inner clarity

I stopped making new year’s resolutions a while back.  I could never see the point, especially considering the statistics that surround them.  Just this morning the news was mentioning by the end of January, 43% of Americans will have already given up on whatever it was they resolved to do.  But if not a new year’s resolution, then what?  I think it’s human nature to gravitate towards the future.  To think about things like goals and plans.  I’ve been pondering this conundrum lately, as I’ve spent the last month taking a much needed and long breath.  And I use the word breath very intentionally, rather than break.  I closed my practice down over the holidays, something I’ve never done before.  I went hiking with my husband out in the southwest – we visited Zion, Bryce Canyon, White Sands and many other desert hot spots.  The breath gave me time to ask myself some questions, and to do some deeper reflection on what I really want.  But the questions I was asking myself were different than the ones I’ve often asked myself in the past.  In the past it tended to center around goal setting.  What goals do I want to set for myself this year?  What do I want to accomplish?  Then a logical jumping off point from that question is to then think about how to make those goals SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.  We are starting with the wrong question. I tried asking myself these questions over my break this year, but no dice.  I really tried.  The answers just weren’t coming, and I did something that was hard to do – I resisted the urge to just come up with something and put it in a spreadsheet.  It was really tough because the feeling of restlessness came up.  I had a feeling it would come, and it was overwhelming.  It was pushing me to sign up for a million different things and to try to fill my schedule with a million different activities.  Restlessness is a feeling I’ll do anything to escape.  I decided to sit with it instead.  I looked deep into that feeling, and the patterns it can often create in my life.  I asked myself what was really going on, what was sitting under the restlessness.  I asked again and again, I resolved myself to feel it, and it eventually passed. And from the bottom of that well, a different kind of question emerged.  This year, I stopped asking myself, “What do I want to do?”  And I started asking myself instead a different question, “How do I want to be?”  Being versus the doing The answer was one single word that kept coming to me over and over and over again.  In conversations, in dreams, in everyday life interactions.  Depth.  It’s become my word now for 2024, an intention that I’ve set to define my year. Interestingly I’m feeling very differently about 2024 having gone through this reflection and […]