Now for some of us, longing might seem like a fanciful word used in romance novels, or for others it might have religious undertones.

But I’ve come to understand it as one of the most powerful forces within us.

I’ve been talking a lot about desires lately (especially in the Ignite Your Desires e-course) and a big part of the reason I think they’re so important is that they’re a doorway to our longing.

“There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.”
Kahlil Gibran

He’s speaking about longing as something that crosses the distance between what we have and what we imagine for ourselves. But it does much more than just bridge this gap.

Longing is the magnetic pull that brings us and our desires together.

Imagine an elastic band stretched between 2 points. The further apart those 2 points are, the greater the tension in the elastic.

We’re holding one end of the elastic.
And whatever it is that we desire is at the other end.

And that’s where the promise comes in.

The longing we feel for for what we desire is the tension in the elastic, the distance between Lover and Beloved.

And if there was nothing at the other end of the elastic, there would be no tension, and no longing in us.

So as soon as there’s a longing, there’s also a knowing – that there really IS something at the other end of that elastic.

And we’re being drawn to it and it’s being called to us. Equally.

We’re never given a longing that’s pointless or just a “whim”. I believe that longing can be one of the best indicators of where our true self is seeking to unfold.

Real longing always has truth inside it.

And yet, it’s not always the easiest thing to perceive  in ourselves. And in our instant gratification culture we often bury it, thinking that it’s too painful to want what we can’t just go out and get.

Longing always points to something that won’t be found in a day or two. It’s always something that will take time. And the very seeking of it will transform us in some way.

And the seeking is ALWAYS worth it!

I’d love to hear your ideas and questions about longing. I’m going to do a follow up to this post and I’d love to know your questions.  Please share those and your comments below.

And if you enjoyed this post, and want the next one sent fresh to your Inbox, go ahead and request them here.

You might also like these:

1. From Complaints to Desires
2. Resistance is Your Soul’s Compass
3. You are NOT being punished by the Universe.

(Note: Even though this was published for the Mar.10-22 time frame, you can still jump into our e-course at the bottom of this post!)

As some of you know, I LOVE astrology. It’s been the best antidote in my life for taking my own shifting energies too personally. And I get really fascinated with the global astrological “weather”; the shifts that move all of us collectively, and we’re definitely in one of those now.

My favourite astrologer is Eric Francis of Planet Waves. He’s a former journalist and he has a gift for telling the larger stories in the current sky and for presenting the shifts as doorways and opportunities that we can take great advantage of in our lives.

And we’ve got a doozy of a doorway getting ready to open next week!

Since last December 21st, Mars, the planet of desire, passion, energy and movement, has been in retrograde. That means, from the perspective of the Earth, it appears to be moving backwards in the sky and what we experience is a slow down or a challenge with all that it represents.

In Eric’s words:

Now that we’re at the dregs of the retrograde, the sensation ranges from not being able to get anything done, to determination to accomplish exactly what you need (which may or may not be working)…In psychological terms, you may be feeling frustration over direction, initiative and/or desire.

I read someone speaking on her blog the other day about feeling like she’d been “sucker punched” over this winter. For some of us, this is what Mars retrograde has felt like. It’s also had a “frozen” quality to it, like all the heat has gone out of everything.

Well, it’s time to get ready, because things are going to heat back up starting next week!

And Mars is turning around and moving forward again in a very particular place on the astrological wheel – the first degree of Leo, one of the most fiery spots in the whole zodiac. Again, in Eric’s words:

Mars stationing direct in the first degree of Leo is all about desire, motivation and identity — and the place in awareness where the three meet.

What’s especially in our faces right now are all the things that try to tell us what we’re “supposed” to want and who we’re “supposed” to be and all the ways that we’re limited in our desires without even realizing that we let go of something that’s deeply meaningful to us.

So it’s like there’s a big wind coming next Wednesday and, if we want it to take us somewhere good, we’ll need to have our course set and our sails up.

Interestingly, I’m noticing as I’m using this wind metaphor that we’ve had one wind storm after another here in Atlantic Canada. The last big one a few days ago blew down a tree very close to the house (a near miss) and covered our front yard in roof tiles!

I feel like that’s the kind of power and energy we’re talking about here, and it’s going to be important to have a way to harness it AND some conscious intention around both moving the obstacles we might have piled up over the winter and which way we want to go with it.

That’s why I’ve created a FREE 20-day e-course called
“Ignite Your Desires”.

This is exactly the kind of process I often take myself through when there’s a big shift or doorway of this kind being offered. And, to be honest, it never occurred to me that others might like to go through it too.

But a couple of recent conversations convinced me that it’s time to get out of the closet with both my own process and with the astrological stuff that I get juiced about.

It’s time to get really clear about what we REALLY want!

I’ll be sharing 10 easy to apply e-lessons, 3 audios and 2 guided meditations between now and the end of March. The course will take about 25 days from whenever you sign up, and it will take you from obstacles to clarity to action steps so you can use all this great Mars energy to make great progress on your most important desires.

Go sign up here: Ignite Your Desires E-Course.

Then come back and tell us what you’ve been noticing about your desires, your obstacles and where things have felt thwarted these last few weeks and months. (It’s SO great to know that it’s not just you, isn’t it?)

And yes, it is free, so please share the link with others so that as many of us as possible can use this wind for the greatest good!

And I’ll be posting about this for the next few weeks, so if you want to follow our dialogue, you can sign up to receive the new posts by email.

