As we welcome the New Year, many will be making the traditional new year resolutions to change their lives in 2010. What will you be resolving to do? Get fit? Lose weight? Give up smoking? Change jobs? There is an endless list of possibilities. So many things you can change, do differently, do better or give up.
Often we start off with best intentions and manage to stick to our resolution for some while. So often, however, a few days, weeks or months down the line, we have reverted to old habits and feel a sense of failure. Year after year we do this to ourselves. And what it does is reinforce the ideas that we are not good enough, not attractive enough, not strong enough, not persistent enough....
How about looking at things a little differently this year? How about a resolution to be kinder to ourselves, appreciate our strengths and celebrate our uniqueness? If we can go into the new year with a greater sense of ease and relaxation, we may find that our lives find more of a balance in the areas that we struggle with.
In every unfolding moment life is doing its thing beautifully and perfectly. While we obsess about "making things right" we are too much in our head to notice the beauty and vibrancy of each moment. We are effectively not living, as life is only what is here right now. We can have thoughts about what has gone before but there is no life in the past. We can have thoughts about the future, but the future is not alive either. Life exists in what is right now!
Let us celebrate what is in this moment - if it is extra pounds, slack muscles, a drag on a cigarette - all is valid and embraced in the moment. Let us not go into denial about what is actually happening. Often when we accept something and allow the light to shine on it, it loses importance and recedes.
I sincerely hope that this will be a wonderful year for you, that you notice life playing out in front of you in each moment, and that you wonder at the miracle and mystery of it all in 2010.
