Deliberate closeness
a new intention for 2026
Posted by Christina Zipperlen on January 6, 2026
As we step into a new year, the invitation is clear: to become active participants in our own becoming. To cultivate the kind of presence so that external powers, those loud, relentless currents of fear, polarization, and exhaustion (we leave it up to you to give them names) do not sweep us off our feet. We must choose the practices, rhythms, and boundaries that help us return to ourselves and cultivate the daily actions that keep us in our bodies.
We moved into 2025 with our collective intention ‘Imagining Kindness’. We’ve been planting seeds of gentleness in a world that has grown sharp-edged.
This year, we move from imagining to participating.
It is time to stop being still and waiting for what is next.
Participation means tending to the soil of the self, it means reclaiming the power to shape the inner landscape from which all our choices arise.
Participation brings kindness closer to us.
This year we want deliberate closeness.
Closeness with our bodies.
Closeness with what is real.
Closeness with Source, with each other, and with the truth that animates all things.
Deliberate closeness means approaching connection from a place of sovereignty.
Deliberate closeness is connection with choice inside it.
It is saying: I am here. I am with you. I am with myself.
It is an active orientation toward intimacy, not something that simply happens, but something we create.
It is the practice of aligning your inner and outer worlds.
When we are nourished and present, we can connect.
When our nervous system is settled, with our breath deep, our shoulders soft, and our eyes receptive, we begin to feel again.
In dorsal collapse on the other hand, the world narrows. We stop seeing left or right, our vision tunnels inward and the world becomes distant. Dorsal is the freeze branch of the nervous system, a survival response where the body conserves energy, withdraws, and creates a sense of distance as protection.
But when we slowly return, when warmth seeps back into our skin and breath fills the belly, closeness becomes possible. First inside, then between us.
From here, kindness is no longer an idea, it becomes a proactive state of being.
To participate in being present with ourselves and the world around is is to choose closeness over withdrawal, presence aliveness over numbness, softness over defense, embodiment over avoidance.
It is how we reclaim the sovereignty of our attention, our energy, and our truth. It is how we strengthen the field of peace within and around us.
Each time we pause, breathe, and feel, we counter the forces that profit from our disconnection. We become quiet revolutionaries of presence.
Maybe that is to not fight against, but to move toward. Toward what is real, kind, and connected. Toward the source that animates all things.
What does deliberate closeness feel like in the body?
- Pause.
Close your eyes.
Feel your feet, the ground, the subtle hum beneath you.
Let your attention drop from the mind into the body. - Breathe.
Lengthen your exhale until the body sighs, a doorway from vigilance into belonging. - Feel.
Sense where life moves within you, warmth, pulse, tingling.
This is how Source feels inside your body.
Stay there a little longer than what feels comfortable. - Name what matters.
What are you ready to move closer to this year?
What requires your presence, your honesty, your care? - Act from closeness.
Let each small act of attention, e.g. how you speak, listen, create, rest, become a declaration of connection.
This year’s intention is a reclaiming of our power through participation, to no longer wait for the world to become softer, but to resume our courage and step boldly into what we stand for, without hesitation or fear.
To live as a conduit of light that cannot be broken, because it is sourced from within.
While we want to move closer to one another it is also not about merging or losing ourselves. It’s about creating a frame strong enough to hold the ultimate expression of our own Self, so that our boundaries, our breath, our being, become acts of love. Closeness begins as an inner orientation, a turning toward what is here, and from there, it radiates outward. This is how we reclaim inner peace, how we return to connection, how we quietly change the world, one body, one breath, one act of kindness and generosity at a time.
