Does your health need more attention? Could you stand to shed a few pounds? Do you promise to break some of those bad lifestyle habits, make some tweaks here and there? Are you ready to make the obligatory New Year’s resolutions list?
You’re not the kind of person that goes through the motions, follows the crowd, sets yourself up with lofty New Year goals that are sure to go unfulfilled. So what’s it going to be?
This new year, you’re going to follow through, get real and get serious, make reasonable changes that will impact your life. You’re going to step up the drive, excitement, and adventure that’s in your nature and look back a year from now with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Here are a few top New Year’s resolutions to get your motor running.
Set Yourself in Motion. Get moving more often and in ways you’ve never before explored. Take daily walks or go jogging to places you’ve never been. Change up your gym workouts. Explore different aspects of yoga, like hot yoga or kundalini yoga. Take up kickboxing. Incorporate brief but intense energetic sessions into your workout routine.
Eating modifications. Make healthy, non-radical changes to your diet … slowly and make them permanent. Concentrate your food shopping in the produce, meat, and fish sections … areas with whole food. Or better yet, buy your veggies and fruits from local farmers and hook up with a distributor for local beef and chicken. Fix more home-prepared meals from scratch. Grow a small garden. Set up aquaponics for your greens. Eliminate sugary drinks – including alcohol and processed foods with ingredients that contribute to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, chronic illness. Tejava teas are the perfect option.
Look within. Meditate to increase the feeling of relaxation, well-being, and joy to tap into your inner life. Make meditation your own: mindfulness or some other technique like progressive relaxation, transcendental meditation, breathwork, or a combination of these. Watch for what resonates best.
Change your looks. Go from brunette to blonde or see what it’s like to let your gray hair grow in. Ask your hairstylist to create a new hairstyle. Add color streaks to your hair. Get a tattoo. Add items to your wardrobe you hadn’t considered before (more bling, leggings, bold, soft, or natural colors and textures). Sound superficial? Maybe not. Physical transformation has a way of bleeding through to the non-physical.
Expand your mind. Attend lectures, workshops, on subjects that intrigue you, things you’ve always wanted to know more about. Attend an event or lecture that’s out of character for you, that presents a different philosophical view. Take a raw foods class. Learn how to make sushi or pasta. Learn a new language using the immersion method, by visiting the county whose language you’re practicing. Get exposure not only to the language but the culture.
Connect with others. Re-establish ties with friends and family. Make amends with people you’ve fallen out with. Make a new friend. Plan more lunches, dinners, gatherings with the people that mean the most to you. Tell them how much you mean to them.
Give of yourself. Volunteer. Help build a house, clear a beach. Participate in environmental projects. Visit and comfort the terminally ill. Help others in need in non-monetary ways. Perform a random act of kindness for a stranger. Make an anonymous donation to a cause you support.
Take a digital break. Being connected is important but sometimes it can cause information overload, distraction, stress, and keep you from interacting with the outside world. Disconnect from the internet, your computer, your cell phone for a day. Try this every so often … when you feel the cyber world is a little too much for you.
Get out of town. Take a break from your everyday world. Visit a far-off place or take a short weekend getaway to someplace you’ve never been to. Go on a retreat or pilgrimage. Trek the icy caves of Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska or the Appalachian Trail.
Try a new sport or hobby. How about some adrenaline-rush sport like skydiving, hang-gliding, bungy-jumping, rock climbing, whitewater rafting? Go horseback riding bareback. Take up a new instrument. Learn how to juggle, how to perform magic tricks, take singing lessons.
Consider making the New Year more about experiences and less about buying stuff that will be soon forgotten. Memories are treasures … long-lasting and spiritually satisfying. Get “front-row seats” to an astrological event like the optimum site for the next solar or lunar eclipse. Follow the path of the monarch butterfly migration.
Hold yourself accountable to these good New Year’s resolutions you’ve set. Think of them not so much as goals or a “bucket list” but your to-do list. Commit to them. Use apps and tech gadgets as reminders and to measure your success. Happy New Year!
