Happy New Year!
I love New Year. I’m a sucker for the idea of a fresh start. A new beginning. A clean slate.
As a child, I also loved New Year, but mainly as a way of prolonging Christmas. I always had a strong sense of loss and mourning when the long, magical weeks of anticipation up to Christmas came crashing to a brutal end at bedtime on Christmas day. New Year seemed to offer a new mini countdown to something festive and a softer transition into normal non-Christmas life.
Although I’ve always loved New Year, I’ve had a more ambivalent relationship with New Year’s resolutions.
In my teens and twenties, I jumped on the classic bandwagon of making lots of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions, only to break them all within weeks and feel like I’d failed the whole year. I then actively chose not to make any resolutions for years, as I resisted the idea that a specific date should decide when I was ready to change old and try new habits.
I now really enjoy using the New Year as a time of reflection and review. A time to remember what’s important to me and whether my daily choices are helping me prioritise what I value or are perhaps getting in the way. I like to reflect and set intentions rather than make resolutions. Giving space and recognising all the things that I’m grateful for and which work well in my life, is just as important as looking at the areas that I’d like to be different. Of course intentions can be set and reviewed any day of the year, but there’s something so tempting about doing it over New Year…
Here is an audio for a guided meditation, in which I guide you how to work out what’s important to you in your life and how you can set New Year’s intentions based upon it. Click on the link below. It lasts 11 minutes. I hope you like it and find it useful. I’d love to know in the comments below.
Wishing you all a 2019 full of peace, love and fun
Sx
