Resolutions

A New Year is known as a time for making resolutions – promises to ourselves and others, usually involving a commitment to be somehow “better” than we are.   Pure hard-fisted willpower is often the tool of choice for achieving these newly stated goals.  As we all know, these resolutions typically don’t last very long, and become a distant memory in a few short weeks. 

Sometimes I have tried the same resolution using different tools – for example replacing willpower over consumption of cookies and chocolate, with a gym membership.  Well, that doesn’t work either, as the well documented drop-off in gym attendance by February attests!  More often I go for different resolutions using the same tool – usually defined as “more willpower”.   Most of us will recognize the idea that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result”.  So why do we insist on making “resolutions” over and over again while almost always achieving the same failed result?  Oh! – and then beat ourselves up about it again and again too!   Sounds like that definition of insanity, doesn’t it?

If I go with the assumption that resolutions to be somehow “better” are an intrinsically good idea, I have to consider that perhaps the tools I am employing to achieve it need to change.   The gym membership didn’t change anything, so could it be that instead of looking forward, I first have to look back to discover why I cannot make it past 8 visits?  What is blocking me from achieving whatever I am resolved to do? By understanding the environment in which I have lived and grown all these years, could I better understand myself now? 

The past holds many things for all of us – a balance of happy and sad memories, confidence and fear of failure, safety and insecurity, acceptance and rejection, feeling loved and unloved.  The list of contrasts is endless but the point is the same – we are all shaped, influenced and affected by our past experiences.  Some of us will find we are more inclined to filter our experiences as positive, and others are more inclined to see negative.  What is undeniable is that we all hold both positive AND negative experiences.  That’s just the way life is.

I have a perspective that wisdom is like living water – it nourishes and cleanses and leads to healing around the circumstances, people, places, and events that have been negatives in our lives.  This wisdom or living water, is not found on the mountaintops of life.  Water does not flow up there.  I contend that the most valuable wisdom is found where water does flow, downhill into the deepest and darkest valleys of our lives.  For me, these valleys have looked like marriage to an alcoholic, struggling with codependency, a divorce, an identity crisis of a dearly loved child. These valleys represent the very hardest places I’ve had to navigate or climb out of.  Yet it has been from these dark places that I encountered the cleansing and healing of the wisdom – the living water- I found there.  It equipped me to trudge out, putting one foot in front of the other.  With the water and wisdom found along the way, I found myself halfway, and then one day, at the top of that mountain.   The view from the top is the best – but you have to climb first so that you can see it.

This offers another way of looking at the negative experiences in our lives.  Despite how we recall or remember them, what can they teach us that could give us transformative wisdom now?  It can be very scary to look an experience that caused us pain.  And yet the people, places and events that comprise our experiences, become an intrinsic part of us.  Just because we choose to ignore the pain does not make the pain go away.   Instead, the pain slowly infiltrates other areas of our lives, coming out in repetitive behaviors we find hard to understand.  Someone once said to me that wet leaves swept under a rug don’t disappear – they rot and fester.  It is a good analogy.  The things that have hurt us the most have to be brought out of the dark so they can be exposed, truth revealed, so that we can climb out and be free of their hold on us. 

So back to a resolution about going to the gym.  Most women are unhappy with something they see in the mirror and proceed to affirm all sorts of negative messages about themselves (I must be…too short, too fat, too thin, too ugly, wrong hair, wrong legs…fill in the blank).  Where or from whom did that message about yourself come?  You were not born with it.  Why do you believe it?  How does it impact taking care of yourself?   What needs to happen to that message to transform it?  What is actually true about you?  If you could see a glimpse of you own inner and outer beauty maybe for the first time, how would it change your resolution or how you leveraged available tools to accomplish it?   How would it be if you went to the gym because your new message and understanding about yourself was “I AM WORTHY - worthy of the time and resources to invest in self-care”? 

So this new year, honor your past by being prepared to look at the things that have been hard to face.  Find the wisdom that allows you to transform the negative experiences in your life so that you can positively change your future.  Come to a Women Revealed weekend, repeat a weekend you have done before with a new issue you want to look at.  Engage with a gold group – there are many, each offering a varied curriculum that offers new insights and tools you can use.  Discover what a community of women committed to unconditional acceptance and personal growth work can do for you.