Creating Your Own Pivot Year
There are times in our lives when we need to pivot, not because anything dramatic happens— just because something has quietly shifted within us and we are ready to evolve.
In The Pivot Year, Brianna Wiest names this subtle threshold: a season not defined by external change, but by internal re-orientation. A pivot year is not about reinvention; it is about a return. A return to what we already know, what we have long sensed, and what is now asking us to live it.
Mystics through the ages know these moments well.
They understood that transformation does not come through force or performance, but through surrender, practice, and allowing. As Richard Rohr reminds us, “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” When we step into the process, our whole being pivots; we take our mind, our heart and our body, our very breath into our daily choices… and with each choice we slowly realign ourselves to a new more authentic way of being.
For the modern mystic, this turning isn’t intellectual, it is realized through practice, we walk it into our life, one choice at a time.
Join me in 2026 as I enter the year of The Path of the Modern Day Mystic© A tour with no outer destination but a journey, nonetheless.
I’ll be using Brianna Wiest book, The Pivot Year, as a daily reader as well as other practices that are germane to what inspires me and I invite you to choose what resonates with you.
This ‘path’ or pilgrimage isn’t about obtaining more knowledge but tapping into the innate wisdom within. I’m inviting you to explore your inner realms through practice rather than study and through willingness rather than certainty; in essence, trusting the mystery.
Ernest Holmes taught that Spirit is always expressing, always giving itself fully—but we can’t experience what we can’t receive. He called this being open at the top. The mystic understands that the work is not to make something happen, but to remove what is in the way of the flow. Or, in Holmes’ words, to release “those things which deny the Presence and Power of Spirit right where we are.”
A pivot year, then, is not a dramatic leap forward but rather it is a gentle turning, a turning toward deeper alignment. In Brianna’s words, “ I hope that this year you realize everything – every last thing in your life – will happen with much more ease if it is in alignment with your soul’s true intent.”
For the modern mystic, this turning toward alignment with your soul’s intent is lived through simple practices:
- Daily Orientation — beginning each day, not with goals, but with the question: What is mine to practice today?
- Sacred Honesty — noticing where we are out of alignment without self-judgment or spiritual bypass
- Presencing Practice — treating ordinary moments as initiations into the sacred now
- Small Devotions — trusting that regular practice, not intensity, is what awakens us to the sacred
This is not self-improvement.
It is self-remembering.
Rohr often speaks of the movement from the first half of life, organized around performance and identity, into the second half of life, organized around surrender and service. Entering an intentional pivot year opens the door to this passage. We enter in not by age, but by conscious awareness. We arrive at the threshold of change when we realize that striving has taken us as far as it can, and something deeper is now inviting our participation.
In New Thought language, this is the shift from willfulness to willingness, from managing life to cooperating with it. We move from asking, “How do I make this happen?” to “How do I allow what is already true to live through me?”
A pivot year does not begin on January 1st (but it can).
It begins the moment we stop resisting our own becoming.
The Path of the Modern Day Mystic© is an invitation to that moment—to walk through your days consciously, honestly and more aligned with the Presence within that has been there all along.
It’s time to let go of someday and choose to start now. As the old adage goes:
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Happy New Year my Friends, Happy More Realized You!
© 2025 Path of the Modern Day Mystic . Alice Reid . All rights reserved.
