Flourishing: A Personal Journey Into 2025

There’s something sacred about choosing a word to guide your year. I started this practice after learning about Melissa Fabello meditating on this practice for herself. In incorporating the practice for myself, I learned that it’s not just a theme but an intention, a lens through which you view your decisions, your challenges, and your growth. This year, 2025 is the year of flourishing—a word that feels both like a prayer and a promise.

But flourishing, as I’ve come to understand, isn’t simply blooming, growing or leaning into abundance. It’s deeper than success or accomplishment. Flourishing is about rooting deeply into the soil of my life—acknowledging its richness, its imperfections. It’s about allowing myself to thrive in ways I once thought impossible, taking up space, repeatedly budding no matter how many times I must also deadhead.

The Roots of Flourishing: Lessons from the Past

Flourishing didn’t always feel like an option. The past few years have been marked by deep reckonings, both personal and systemic all at once. Navigating the intersections of coloniality, systemic oppression, and being traumatized often felt like survival was the only goal. And yet, even in those moments, tiny seeds were being planted—propagating themselves into the soil and reaching for the nutrients that were far from the surface.

In 2022, I left a workplace that eroded my sense of self. That experience forced me to confront what flourishing could never coexist with: environments steeped in harm, expectations rooted in conformity, and systems that devalue humanity. In being forced to step away, I was also forced to make space for something new—a decision that, at the time, felt like a loss but turned out to really be a reclamation.

Since then, I’ve been learning what it means to truly nurture myself. It meant creating boundaries that honour my worth, listening to the wisdom of my bodymind, and leaning into community care rather than individual endurance. These lessons were my roots—the foundation for this year’s flourishing.

What Flourishing Means in 2025

Flourishing isn’t about perfection or relentless productivity. It’s about embracing cycles: of growth and rest, of joy and grief, of fullness and release. It’s about celebrating the so-called messy, non-linear process of becoming. Flourishing means aligning my life and work with my values, choosing care over control, and giving myself permission to imagine.

And it’s not just personal. Flourishing extends into everything I build, especially Plutonian Consulting (PC). PC is the tangible manifestation of this year’s theme—a collective space where flourishing becomes possible for individuals and communities alike; especially on this side of the pond since I live in the UK from 2019. Through decolonial praxis, equity-driven leadership, and transformative systems, PC is an act of hope and resistance, a garden where liberation can take root.

How We May Flourish Together

One thing I’ve learned is that flourishing isn’t a solitary journey. It’s collective. It’s interdependent. It’s in the ways we uplift one another, share our knowledge, and build systems that honour our interconnectedness. This is why PC’s work was birthed and gestated in alignment with my personal journey—because it centers flourishing not just as an individual act but as a communal responsibility.

If you’re looking for ways to flourish in your own life, I invite you to join us in this journey. Whether through the Depths of Katabasis membership, the Siblings in Struggle podcast, or upcoming workshops, PC is a space for reflection, connection, and transformation. It’s a reminder that flourishing is possible, even in the face of systems that tell us otherwise.

A Year of Metamorphosis

As I step into 2025, I hold this theme of flourishing with both tenderness and conviction. It’s not about achieving a single outcome, but about living fully in alignment with my values. It’s about planting seeds and trusting that the growth will come, in its own time and way.

So, here’s to a year of flourishing—a year of messy, imperfect, and joyful becoming. Here’s to the cycles of care and transformation, and to the gardens we’ll grow together.

Discimus ut serviamus,