New Year Resolutions, or Real Life?

Here we are, another year flashed by in an instant and my head is left spinning at the speed with which the last year passed by! Is time speeding up, or are we just trying to fit more in?

2012 was a year of challenges – so many of my friends and family were pushed to the limit with tragedies and difficult situations to overcome. For me, even though I didn’t experience anywhere near the distress that some in my life did, I felt it was a year that pushed my buttons and it seemed like every time I turned around one of my beliefs was being challenged. It was like life was hitting me over the head with opportunities to learn at a rapid rate! I came through the year exhausted, but happy that I had been provided with such amazing opportunities to take my life and how I live, to another level.

I have also heard others describe 2012 as a year where life provided the chance for them to get over their negative patterns of behaviour, by providing the perfect situations to bring out their fears and limitations (as I think life does constantly, but maybe that’s just me!). Asking good quality questions is the key to relieving the drama that can come up, when those situations appear.

This is where I love bringing in the work of Byron Katie, and asking questions such as “What am I believing to cause this distress? Is that true? Is there an alternative view that may be just as true as the story that I’m invested in? Sometimes it can take an objective friend / family member / therapist, to cut through our stuck story and shed some light on the underlying beliefs or fears that are driving our attachment to it. So often we can find that the story we’ve created has a foundation of sand and will collapse under greater scrutiny. The greater the pain and distress we’re in, the greater the opportunity we have to grown and learn something amazing. I choose to live my life with this understanding and even though I have as many testing times as others, this practice of asking quality questions, helps me get through my distress much faster, with awesome insights and understandings that will serve me well in the future.

Like me, I know that many are hoping that 2013 will be a much more gentle year, as we move into a phase of flowing with life, rather than resisting it. I know for me personally, I’ve made some difficult decisions (such as taking the first half of the year to finish a book I’m writing, rather than running any retreats) to allow a greater sense of peace and flow into my life. Part of wanting that balance, is then about creating it – we can’t just leave life up to random chance and then complain when it doesn’t go our way. If flow, peace and balance are a goal, then taking deliberate steps and actions to create that, is part of the process.

So I didn’t set New Year’s Resolutions this year, but I have spent quite some time over the last few months visioning and designing the way I would like this year to unfold and how I would like to feel. From using vision boards to Mind Movies, meditation to strategic planning, anything worth doing is worth doing well – and I figure that nothing is more important than creating an amazing life, full of love, health, success, connection, adventure and fun – with peace, flow and balance permeating everything I do. With my core belief in abundance being, the more I have, the more I have to share, it is my mission to create abundance in all areas of my life. If I am swallowed up in busy-ness and exhaustion, then that leaves nothing in the tank for me to get by on, let alone have enough to give someone else a “lift”.

The New Year is a wonderful opportunity to not just think about making “resolutions” but to think about what would make up your ideal “real life” and how you can go about making that happen!

What tools or techniques do you use to evaluate your life? Do you make resolutions or create a vision for your life instead? What are some of the feelings that you would like to create this year?

Happy 2013 everyone!

Leisa