in 2026.

BLESSINGS

BLESSINGS: What Else Can We Do? Every year, so many of us make New Year’s resolutions. Every January, the gyms are full. Gradually, they thin out. Why? Because we all falter. The key is to get back up and try again. Effort, even small steps, pays both material and spiritual dividends. That said, I send these blessings to everyone because they have helped me focus on the positive. I am offering all of you twelve words as gifts/affirmations; you may focus on one to write/share/meditate on for each month of the year, or design an affirmation practice of your own to help you imbibe the word and its meaning. The order is not fixed, so feel free to mix them up or rearrange them to suit your needs, inclinations, or intuition. I hope you enjoy them. For 2026, I am sending the following 12 gifts/blessings/wishes to each of you:
♥ Health
♥ Happiness
♥ Hope
♥ Abundance
♥ Grace
♥ Peace & Love
♥ Wisdom
♥ Friendship
♥ Goodwill
♥ Success
♥ Adventure
♥ Divine Protection
You may also create your own twelve-item wish list and try the tips above. What did you do on the first day of 2026? And what are your plans for the rest of the year? Make it an auspicious beginning. It’s never too late to start over. I wish you the best year ever!

Poem: Ring Out, Wild Bells (from In Memoriam) – By Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

From A Poem For Every Day Of The Year – via Poets.org

“The magic in new beginnings is truly the most powerful of them all.” Josiyah Martin

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Prayer: May 2026 bring you great joy in all your friendships and family. Friendships are not easy to make, even though we live in a world with billions of people.

FRIENDSHIPS

FRIENDSHIPS: When I was much younger, my Dad always reminded my siblings and me about the preciousness of family and true friendships. He often said that if one could count their true friends on one hand, they were truly blessed, because while we might know lots of people, most were acquaintances at best, and some were fake friends. So if we have that precious few who stand by us in all conditions, we have the greatest wealth. He would say in our native language, Igbo, “Onye nwere ezibo enyi, nwere akụ na ụba.” – He who has true friends has the greatest wealth. I concur.
We live in a world where the word “friend” is used casually. We have good-time friends, internet friends, fair-weather friends, transactional friends with benefits, fake friends, and THEN we have our ride-or-die friends. This is not a criticism of friendship; it is a reality of life, as we have all experienced people who disappeared when life got tough or tragedy struck. So to be able to say ABC is/are my closest and trusted friend/friends is a treasured gift because even though we live in a world with billions of people, true friendship takes grace on all levels, concerted effort, and perfect timing to bring folks together. It’s one of the greatest blessings in our lifetime.
Cherish your friends and let them know it. Ask your heart who they are because you already know who your ride-or-die friends are, and be grateful for them. We can’t be best friends with everyone, and that is okay. We can treat everyone with respect, compassion, and fairness, but we ultimately find we are closest to a handful, if we are lucky. Often, we are closest to one or two people, and that is okay. That is life. Accept the blessings of all types of friendships, acknowledge them for what they are, and stay grateful.

Poem: New Year’s Day – By Kim Addonizio
The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed

to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.

They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives

have carried them
this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here

with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care

where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it

they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it. Via PoetryFoundation

Continued Below
“The only person you should try to be better than is the person you were yesterday.” Unknown

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Motivation Mondays: Reflections On A Happy New Year!

Prayer: May the Lord bless you with good health, peace of heart, and His guiding light throughout 2026. May this year surprise you with unexpected kindness and strength.

THANKS & GRATITUDE

THANK YOU/GRATITUDE: Being grateful and saying Thank You is very powerful. “Thank you” is the easiest way to show appreciation and gratitude, yet so many either choose not to say it or simply eliminate it from their vocabulary. It takes so little effort, and when expressed, it blesses both the giver and the receiver. What does Thank you mean to you, and do you say it freely and gratefully? Here are three of my favorite thank-you quotes:
Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever said in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
Alice Walker: “‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say.”
Stephen King: “Don’t let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.”
Sometimes, our intentions of gratitude teach us lessons about desire, ego, letting go, and making peace with situations. Let me explain. About 11+ years ago, I decided to take a leap of faith and add a weekly Motivation Mondays post to my blog. The Motivation Mondays series was created to encourage anyone who wished to share a motivational quote, photo, personal challenge, or post to help others start the week on an upbeat note. Each week, I picked a motivational word to help us create a response. It was my attempt to say Thank you and to Express My Gratitude to have blog readers. I created a Motivation Mondays Private Community Page and an Independent Motivation Mondays Post Page, all on Facebook. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I set out not fully grasping the depth and breadth of hellish work required to keep it all running seamlessly.
The first post was Motivation Mondays: Dream. I was excited to start this because it forced me to commit to a weekly post and engage/include others in the effort. So, once I created the Facebook page for it, I added a slew of instructions and invitations to get it up and running. Little did I know what a huge challenge it would become. Writing the weekly content was the easy part, but running the group and managing all the content that came flying at me on multiple social media channels and over my head was shocking. I kept the instructions up for years, even though reality was less than ideal, and over time, some of it slowly unraveled.
There were great lessons learned from the experience as I gradually grew to appreciate the role of virtual assistants, division of labor, and keeping things simple. We all know what happens when a small, relatively successful business decides to expand massively overnight. It crashes without fail. Everything in life is timing. We have seasons for a reason, and real growth is incremental, not a sudden surge as if on steroids. I was happy to be the content creator, but I knew I had to revisit the format, reshape it into something simpler, and hire an assistant. I did for a while, and then life demands took over.

