I got the opportunity to interview and connect with a close family friend and spiritualist, Richard Kidd (known as Richey), about stepping into a new year and a new perspective for those New Year’s Resolutions.
Richey practically grew up on the beach, and from a very young age seeing his friends surfing and coming out the surf with huge smiles got him to ask for a surfboard for one of his birthdays. He dived headfirst into the competitive side of surfing and competed from the age of 12 till 21. This had him waking up one morning and feeling a sudden change, ‘a dark night of the soul,’ as Richey puts it, which evoked many questions about who he is? Why is he here? What is his mission? And so he decided to retire from the competitive surfing career, becoming freer and now using the ocean as a form of healing and enjoyment. He found himself in another world, an empty thought-land where he gets to let go and ‘go with the flow’ when riding a wave. “I connected with the spiritual side of the ocean,” Richey adds.
This change opened him up to becoming the co-founder of a new experience called Sacred, a community and network dedicated to healing ourselves and each other through sacred healing ceremonies, practices and spiritual teachings. They facilitate mindful and conscious events for those wanting an alternative way of being. We are in a powerful time where society is shifting, and time has sped up, “We have never been more connected yet separated, and we never had so much time to look into our own lives as individuals,” exclaims Richey. It is essential now that you build a healthy habit that will create a thriving lifestyle, and to form such habit is to enhance positive thoughts and take action on those thoughts.
With 2022 right around the corner, I asked how one can take a breath. Richey loved this question, as he has recently studied and works specifically with breathwork, but also consciousness, mindfulness and meditation, which all correlate straight to the mind. “Breathing allows stillness. It brings in that sense of peace and brings in clarity, which really allows us to focus, and create the life that we want for ourselves, which is a big transition a lot of people are going to be going through coming into the new, letting go of the old. (The old being unconscious ways, the new being our new realisations, new conscious, intentional ways of doing things through living certain ways),” Richey answers. ‘How one can take a breath’ doesn’t mean a physical; once off breath, it means a pause. It could be in the form of meditation, journaling, or just taking time to be present and acknowledge what is around you and where you want to go in your life. Richey explains that we have been taught that there is a big gap between thinking and the material world, but if we can write our thoughts down, we can bring those thoughts into reality. This is a beautiful explanation and a great ‘breath’ for those who struggle to sit and meditate. “Sometimes it’s hard to focus on a thought before getting lost within the clutter in one’s mind,” adds Richey.
I am one of those people who find meditation a better process for me rather than journaling, so Richey gave me a wonderful statement, saying that we are hyper-intelligent human beings and that the mere fact that we can bend our finger at will and take a deep breath when we want to and feel everything we are thinking is astonishing. “Meditation allows you to tap into your ‘control panel’ and to be able to look at your processing system and to look at the parts that you haven’t processed,” explains Richey. Meditation is an inner tool that you can strengthen; just like doing push-ups, you stimulate and grow your brain and mind-muscle and your meditation practice, which allows you to deepen the connection to yourself.
“A beautiful thing going into this new year and releasing the old and building the new is to always start with self-reflection on the past year, not necessarily reflect on the year but reflecting on all the different stages of being, emotional phases, and cycles you went through in your year that you either liked or didn’t like and then reflecting on that, and looking at the things you didn’t like and to brainstorm different ways to go about similar situations while using the beneficial cycles you had as tools and reverence to then energise the changes that you are making going into the new year,” says Richey.
It was an energising interview, and I loved every part of it. I hope this article resonates with you and inspires you to take that ‘pause’ and just breathe going into the new year.