This time of year, many of us are dancing with devils that try to break our momentum and enthusiasm and wrestle us to the couch. The weather is cold and grey, we are in a long stretch between holidays and often feeling funky after the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years furor, and most of us are struggling to reconnect with the enthusiasm and determination we felt when setting our resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, stop drinking, or organize our house.
Whatever the resolution, it was something important to you but challenging – and not the fun kind of challenging. If it wasn’t important to you, you wouldn’t have bothered setting a resolution; you’d either forget it or simply do it. By the same token, if it wasn’t something challenging to you then you’d have already done it. No big fanfare, no planning, no mental space taken up, you’d have just done it and moved on.
Pretty much anywhere you turn in the new thought section of the bookstore, you see emphasis on the power of intentions. At the same time, I can’t think of a single “self-help,” “new thought,” “new age” book I’ve read that talks about resolutions. This isn’t just because they have an unpleasant connotation of failure, usually failure Read the rest of this entry »