Today, the Motivation Mondays Private Community page barely exists, plus Facebook has decided to permanently delete community chats from its platform starting today… is that serendipity or a sigh? In addition to the community group, I still have the Facebook Page where I share posts from this blog. It is not private, and it has fewer community requirements or expectations.
What was the point of all this? As we progress through this year, let’s give ourselves permission to take things slowly, to meander, to pause and ponder, to step back, to lean in, to fail, to give thanks, and to get up. This is where true growth lives, and success finds a permanent home. There is no overnight success in anything. FRANKLY! Have an awesome year!
Basic Instructions: Do share your thoughts, insights and prayers? Thank you!  ♥Happy New Year!

Poem: Ode to the First Day of the Year – By Pablo Neruda (Translated by Ilan Stavans)
We identify it as if
it were a wooden horse
different from all horses.
We adorn its forehead
with a ribbon, we hang
on its neck colourful rattles, and at midnight
we get ready to receive it
as if it were an explorer descending from a star.

The way bread resembles
yesterday’s bread, a ring all rings: the days
blink clearly, jingling, fleetingly, and lie down in the dark night.

I see the last day
of this year on a train, toward the rains of a distant purple archipelago, and the man
on the machine, complicated like a clock from heaven, lowering his eyes to the infinite
ruler of the rails, to the shining handles, to the nimble bonds of fire.

Of conductor of trains
accelerating toward the black stations of the night, this end of the year, without wife or children, is it not the same for the one gone, the one coming?

From the roads and workshops, the first day, the first dawn of the starting year, has the same rusty colour as the iron train: and people along the way greet it,
cows, villages, the vapour of the first light of day, without knowing it is
the year’s door, a day
heralded by bells, adorned with plumes and carnations.

The earth does not
know it: it will receive that golden day, gray, heavenly, it will extend it over hills, it will wet it with arrows of translucent rain, and then
it will curl it in a tube, will store it in the shadows. It is thus, but a small door of hope, new year’s day, although you are like the bread of all breads, we will live you in a different way, we will eat you, flower you, wait for you.

We will place you like a cake in our lives, we will light you like candelabra, we will drink you as if you were a topaz. New Year’s Day, electric day, fresh, all the leaves emerge green from the trunk of time.

Crown us with water,
with open jasmine, with all the aromas deployed, yes, even though you’re only a day, a poor human day, your halo beats over so many tired hearts, and you are, oh new day, oh forthcoming cloud, bread unseen before, permanent tower! Via Cribiecoach.blog

Positive Motivation Tip: Start the year with an open and thankful heart, hands, and mind. May daily blessings meet you at your door.

The details for Topics that might be covered in the Motivation Mondays Series are below. Join in! The themes for JAN 2026 are:
01/10 – New Year’s Day, 04 Critics’ Choice Awards, World Braille Day, 05 National. Screenwriters Day, 06 Epiphany, 07 Orthodox Christmas, 09 Law Enforcement Appreciation Day
01/11 – Golden Globe Awards, Human Trafficking Awareness Day, National Milk Day, 14 Orthodox New Year, 16 Religious Freedom Day,
01/18 – Winnie The Pooh Day, 19 Martin Luther King Jr Day, 21 National Hug Day
01/25 – 24 Int’l. Day of Education, Nat’l. Compliment Day, 26 Nat’l. Spouses Day, 27 Commemoration of Victims of the Holocaust, 28 Data Privacy Day

National Mentoring Month, National Glaucoma Awareness Month, Cervical Health Awareness Month, National Blood Donor Month, Birth Defects Prevention Month, National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, National Stalking Awareness Month

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  PHOTO CREDITS/ATTRIBUTIONS: All Photos – Happy New Year photos from Pixabay, Commons.Wikimedia, and AdobeFreeStock

  Until Next Time…
  Ask. Believe. Receive. ©
  Elizabeth Obih-Frank
  Mirth and Motivation
  Positive Kismet