This time of year we are inundated by blogs, magazines, and advertisers offering a frenzy of self-improvement ideas, picking a word for the new year, or creating a vision board to help manifest your desires.
Whatever ails you, there is a class or a book out there, something you can buy, or something you can do to make it all better sometime in the future.
Really???
I’d like to offer my thoughts for a new year.
My New Year’s resolution this year has nothing to do with working on self-improvement, creating a new better me, fixing myself, or making resolutions to lose weight, get in shape, or anything else. I decided to continue to choose to focus on loving who I really am—now, in this moment.
The desire to be different, be better, to become more, is so common to so many of us. I think it is a cause of immense pain, to try and try to become something different than who we really are.
I believe everything I need is already inside me.
In this busy, noisy, world, it’s sometimes hard to stop and listen, to tune in to who and what I really am and to choose joy in the moment instead of some promise of nirvana in the future.
“With my heart bruised by my failures to live my desire to love myself and others well, it becomes painfully obvious to me that the intention to live consistent with soul-felt desires is not enough, even when those desires are deeply felt and clearly articulated. I want to know why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be…
[…]One night, after several months of writing, one of the elders who has appeared in my dreams for over fifteen years…comes and speaks to me while I sleep. ‘Wrong question, Oriah,’ she says. ‘The question is not why are we so infrequently the people we really want to be. The question is why do we so infrequently want to be the people we really are.’ ” — Oriah Mountain Dreamer
How do we choose to “want to be the people we really are?”
It is deceptively simple (though not easy). It starts with simple acceptance of what is, including who you are now, in this moment. If you are in pain or feeling difficult feelings, tune into them. Notice how they move and change when you allow them to simply be without trying to fix or change them.
Notice the unkind things you say to yourself inside your mind all the time, and instead of being harsh with yourself for failing once again, simply notice, and silently say to yourself, “Forgiven.”
Listen to the stories you’re telling yourself inside your head. If those stories are about trying, struggle, becoming more like someone else, finding your purpose, shoulds, finding an answer outside yourself, or being something other than who you are this moment, gently let go and whisper to yourself “I am here now. I am enough. I have enough. All is well.”
If you are trying to escape uncomfortable feelings by looking outside yourself for fixes or distractions from your pain, try just being with the discomfort and pain, accepting it, observing yourself in this moment.
Live as if you are in between stories
“Who would you be if you did not do whatever you do every day? What if you experimented in ways that could do no harm to yourself or others, were soft where you are normally hard, tender where you feel you must draw a firm line, giving where you usually take, receiving where you have no expectation or habit of receiving? What if you played with this solid sense of self you have built up, said what you were thinking when you usually remain silent, were quiet where you always felt you needed to add something? How much of the story you have created do you mistake for who you really are?…
Create a gap in your story and sit within the gap, sit in the emptiness of not knowing who or what you are until an awareness of your essential nature fills you….
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Be present to this moment breathing in peace, breathing out loving kindness. Choose to love who you are right now in this moment.
May you walk in beauty.
Looking across Lake Calhoun on Christmas Eve
Another Christmas Eve view
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