Engaging qualities of being for the new year!

​Good morning and Happy New Year!

Actually it is New Year's Eve morning, and I woke with you on my mind. I want to wish you a happy new year, and reflect on how to take advantage of this moment of beginning.

I know we can get down on ourselves about having set resolutions so many times and not followed through the way we had intended.

It can seem like it is not worth it to set yourself up for this kind of disappointment again.

Let me see if I can do something with this idea.

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On the plane home last night, coming home from being with my family for the holidays, I began to think about goals and resolutions. It is a hopeful moment infused with an energy of possibility. I love it because for this moment I let go of the weight of the todo's and lean into the lightness of possibility. 

I start with goals- resolutions are a next step.

I think about my personal goals first and then my professional goals, because my personal goals are the groundwork for everything else.

It is good if they can be very tangible- like, for me, training for a back packing trip with my daughter this summer on the Appalachian trail. Truly there is a lot I need to do to make it so that I am capable of this adventure! But what a win/win! I will become stronger and more confident in my body again! And I am so excited to share this with my daughter!

It was fun to start to break it down into all the constituent parts and begin to see how it will fit into my daily life. Like right after I write this, I will be heading out to take a hike in the woods.

The resolutions are more like the practices that will help you get to the goals. So in my example it is practices like the morning rituals of exercise, the afternoon rituals of movement breaks and physical therapy type exercises to strengthen my knees and ankles. 

If I think of them more like practices and less like chores, they have a quality of self-care and loving awareness. 

And this leads me to the main point of this whole ramble- which is about the qualities of being.

After I have set some goals in my mind, and looked at the practices that will get me there, I always ask myself what qualities of being will help. And then I call in those qualities of being.

Huh?

Surely I have mentioned this before so forgive me if it is getting old.

What I am talking about one of my teachers calls divine qualities and another teacher calls transpersonal qualities. They are things like courage, hope, simplicity, play, levity, compassion, calm, groundedness. They all sound good, or at least the ones I am talking about do.

There are, of course, the opposite qualities available as well. It may be that you are swimming in some of the uncomfortable ones without even knowing it. They are things like fear, anxiety, heaviness, hate, discouragement.

So the practice is to look at your goals for the year, and check in with yourself- how are you feeling about it? When it has gone bad in the past, in what way has it felt bad? And then what quality or two or three, but not too many, would be most helpful going forward? 

For me, when I have tried to get in better shape, I have found myself in a cycle of should's and heavy handed discipline and then resistance and rebellion- the chocolate and sugar calls so strongly any time I declare I am going to lose weight. Even just sitting here writing this I can feel the heaviness and stagnation that makes this goal almost impossible. I think there is even some self-loathing in the water.

Yuck. No wonder it falls apart!

So for me, as I move into the new year, I am calling in Love, Play and Compassion.

I will be writing them large somewhere in my bedroom so I wake with them and go to sleep with them.

I will be taking the time, and I invite you to join me, to notice, with an openness to seeing and feeling it, what painful qualities are stirring in me. And then I will wrap myself in compassion and love- opening my heart to let the qualities pour in. And when I feel the self care doing its healing work, I will invite play and light hearted pleasure to the party. 

This is what I want to bring to my personal goals and also what I want to bring to my professional goals. Strike that- it is what I choose to bring to my personal and professional goals. 

Want is infused with a sense of scarcity- I want something I do not have. Choice is infused with empowerment. I have options, as we all do, at any time. The compassion, love and play are all there available at any time, as are the nagging self- deprecation and feelings of deep disappointment.

It is a radical thought and I invite you into it:

Choose how you want to be with yourself and the world around you. And then Nourish that choice in your daily practices. 

So the New Year's Resolution to get in shape for my big adventure in the summer is really a resolution to keep coming back to an awareness practice and choosing to call in the qualities that make me feel good and help me to put engage the work that I do in a positive way.

• What is your goal?
• What are the practices that will get you there?
• How does it feel when it starts to turn bad?
• What are the qualities that you choose to bring to it?

I would love to hear what yours are! In fact, I bet it would be super energizing for all of us if there was a way to share all of this with each other.

Have a really fun transition into 2024! 
Warmly,
Val