New Year's Wellness Starts with Ditching Resolutions

The New Year is fast approaching, and with it all the usual trappings of the holiday: parties, noise-makers and sparkly hats, a toast at midnight, and the self-recriminating guilt over the things in our lives we haven’t mastered yet--a.k.a. resolutions.Here’s what it often sounds like: “This is the year I’m finally going to lose weight/get out of debt/travel/get a better job….” Or the even more angst-filled, “When January 1 hits I have to get myself in gear and finally start..”

This is the language of guilt. And guilt poisons the soil of even the best-intentioned new endeavors, replacing creative possibility with shame over having been a failure to this point in our lives at the project in question and intense pressure to get it right this trip around the sun.

Is it any surprise 80% of us abandon our New Year’s resolutions by February?

At Complete Wellness, we’re proposing a different approach. One that supports, well, complete wellness--that happy synergy of mind, body, and spirit operating with their innate power and intertwined pathways of grace and beauty.

And it starts with absolving ourselves from the shame-cycle of resolutions. Once free of the illusion that we “have to” do anything to be better, worthy, or happy, we can focus on the two things that actually lead to wellness: gratitude and practice.

Instead of resolutions, we hope you’ll join us in setting realistic and wellness-based goals where the first step is gratitude for what you’ve already done. Start with a celebration, map out a few steps you can embrace to promote a practice of wellness in whatever area feels best for you, and let yourself enjoy what grows from soil you’ve tended with kindness.

Throughout this month, our wellness practitioners will be sharing their thoughts on healthy goal-setting in different areas of well-being to help along the way. May each of us greet the New Year as 365 gifts, ours to cherish, ours to cultivate, and ours to share with love.

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Author

Complete Wellness' blogs are written by Marissa Polselli of Wordtree, LLC