As we approach the New Year, it is easy to get frustrated looking back at past resolutions that have flopped. It is easy to fall right back into the same cycles. We make the same resolutions and say “I’ll do better this year” then a few weeks into the new year they fall to the wayside, AGAIN!
That happens, when we expect to wake up on January 1st miraculously a different person, the whole “New Year, New Me” BS . That’s not the way it works. Research says it takes a minimum of 21 days to break a bad habit or start a new one.
If we truly want to make lasting change, a strong foundation must be built and we must take small daily steps to achieve our goals. The sparklers we light to ring in the New Year aren't magic wands that make things change overnight.
Nature inherently provides us time in Late Autumn and Early Winter to slow down and cocoon. We are invited to practice gratitude, celebrate our achievements, and grieve our losses.
As our modern society has moved further away from agricultural calendars and we are surrounded by artificial lights, many of the lessons we can learn from natural rhythms and cycles have been lost. Hustle culture and capitalism encourages us to work non-stop to achieve goals and purchase things we don’t need or truly want. This moves us away from alignment and closer to burnout.
It can be easy to know what we don’t want to bring with us. We can often dwell on the hard lessons we’ve learned and the pain that we experienced. This puts us in a low vibration and our ability to shine brightly becomes harder. Releasing what no longer serves us is just like clearing out luggage before we start packing for a new trip. You want to free up space for new things.
We can achieve this by looking at what went well and what we implemented to shift the scales towards alignment and higher vibration. The hustle and bustle culture we live in makes it easy to get sucked back into the vortex of rushing, doing, not living mindfully in the present moment, which causes us to slip out of alignment. You may have heard the phrase “take 1 step forward and 10 steps back”. That is exactly what happens when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the vortex. We didn’t learn the lesson fully the first time - to pause and evaluate from a place of alignment and we are forced to try again. If we take time to evaluate the past year, what worked and what didn’t, that allows us to make preparations to move into alignment, be our most authentic self, up-level, and ultimately manifest our dreams.
Remember no one is perfect. It is easy to fall into old cycles and get sucked into the vortex. This is completely natural. Have compassion for yourself if this happens, pause, and evaluate the situation. Find your center, feel into what feels in alignment, make a plan of action, then proceed.
I invite you...
to set aside some time in the next few weeks to think back over the past year and consider what you want to bring with you into 2023 and what you want to leave behind. The following journaling prompts will help.
Grab your journal (or a word doc if you keep a digital version) rather than a scrap piece of paper for this exercise - so you can return to it in the future.
Ask yourself…
Who was I going into this year?
Who did I become this year?
What do I like about the person I became
How does that make me feel?
What changes were implemented or strategies made this easier?
What didn’t quite work and what were the lessons to be learned from these experiences?
Moving into the new year, how do I want to feel - what do I want to do more of?
What lessons and strategies do I want to bring with me into the new year, so I can feel this way, do the things I want, and live from a place of alignment?
- Lauren
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