A Spiritual Reset Routine: Clearing My Internal Filter Through Shared Thresholds

I’ve started thinking about certain times of year as giant dryer-lint cleanings.

I’ve lived with ADHD since childhood, and it still affects me to this day. Over the past few years, some health challenges also intensified symptoms that were already familiar to me. Thankfully, medical treatment has helped significantly.

But even with that improvement, I’ve continued to notice something I’ve seen for years: my access to executive functioning changes pretty dramatically across different seasons.

During a period of intensive partnered trauma-healing work, I started paying closer attention to that pattern.

And something clicked.

After the High Holidays, especially in October and November, I tend to have unusually strong access to my executive functioning. I often experience something similar in January and February, after the Gregorian New Year.

Same brain. 

Less static.

What I began to notice about access

This was interesting to me because I already do a lot of ongoing tending.

I journal. I pray. I walk. I have reflective conversations. I engage in trauma-healing work. I use accommodations and practices that support my mind, body, and spirit.

Emotional and spiritual depth are very comfortable territory for me.

So why did these particular times seem to make such a difference?

That’s where the dryer-lint metaphor came in.

All of those regular practices are part of the laundering process. The washing and drying is happening.

And still, lint accumulates.

There’s the grief that didn’t quite move all the way through. The urgency that became background noise. The old story I stopped noticing. The emotional residue of living, working, leading, relating, and being awake in a complicated world.

Even with deep work, some static builds up.

And I began to wonder whether these larger New Year moments were helping me clear the filter.

What feels different about a shared reset

The phrase that emerged for me was shared reset.

Rosh Hashanah is my primary spiritual New Year. There is a deep sense that a chapter is closing and another is beginning, and I’m experiencing that turn alongside millions of other people.

The Gregorian New Year holds much less spiritual meaning for me. We also live within Christian hegemony, which shapes why January 1 carries so much collective weight in the first place.

And still, I am a sucker for an intentional moment.

So I use it.

What matters to me is the sense that I am participating in something larger than my own private decision to start fresh.

Every breath can be a reset.

Every morning can be a reset.

But those moments do not always carry the same collective momentum for me.

A shared threshold does.

I can feel, consciously or otherwise, that other people are also marking an ending and a beginning.

And that seems to matter.

Kanaka Creek Regional Park

What I mean by a spiritual reset

For me, this is a simple process of noticing that I am entering a new moment and allowing myself to release some of what has accumulated.

Sometimes that happens around a major threshold like Rosh Hashanah.

I’ve also experimented with smaller versions through Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh, moon cycles, seasonal transitions, and other moments that carry some sense of shared turning.

The scale can vary.

The important piece for me is recognizing:

Something has ended.

Something new is beginning.

I get to meet this moment freshly.

There may be a kavana, an intention, but even that is optional.

Sometimes the reset itself is enough.

The internal spiritual reset routine

This can be very simple.

1) Notice the collective threshold

Recognize that you are entering a new moment.

For me, it helps when I know other people are marking that transition too.

Rosh Hashanah. Shabbat. Rosh Chodesh. A new moon. The beginning of a month. A seasonal transition. A new week.

Let yourself really notice: something is turning, opening, and beginning anew, for me and others, too!

2) Take a few deeper breaths

I often take a few breaths and let my mind and body settle into the reality that this is a new moment.

Often I feel chills or what I like to call a "Shekhinah shower" or "God bumps" moving through my body and personal energy field.

Sometimes it’s quieter than that.

The point is simply to let myself register the transition and anchor that shared newness into my embodied and energetic experience.

3) Release most of the lint

I imagine releasing accumulated noise, static, or residue back to Spirit, God/dess, and/or the Earth. You can release it back to or whatever larger holding feels true for you.

We don’t need to catalog everything.

We don’t need to resolve every issue.

We're simply clearing what is available to clear.

4) Notice what becomes easier to access

When some of the static clears, fresh thoughts sometimes become available. Usually not immediately (though that's definitely possible), but in the hours and days that follow.

A different possibility.

A clearer next step.

Something I knew but couldn’t access as easily through the accumulated mental and energetic debris.

