“New Year New Me” is Old News

Hey Technically Spiritual fam… How are your well-being habits holding up? Is anyone out there still going strong with New Year's Resolutions?

Hang on – this is not a moment for shame. I only ask because it’s completely normal and common for those aspirations to not really make it past January.

[Oftentimes, we set goals for ourselves that are not sustainable, realistic, or truthfully, not even goals WE want, but something we’re told we should want. Perhaps they’re even the standard thrust upon us by capitalism - products like journals or personal trainers that benefit from that “New Year New Me” push without any real thought to comprehensive well-being. Or, maybe they were real, important goals you made for yourself, and yet they always seem to fall to the backburner. For mindful habit-building tips, click here.]

It’s a universal experience that we find ourselves reliving or confronting the same lessons over and over again.

This self-improvement (I’d rather think of it as healing rather than compulsory growth for growth’s sake) is a lifelong practice, just like mindfulness and meditation are. No matter how hard we may have tried to rework them, no matter how long we've been practicing, these are lifelong and ongoing efforts, which means milestones and calendars aren’t the best tools.

Around New Year, we may recognize patterns we thought we left behind last year, or realize we've been on autopilot for weeks due to some outside stressor.

Why does this happen?

Because: There are no hard and fast rules about what healing and growth should look like – no handy one-size-fits-all tool or standard (like New Year Resolution trends) that’s actually impactful and sustainable. Unfortunately, we can’t really copy-paste someone else’s approach or template because we are different people living different lives.

So what can we do instead? How can we prioritize our own growth or well-being in a way that’s healthy, realistic, and utilizes the right tools?

We inject mindfulness - which is a habitual practice all on its own.

Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating presence with an accepting attitude. When we approach habits or self-improvement this way, we can become attuned to reality (not caught up in old stories or patterns) and give ourselves grace when progress is slow or things don't go as planned.

While life continues to unfold in new and unexpected ways no matter our plans, mindfulness gives us more access to stillness amidst chaos and adaptability amidst change.

Mindfulness gives us the tools to deeply check in with ourselves, our progress, our feelings, the present moment, and operate from a place of groundedness and truth (not New Year New Me, pressurized spontaneity and comparison).

Mindfulness also continuously provides us with sorely-needed perspective checks.

In reality, though these moments of repeating old or harmful habits can feel disappointing or like we've failed in some way, I encourage you to get a change in perspective: one that might reveal you haven't been going in circles, but rather upwards in a spiral.

No practice meant to help us heal or grow is linear. No calendar determines your success or failure rate.

So as the New Year New Me ads bombard our feed, as other people’s standards are held above our heads, return to mindfulness. It’s the one tool all of us have, however that looks for us in any given moment, to remind us about why we’re here and where we’d like to go next.

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