It’s a new year and everyone is making huge plans. There’s a new start, clean slate and another chance to get it right. What pressure!

Social pressure encourages us to make big plans, live your biggest life, change the world, lean in, make it count.

It can seem like everyone is planning amazing goals, but what if that’s not possible for you?

I believe that we need kindness more than admonishment and pressure. (Click to Tweet!)

Lasting, healing change happens organically to the schedule of your body, not when an artificially constructed calendar turns over.

I’m refusing to pressure myself just because of a calendar invented hundreds of years ago by a Pope, who obviously never met me, and probably would have branded me a witch if he had.

I don’t believe that in one year, if we work hard enough, are good enough, if we cleanse, detox, manifest, and work on ourselves enough, we will have a perfect life. Maybe this is the perfect life, the one with pains and dropped stitches and jumping cds and wonky photos.

 

Often resolutions are used a way of pursuing perfectionism and escaping what is. We try to escape the very human aspects of life – pain, sorrow, grief, hurt, anger through intellectualising, and self-help.

Instead, can we see life as a spiral, where we take turns at challenges again and again, learning more each time. We move not upwards but deeper and wider.

I invite you to do this new year, YOUR way:

– Celebrate at a time that works for you, not necessarily January.

– Notice the pressure to conform and fix yourself, unpick that tangle before you make a commitment.

– Value your achievements however large or small.

– Take the new year as an opportunity to celebrate rather than critique.

Wishing you a sensational 2015, my dear. I know it will be sensational, because you are.

Image courtesy of Juskteez Vu.