This is one of the things I find most refreshing and interesting about the practice.

5) Bonus, but not necessary: Let a kavana, a mindful intention, emerge, if one wants to

Sometimes I set a kavana for the next stretch of the journey.

I’m not setting a goal. I’m orienting.

And often my questions are very simple:

What's the next, gentle, yet firm step I can take toward greater alignment?

What would I love to experience or accomplish?

What nourishing, visionary, and/or loving choices can I make from here?

Where is my heart guiding me? How can I mind assist, instead of inhibit?

What makes sense from precisely where I am now?

That last question matters deeply to me.

The more the intention honors where I actually am, the smoother my aspiration journey will be from that place of clarity.

Shared thresholds I’ve successfully experimented with

Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe

This is the biggest shared reset of the year for me.

Rosh Hashanah carries spiritual, communal, ancestral, and personal meaning. And the Days of Awe invite a much deeper process of return.

Teshuvah, return, has become one of the Jewish concepts I love most.

There is something powerful about being invited, together, to return to our inherent goodness and Divinity, again and again.

Shabbat

I’ve experimented with allowing Shabbat to function as a smaller weekly clearing.

A week has ended. I can enter the spiritual portal of Shabbat's 25-hour sanctuary to water seeds of personal and collective dreams through rest, nourishment, song, reflection, prayer, solitude, and joy.

And at Shabbat's conclusion, another rhythm begins.

Even when my observance is simple, honoring and internalizing the shared reset and threshold crossing helps create more spaciousness and room for better executive function.

Rosh Chodesh and moon cycles

I’ve also tried this around Rosh Chodesh and the cycles of the moon.

Monthly shared resets can be especially helpful because I don’t necessarily want to wait six months for a giant filter cleaning, and sometimes weeks and get away from me. 

I also love that, traditionally, Rosh Chodesh is a lovely time to immense in the sacred waters of the mikveh, ritual bath. 

When I don't have time to schedule an official mikvah visit, I will do a "mini-mikveh" shower experience and it's suprisingly refreshing, even if not quite as much as going to a mikveh or flowing natural body of water. 

The Gregorian New Year

January 1 is not my spiritual New Year.

That said, I am a sucker for shared opportunities for mindfulness and intention setting! And millions upon millions of people are collectively experiencing a sense of transition, reflection, and beginning again on January 1. How lovely!

For me, there can be value in consciously leveraging that collective momentum while remaining clear about where my own deepest spiritual center lives.

Nature’s New Year: The Spring Equinox

The spring equinox feels like another kind of shared reset: nature’s New Year.

It marks a shared threshold written into the Earth’s relationship with the sun, as day and night reach near balance and the light begins to take up more space.

This one's cool because I don't just share this shared reset with much of humanity, but all of Mother Nature in my region of the world! All my neighboring sentient beings.

What a holy, wild, and vibrant shared renewal!

It’s an invitation to emerge from dormancy, notice what is beginning to stir, and ask what wants to grow in the season ahead.

Why I’m sharing this

I haven’t heard many people talk about shared resets in quite this way.

And I would be delighted if someone else who experiences significant shifts in executive functioning, energy, clarity, or access tried this on and discovered something useful for themselves, too.

I’m especially interested in it because the practice is not elaborate, though it can be profound nonetheless. 

It has been for me.

You can make it elaborate, though, if that nourishes and delights your spirit!

We explored some of these themes in greater depth during a recent Grounded & Growing COP live call, particularly around teshuvah, intention, return, renewal, and what becomes possible when some of the static clears.

For now, I’m continuing to experiment and affirm the efficacy of this practice.

And as Rosh Hashanah approaches, I’m particularly curious because I already feel more present, grounded, and spacious than I have in quite some time.

So I’m wondering:

What else might become available when I clear the lint from the filter?

Here’s to wishing all, whether you observe Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe, the full or new moon, the beginning of a new week, or another meaningful threshold, a deep and cleansing shared energetic reset.

May much ambient static clear.

May fresh thoughts bloom.

May you find your way back to what is loving, joyful, and true for you, in your present wonderful form, right now.