January is a month to make changes. The New Year implies new beginnings. There is a sense that we can jumpstart our lives and become new people. Perhaps more than any other time of the year, this is when we think about personal transformation. And the world's religions support us in this. As Sam Keen once put it, "The great metaphors from all spiritual traditions — grace, liberation, being born again, awakening from illusion — testify that it is possible to transcend the conditioning of my past and do a new thing."

To honor this truth, and to reinforce it with a daily practice, we have gathered songs and videos that celebrate change. Music videos for some of the songs are linked off this page. For a fuller list, visit our playlist at Fiql.com. Transformation begins with the personal, moves through our relationships, and turns political when we seek real and meaningful changes in the world.

It is time to shed old habits and travel with the winds of change. Here are a few quotes to get you going.

• "To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed very often."
— John Henry Cardinal Newman

• "It is the closing of the heart far more than the closing of the mind that keeps folk from transformation and deepening."
— Jean Houston

• "The ultimate goal is to transform the world into the kind of world God had in mind when He created it."
— Harold Kushner

• "Nothing is more crucial to our lives or more central to the heart of God than the transformation of the human personality."
— Richard J. Foster

Transformation Videos

• Bob Dylan: The Times they Are a Changin
• Doboloh: Winds of Change Meditation
• The Beatles: Revolution
• John Lennon: (Just Like) Starting Over
• Yahwehking: A New Beginning Meditation
• Bee Gees: Children of the World
• Yvonne Elliman: Everything Must Change
• Druwin: Seeds of Change
• Kimberley Locke: Change
• Justin King: Change
• Indigo Moss: Start Over Again
• Beverley Knight: Queen of Starting Over
• Pulp: Something Changed
• Social Change through the Power
of Peace
• Carrie Newcomer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Holly Near: Light of Change
• Judy Collins and Pete Seeger: Turn Turn Turn
• Buffe Sainte-Marie: The Circle Game
• Tracy Chapman: A New Beginning
• Vangelis: A New Beginning at Hadrian's Wall


Transformation Songs Playlist
• See a longer playlist of songs about change, change, and more change