We’ve all been changed by 2025. Our world has changed. A lot of people have been propelled into profoundly life-altering circumstances, and even those who’ve emerged relatively unscathed aren’t untouched. Our collective nervous systems are carrying more stress than even the Covid years, and so far 2026 doesn’t exactly present itself as a year of ease.

And yet, you’ve navigated this year with more discernment than you probably realise.

When I sat down to write this, I wanted to talk about how the January 2025 version of you could not have imagined moving through this year. In fact, the January version of most of us would probably have stayed in bed and refused to participate if someone had handed over the script. And if, right now, you’re looking back at the last eleven months and giving yourself a hard time about the goals that didn’t happen, the plans that dissolved, the dreams that stayed on the shelf, maybe you just don’t do that today. Maybe you give yourself a moment of grace for everything you’ve had to move with, through, and in.

Just surviving was an achievement.

That was going to be the whole piece I wrote today. A simple invitation to stop punishing yourself for not being superhuman in a year that felt like it pulled the rug out from under almost everyone. But there is something sitting underneath all of this, so I’m asking you to stay with me a little longer.

Our world has changed, and it’s going to continue to. But 2025 isn’t “the year everything changed” — 2025 is the year the changes that have been simmering for a long time finally broke through. All the putting it on the long finger (do you say that outside of Ireland? It means “putting it off”), all the pretending that issues around resources, climate, infrastructure, basic care and compassion could wait for another day or another year… well, they’re all needing to be dealt with now. You can see it everywhere: in local communities, in cities, across countries, and globally. It’s destabilising on every level, and no one is exempt from feeling the impact of it.

What we’ve been feeling in our individual bodies is a microcosm of what’s happening collectively. Every single soul who incarnated here came into a time that was always going to test the scaffolding — personal, societal, spiritual — that we’ve relied on.

And that’s where, to me, things get interesting, and things get hopeful. Yes, hopeful. But only if we’re prepared to get even more honest with ourselves than we already have this year.

Because unless your spirituality, your community, your worldview is uplifting everyone, it’s uplifting no one. This doesn’t mean everyone believes the same thing or follows the same practices, but rather that there is a fundamental relationship of mutual respect. Unless you’re part of spaces where equity, accountability, boundaries, respect, integrity, and humility are genuinely cultivated and encouraged, you’re participating in the division that has become so apparent this year.

“In community” doesn’t just mean the people you meet in person, it’s who you follow, who you trust, who you listen to, who you allow to shape your sense of belonging in this world. And if your belonging comes at a cost to someone else — through the appropriation of their traditions, rites, practices, or beliefs — then it’s time to start asking yourself the harder questions.

Are my people in the “we’re right and you’re wrong” camp?
Am I?
Does some part of me believe that only a chosen few are evolving, ascending, or “getting it,” while others just aren’t at that level yet?

Because I’ve seen these beliefs permeating a little too widely for comfort in the spiritual and wellness space this year. This isn’t spiritual maturity. It’s the same old hierarchy dressed up in cosmic, fluffy language. It’s no different from any ideology that decides some humans are more worthy, more enlightened, or more destined for success, abundance, or even life than others. That’s not ascension or 5D evolution. That’s just elitism with incense, bells and a namaste.

And until we’re honest with ourselves about where and how we’ve participated in or bought into these systems — and it’s easy to fall into that space, because it can feel comforting, familiar, even righteous — we can’t be or do differently. What this year has revealed, brutally, beautifully, is that none of us get to bypass the times we’re living in. And none of us get to rise alone. Not in any real way.

And so, as we turn toward 2026, I’m not going to pretend the world is suddenly going to right itself. We’re well past the era of magical thinking, where we convince ourselves that if we just stay positive, everything will sort itself out. That isn’t where we are anymore.

But here’s what is true: when the ground shakes, you see what’s real. You see what endures in you. You see what you’re no longer willing to carry, what you’re ready to claim, where your voice refuses to fall back asleep. This year stripped away the illusion that personal evolution happens in a vacuum. It doesn’t. It happens in how you show up with and for others, and in how willing you are to keep choosing clarity even when the world feels unrecognisable.

So if you’re walking into 2026 uncertain, exhausted, hopeful, wary, ready, or all of the above, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it honestly. You’re stepping into a year that will ask for participation over image, integrity over illusion, community over hierarchy.

And perhaps that’s the real gift of surviving a year like 2025. It reveals. It shows you what won’t break in you. It shows you what you’re made for.

Remember Dory from Finding Nemo and her great line: Just keep swimming? She forgets almost everything, but she remembers that. And there’s something so deeply true about that for this year, and moving into 2026.

If there’s a direction for 2026, it might simply be this: just keep swimming, honestly, consistently, from your heart, and not alone. Keep moving, keep learning, keep choosing the next right thing, keep leaning into community that uplifts everyone. Let your compassionate humanity be what leads.