I quit making New Year’s resolutions some years back. Every year, from late December to early January, I receive dozens of emails and social posts talking about, or inviting me to participate in, some sort of New Year’s resolution activity. I ignore them. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t have things I want to improve, add or delete from my life. It’s just that I found something better.
I have a problem with the practice of these resolutions because I question their impetus and motivation. What part of me is responsible for determining what to focus on and then for carrying out the decision? I’ll use a typical New Year’s resolution as an example, to lose weight and get fit. Why? Is it because I really want to take better care of myself as an expression of self-love and self-care or is it because I’m judging and disapproving of my body? Then there’s the problem of carrying out the resolution. Will power, force and self-bullying are unsustainable, which is a main reason so many of these resolutions peter out in a few weeks and fall by the wayside, leaving a trail of judgment, guilt and disappointment in their wake.
Instead of making New Year’s resolutions from the ego-mind, I’d rather go straight to the Source to get my direction for the new year. I do a process to attune and connect with the intent of my Being for my life in the coming year. When the impetus and motivation arise from my inner self, rather than my mind, for sure it’s going to be in my highest good and aligned with my soul purpose. One of the advantages of attuning to this inner intent is that it’s a sustainable process. I don’t have to personally generate all the energy needed to carry out an intent that arises from my inner Being, it’s provided for me. Also, it just plain feels good, empowering and self-affirming with a body-felt sense of confident inner knowing. Do your New Year’s resolutions make you feel that way?
(By the way, feel free to substitute higher self, inner guidance, soul, Source, Spirit, God or Goddess for inner Being. They’re all different ways to speak of the same energy.)
In the attunement process, we open our inner awareness to register a felt sense of our soul purpose. At first, this is usually experienced as a current of intent that emerges from an inner core. It feels purposeful, but not yet specific to anything concrete in your life. Once we get our inner attention hooked into the flow of this current, it begins to feel like a grounded, body-based sense of inner knowing. The more we open and attune to this sense of purposefulness and inner knowing, the more it unfolds into specific direction to action. Sometimes that happens during the attunement process itself, but more often it unpacks into specific guidance to action over a day or so. I think that’s because when we connect our inner awareness to this current of intent, it’s at a super-concentrated level of psychic energy beyond our conscious daily-life mind, and it has to go through a translation process to convert into specific action we can take in physical reality.
For any highly creative person, and for those of us with a feminine operating system, force of will and mental determination are not the most effective ways to generate change. Alignment and attunement, opening to connect with an inspiration and guidance, work so much better for us since they use our natural mode of functioning.
If you want to scrap your New Year’s resolutions for something better, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a guided attunement process to connect with the intent of your inner Being for 2018. Email: Mikhaila (at) mikhailastettler.com
Wishing you a happy, healthy prosperous and creative 2018!