What 2025 Was Really Training You For
If you’re closing out 2025 feeling reflective, tender, tired, wrung out like a sponge, or strangely wiser than you were twelve months ago, this is for you.
This is not a “set goals and smash next year” post. Not because goals are not important, but because for many people, this year was not about getting more - it was about getting through.
To become someone who can actually hold more.
Because if 2025 didn’t give you what you thought you wanted or what you were trying to manifest, it might have given you something far more important than the thing itself.
The truth about manifestation that people skip over
One of the biggest misunderstandings around the law of attraction is that manifestation is about getting what you want quickly, joyfully, and without any inner work.
But manifestation does not work on desire alone.
It works through capacity.
Your capacity to receive, yes, but also your capacity to hold what you receive without self-sabotage, panic, over-control, or fear of losing it.
Capacity is not built through comfort. It’s built through being stretched.
So if your year felt slow, confronting, uncomfortable, or destabilising at times, that doesn’t mean you failed. It can mean your foundations were being strengthened.
Fear-based manifesting and the pre-emptive strike
A lot of people think they’re manifesting when they’re actually reacting.
They’re not creating from pure desire. They’re creating from fear.
They’re taking action to stop the thing they don’t want from happening - the pre-emptive strike.
It can look like:
Over-planning because you’re scared of uncertainty
Chasing outcomes because you’re scared to feel what’s underneath
Trying to control people, timing, money, or relationships so you can feel safe
Doing “all the right manifestation things” while your nervous system is wired and braced
When fear is underneath desire, life often feels like it slows down. Like the universe is blocking you. Like you’re being tested.
But what if it wasn’t punishment?
What if it was protection?
Because if you manifest from a dysregulated system, you might get the thing, but it becomes another thing to manage, protect, and fear losing. That is not freedom.
The only way out is in
One of the most annoying truths on this path is also the one that changes everything.
The feeling you’re searching for, safety, stability, love, peace, has to come from within.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to desire beautiful things. You do.
It means the deeper work is learning to become the energy you keep searching for outside of yourself.
The only way out is in.
If you can feel that in your body, you’ll understand why this year may have been one of your biggest initiations.
The quiet proof that you grew this year
Growth isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it’s the absence of chaos.
Sometimes it’s catching a pattern earlier.
Sometimes it’s being less willing to abandon yourself.
So as you close the year, ask yourself:
What am I able to hold now that I couldn’t hold a year ago?
What reactions have softened?
What patterns am I catching earlier?
Where am I less willing to say yes when I mean no?
These are signs the work is landing, even if the external results aren’t perfect yet.
If 2025 stripped something away, it may be because it was never meant to come with you.
If something didn’t arrive, it may be because you were being prepared, not punished.
Prepared for something more sustainable.
Listen to the full episode
I go much deeper into all of this in the podcast episode: What This Year Was Really Training You For, including the energetic and nervous system side of why things can feel delayed, and how to close the year without pressure to reinvent yourself overnight.
The full episode is linked here
Want to go deeper?
If you’d like personalised support moving into the new year:
Explore one-to-one coaching HERE
Listen to my guided meditations on Insight Timer HERE
Download the free Energetic Reset guide HERE
Thank you for being here, and thank you for doing the deeper work, even when it isn’t glamorous.
Love Salarah x
