A Peaceful New Year

Happy New Year!  Let’s make 2013 the year we make peace… with ourselves.  I know it’s tempting to see the clean slate of the new year as an opportunity to re-start all those self-improvement initiatives, but what if we resolved to give it a rest for a while. 

We fool ourselves into thinking that happiness is a journey or some kind of contingent give and take. I’ll be happy when I finish my degree, when I lose 10 lbs., when I get more clients….  And when we meet those goals and we’re still not content, we decide that must not have been it; there must be some other key to happiness out there.  Or, we see the flaw in that cycle and decide we’re going to “work on” accepting ourselves and being grateful for what we have in life.  We redirect our critical self-thinking and make lists of everything we have to be thankful for or all of our positive traits.  We vow to practice loving ourselves until we get it right.  What?

 We’ve all had the experience of solving problems when we stopped working on them.  Answers just appeared.  We’ve been flooded by powerful feelings of joy and gratitude while driving to the supermarket. This is what happens when we let our essential resilience, our innate wisdom and common sense, bubble to the top of our consciousness.  It’s always there if we have the faith to stop doing and just be.