As we’re getting closer to the end of this year and closer to the new year, a lot of people start thinking about resolutions and goals and changes they’d like to make.
This time of year can be a natural time of reflection, when we reflect on the past year and think about the things we’d like to experience, see, change, and cultivate in our lives.
While I haven’t made resolutions in years, I understand that there is power in the collective energy of this time of year—it genuinely feels, at least on some level, that there’s a shift, a fresh beginning, that there’s an open future we’re walking into.
With that said, here are three reminders we can carry with us into the new year—and throughout each and every moment of each and every day of our lives.
3 Powerful Reminders to Carry with us into the New Year:
1. We can make a change anytime in our lives, in any moment.
We don’t have to wait until the new year or the next day or the next hour. We can start right now. Often, people, especially around this time of the year, plan for making changes in the new year—but the truth is that we can make changes in any moment of our lives. We don’t have to wait for Monday or the next day or month or even hour. We definitely don’t have to wait for a new year.
We can decide right now, in this moment, to make the changes we want to make. Do we want to shift our thoughts or beliefs or mindsets? Do we want to change certain patterns or behaviors? Would we like to cultivate a new routine or habit or action? Is there something we’d like to let go of? Is there something we want to work toward or achieve? Is there something we’d like to prioritize or introduce into our lives? Is there a new way we’d like to live our lives? What do we want? We can ask ourselves this every day, and we can make these changes every day, in any moment.
We can act and shift and change and cultivate and work toward anything that we want—right now.
2. Our perspective determines how we view the world; look for the opportunities, the lessons, the positive.
We view the world through our own, personal filters. We all have our habitual ways of reacting to the world. Most of what we do and how we behave is governed by our subconscious—by thoughts and beliefs we may not even consciously know that we have.
We may not always be able to decide or choose or determine what happens to us in our lives, but we can choose how we react to it, how we experience it. If we can look for the opportunity, the lesson, what we can learn, it’s a powerful way of shifting our perspective, especially in more difficult situations. Yes, something we experience may be difficult, but what is our opportunity here? What can we learn? What are we being presented with? And we can learn to sit with the more difficult things by understanding we’re holding space for ourselves and connecting more deeply with ourselves through it.
We can also actively look for the good things, the simple, beautiful things we appreciate. We can spend more time noticing and paying attention to the beautiful and wonderful things around us. We can practice presence and being deeply present in our lives.
3. It’s important to move with what feels right to us.
We all have conditioning—we have thoughts and beliefs about ourselves and the world. We may have expectations of ourselves and others may have expectations of us (or we may perceive that others have expectations of us whether they actually do or not). But we can always choose to move with what feels right to us.
What do we want? What feels right to the deepest parts of us? We can think about this in big ways (big life changes) or even in small ways—do we really want to do our usual morning routine, or are we actually yearning for something else instead?
We have an inner guide, an inner compass—a soft, peaceful place inside of us that knows our hearts, what we long for, and who we are. We can always choose to move with what feels right to us.
It’s important for us to realize that we have the power to choose how we act in life, in each moment. We can move toward what we want, we can learn to be present with ourselves, and we can learn to accept the flow of life while staying tuned into our heart and how we feel and what it is that we want.
We can cultivate and change habits and actions and thoughts and behaviors. We can choose to act differently or shift something. We can discover a new layer of ourselves, let go of previously unseen filters. We can move in alignment with our hearts and who we truly are. We can cultivate self-awareness.
We don’t have to wait until the new year to do the things we want to do—to make the changes we want to make or experience the things we want to experience. We can do it all now; we can do it moment by moment.
These are reminders we can carry with us into every new year—and every moment of our lives.
~
AUTHOR: LISA ERICKSON
IMAGE: FREESTOCKS/UNSPLASH
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