The year 2015 holds endless possibilities for us all. Personally for me, I’m planning what I hope will be a successful book tour promoting my new book, “When Everything Changed: My Journey from Physician to Patient.” In addition, I’m also launching a new company that I have co-founded, WOW Health Group LLC, an organization that promotes and manages a portfolio of companies that uniquely challenge how healthcare is delivered in the United States and how we as consumers experience our own health.

Part of my vision for WOW Health Group stems from my fascination with the human desire for renewal and new beginnings. St. Benedict in his Rule for monasteries writes, “Always we begin again.” This impulse is the heart of what makes anticipation of the New Year kindle all of our longings for a richer way of being in the world. There is something so very hopeful to me in this fundamental impulse. January 1st brings out our fervent desires for the future and our commitments to change, whatever that entails. Our inclination is usually a set of “resolutions” aimed at working harder for whatever it is we want or fixing our self-perceived flaws. There is nothing wrong with making resolutions. However, they often aim very high without first cultivating the change of heart necessary to prepare space for these new possibilities to take root. People are hungering for more depth to this time of transition. We are recognizing the opportunity of a threshold. Doors and thresholds offer us potent symbols of new and unexplored possibilities. They can evoke a sense of powerful potential and both internal and external worlds we have yet to explore.

One of the reasons our secular celebration of the New Year is often so disappointing is that we do not take time to prepare ourselves for this time. We begin the year full of resolutions and promises to ourselves to perhaps eat better, exercise more, work less or find more time for friends or for ourselves. But these resolutions often rise up out of our sense of scarcity and the busyness and immediate desires we feel at the surface of our lives. Consider taking some time to prepare — even if only for an hour or two — to really listen for the deeper longings pulsing within you. What emerges from that place of stillness and grounding in your holiness and goodness, rather than from a list of your shortcomings? What new doors are waiting within you to be opened?

In the Jewish tradition, the New Year begins with the ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in autumn. During this time, Jews reflect on those relationships during the past year that need reconciliation, recognizing that the way to move forward in more fullness is by acknowledging those places where we have failed another person in the past and then making amends. Is there someone you have hurt this past year through your words or actions? Is it possible to ask for their forgiveness? Is there someone who has hurt you this past year through words or actions? Can you offer them forgiveness?

As you make a fresh start in the dawn of the new beginnings you are creating, may you make friends with newness and know deep within that the God who keeps revealing new things to us, also fills us with hope for a future of peace.