2025 Reflection

The year I found God 💫

While the end of the year is typically a time I reflect on the past year, I’ve actually found myself reflecting on the past 20 years this past week as I’ve spent it in my childhood home for the last time, as my parents are moving from the Northern Virginia area where I grew up. I’ll potentially write a separate piece about this experience later, but I just wanted to name that that’s the headspace I’ve been in recently.

If I try to zoom back in on just this past year of 2025 though, I feel that if I’m being honest, I have been anticipating and wondering how I’d write my 2025 reflection piece for a few months. In short, it has felt like the best year of my life on many levels. And I don’t think it’s even close. Yet it feels like the positive things that I’ve experienced feel hard to put into words.

Eventually, I came to the joking conclusion that if I couldn’t come up with anything, my backup 2025 reflection could just be “2025 was the year I found God”, and leave it at that.

When I say ‘God’ though, what I mean is a connection with the universe, the divine, and a greater force. I grew up nonreligious and had an aversion to the word ‘God’ for the longest time, but I find myself using it more in a spiritual context to describe what feels indescribable.

These experiences have been inspired by Michael Singer’s writing and my experiences reading and applying concepts from his three books (Untethered Soul, Surrender Experiment, and Living Untethered). He already did such a great job of articulating nuanced topics into three separate books, which may be why I find it hard to describe some of these topics in just one Substack piece.

In my 2024 reflection piece, I wrote that “I felt like I grew in so many ways, and in new dimensions that I didn’t even know were possible when the year got started”. Building on that, 2025 has felt like 2024 was only the beginning - planting seeds that have started to sprout in ways I couldn’t have imagined. In many ways, I have just felt that I didn’t even know it was possible to love life this much.

Liftoff: Integrating the Internal and External

In my 2024 reflection, I set an intention of the following chapter title for 2025 that I wanted to write if my life were a book: “Liftoff: Integrating the Internal and External”. I hoped to integrate my inner work learnings from 2024 with ‘outer work’ like career and dating. And boy did that happen. I was able to see how well my inner work applied to the external world, and felt like I completely redefined the way I approached things for the better. To give a glimpse into this, my journey back into working started with working at my favorite community space in SF (The Commons), an experience I’ve described as one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done.

This integration of inner and outer work wasn’t always a guarantee. There was always a part of me that thought that the sabbatical I took was either going to be the worst or best decision I ever made. A part of me sometimes wondered if I was indeed taking the right path as I tried to exit sabbatical in the worst job market I had personally ever seen.

It’s hard to believe that I started 2025 coming back to SF from a trip to Asia without knowing what was next for my career after my job hunt had taken longer than expected. I even had a thought too that at a certain point it wouldn’t make sense to live in SF, the city I loved so much, if I couldn’t figure out my next career steps by a certain amount of time.

It’s hard to imagine that it’s the same year that ended up including my sister graduating from college and moving out to SF for a job, me figuring out my career situation for the time being, and overall having the best year of my life, with the most feelings of flourishing and love I’ve felt. Even though I started out the year with things to still figure out externally, I did feel a strong sense of self-worth internally, and a trust that everything was going to be more than okay.

Unfolding

I went into 2025 with the one-word intention of unfolding, and it has turned out to have been such a powerful and resonant guiding intention for my entire year. To me, unfolding represents allowing life to emerge with an acceptance that there’s a lot we can’t control, while being grounded in a trust that I’ll be able navigate it with intentionality and presence.

Here are some things that I felt this year:

• The strongest sense of connection with another human being I’ve ever felt

• Going back in time to heal intergenerational traumas

• Feeling the presence of God

What sticks out to me as I reflect on these is how much they came to me as the journey of life unfolded in front of me, rather than my prior orientation that was more fixated on “doing more” in order to feel good enough. I felt like I was living in harmony with what the universe wanted me to do and following the desires of my heart.

When I look back at my nomadic days with my prior orientation from a few years back, I felt more oriented around seeking dopamine and novelty. While this was an important phase of my journey, last year marked a shift from external validation to internal fulfillment. Based on my previous lens of living life, I used to start my yearly reflections by listing my top three moments of the year. This year, my view has become more that life is just a constant unfolding journey, and that there is infinite love and beauty in every moment if we’re able to open our hearts to it. Aligned this new paradigm, 2025 was the year that spending time in Alamo Square Park (a park I’m able to go to almost every single day) sometimes led to feeling love and beauty flooding my senses at a pace that made me want to ground myself by focusing on one tiny detail of nature at a time to pace myself.

I’ve also really come to find evidence for what I’ve heard around how experiences that trigger us in this unfolding journey of life are gifts, as they can show us stored blocked energy in us that can get in the way of our innate love and beauty. It’s an opportunity to work on something, release the blocked energy, and make way for more space for the innate infinite love and beauty in us.

Family

The last thing I’d like to add about 2025 reflections is that it has felt like a standout year for my family as well.

• It was my parents’ first full year of retirement. They spent 250+ days of the year traveling around the world across five continents, including a cruise to Antarctica, which they say is their favorite vacation they’ve been on. They got to spend Chinese New Year with family in China for the first time in over 30 years too. In between their travels, they decided to buy a house in Las Vegas and to soon relocate our family home base there, which is why I’m writing these words here in one of the last days I’ll be in my childhood home in Northern Virginia

• My sister also had probably the most significant year of her life - graduating Duke and moving to SF for a job

2026 Intention: Love

My one-word intention for 2026 is love.

Here are some ways I hope to embody that:

• Cultivating more moments of feeling the love and beauty of the world that I’ve started to feel more of

  • Note to self: I’ve found having enough ‘space’ to be an important part of cultivating this

• Continuing the process of allowing life to unfold, and working through triggers and blockages that come up to make more space for the innate love in life to flow

• Choosing love over fear

• Continuing to experiment with living with more of a heart-centered approach rather than a mind-centered approach

• Love and compassion for others

• Helping others find the innate love and beauty in themselves. This feels like the next logical step after experiencing the love that’s possible in myself - to share it with others. As Michael Singer says, “Love is a very unique gift - it is just as beautiful for both the giver and the receiver.”

As I conclude this piece, I’m in Florida on a trip to visit Michael Singer’s Temple. A fitting activity for a year that was so inspired by his writing and journey, so we’ll see how that unfolds.

Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!

-Ray