If you decided upon New Year’s Resolutions which you thought would enable you to feel more loved or accepted or worthy – you are setting yourself up to fail.
By externalising those feelings of innate are and belonging, you are handing over responsibility and care for yourself to some external achievement. You are telling yourself that you need to do or be something on order to be worthy of love. Can you see why that might be a problem? Because if things ever go off course, and because of, well, life… they can, the inverse of that is that you think you will be less worthy or less deserving of love.
You’re place of belonging, your innate worthiness and right to take up space in the worth is intrinsic – there is nothing you can do or not do to change that.
By making an arbitrary list to which you measure your value as a human against, you are trying to prove your place in the world. But the truth is – you have a perfect place in the world – just by the existing.
So why make set goal at all? The truth is when we stretch out lives and put something in our sight line that we commit to achieving we have to extend our heart, lives and our learning beyond the remits of everything we thought the be possible. In order to achieve a goal, your lesson plan should always be: how can I get there whilst showing the most amount of kindness and compassion? The goal is a devise, not the prize. It trick is in seeing what you need to learn about yourself, your life and the world around you in order to reach that milestone you invented for yourself – it is about who you become in order to get there – not about where you get to.
So to the ones who are still trying, I salute you. And to the ones, who threw it all in the air and said you’ve given up already, what if part of achieving your goal could be how many creative ways you could learn to pick yourself back up and still keep travelling in the direction of your dreams? If you’ve set yourself a long journey, you’re going to stumble sometimes – what if that is ok? What if it is more than ok? What if those stumbles were an essential part of the journey?
The more times you are able to pick yourself up, with kindness, the more ways you will discover to help other people up along the road.
I wish you joyful, terrible, perilous and outrageous adventures. After all, isn’t that what we are here for?