You can also follow me on twitter at :
http://www.twitter.com/susanjohnstone

You might also like these:

1. The Myth of “I don’t feel like it” (Part 2)
2. From Complaints to Desires
3. Why Desires Are Better Than Resolutions Any Day

I read something tonight on the Simple Marriage blog that I just had to share with you because it speaks to the fine line that so many of us are walking between deep acceptance and striving for more.

The post is by Kathleen Quiring and it’s called “In Defense of Pretty OK“.

What Kathleen sums up so well is the sheer amount of pressure that we can put on ourselves in our constant questing and striving for improvement.

And this pressure comes into play especially when we’re seeking to make progress toward something we  really love and desire because it can feel like there’s a lot riding on whether we move forward today or not.

On this quest, and in any dance with our resistance, there are going to be days where it seems like not much happens.

There are definitely going to be times when we just don’t have the energy to “be awesome” and days when we shoot for something and fall way short.

These days are the most essential part of our practice.

My teacher Daniel at The Way of the Heart likes to talk about this in terms of meditation (and I’m sure many teachers of many diverse practices would speak about it this way.)

He says that the essence of any awareness practice is that you show up, sit on the cushion, stand on the mat, etc, and you watch your breath or your thoughts or your body and every time you wander, you come back to the practice.

And suddenly, one day….something happens!

You have a breakthrough or an epiphany or a vision or experience that you’ve never had before. And that’s when we tend to say “Ah, finally something is happening!”

And Daniel points out that those breakthrough days are the only days when nothing really happens.

Yeah, really! Every day when you gutted it out and felt like you got nowhere, and your mind was all over the place, or you failed to take that day’s appointed step, you were actually doing the real work of the practice.

And the breakthrough day was the day when there was no real work, you just got to reap the harvest of everything you’d been putting into it before.

And we don’t tend to celebrate or even notice the pretty OK days.

We keep looking for the flash of awesomeness that tells us we’re on track and we’re getting somewhere. And, in all fairness, that beautiful, glorious flash is so motivating and soul-sustaining that we need them every once in a while.

But I think we also need to tell the stories of the tiny miracles that happen on the way to the awesome.

Like the moment when we DIDN’T snap at our partner and when we didn’t turn on the TV or ate the veggies instead of the pizza or struggled with our monkey mind in a meditation.

These are the tiny miracles. And they add up.

Let’s hear some of your tiny miracles – tell the stories and celebrate them in your comments below.

And if you enjoyed this article, and you’re not signed up yet, go ahead and subscribe to receive free updates by email or in a reader.

You might also like these:

1. Our Passions Have a Purpose
2. The Myth of “I don’t feel like it” (Part 2)
3. A Doorway to Your Desires

Calendar from Linda & Harriet

Happy New Year!

And with the New Year comes the inevitable  reviews and stats on how well we generally do at following through on our New Year’s resolutions!

Generally, the stats say we don’t do so well and, in my experience, there’s one big reason for that…  we haven’t dug deep enough to find out WHY we really chose our New Year’s resolutions in the first place.

Some resolutions seem so obvious.

We KNOW that we’re 25 pounds over our healthier weight, or we KNOW that the smoking or junk food is bad for us – so OF COURSE we should resolve to do something about them.

In this case, too, we’re often making the obvious resolutions for the benefit of someone close to us. We say we’ll do it because it makes THEM feel better and also gets them off our back for a little while.

And sometimes we pick a resolution for someone else’s benefit.

We may choose a resolution because THEY picked one and if you live in the same house it’s a lot easier to BOTH quit smoking or eat healthier.  And, of course, you want to be supportive…

The downside is this :

That isn’t always the truth of our own heart and it sets us up for a lot of inner struggle, defeat, self-judgment and maybe their judgment too, when we don’t succeed in staying with it.

There’s a much more powerful and satisfying way to go about this and it requires a little digging – into our desires.

With resolutions a “good idea” just isn’t good enough.

You see, all the kinds of resolutions I listed above seem like perfectly good “ideas” – but that’s the problem, they’re just ideas. They’re in the mind and we haven’t brought them down to heart level yet.

The heart level is where all the power is and the fuel that will keep you going even when you want to quit, and even when your spouse or room-mate quits!

Let’s say you’re faced with the obvious choice that resolving to lose 20 pounds would be really good for you – and everyone else in your household thinks so too. That’s a fine and healthy and well-intended choice – but lets take it deeper now.

5 questions to ask about your resolution to find the desire behind it:

Take some time and sit down in a quiet space, maybe first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and simply watch your breathing for a minute or two as a way to quiet your inner world. Notice your body relaxing just a little bit and just breathe.

Then take a few minutes to reflect on WHY you would want to make that resolution this year. Next you can ask the following questions in any order you want and see what comes up for you:

1. What feels important about this for you? Why?
   (And when you get an answer, you can ask Why? about that, and so on, peeling layers into your heart as you go)
2. Is there something happening in your life right now that makes this choice more important than before?
   Maybe you tried this and couldn’t follow through. What’s different now?
3. Is there a longing behind your resolution?
   Is there an ache for something that you’re missing in yourself or your life? And how does that longing relate to the resolution you chose?
   (Hint: longing is GREAT fuel for staying motivated.)
4. Is choosing this a way to stop feeling badly about something?
   Is there an underlying desire to simply feel good again, with or without the change? If that’s the case, find a way to come to a deep acceptance of where you are now, first, so you’re not in reaction to feeling bad at the same time that you’re trying to change.
5. Is choosing this a means to something else that you desire even more?
   For example, someone might be choosing to lose weight in order to find a relationship. If so, what’s the desire that’s even stronger than your current resolution?

Write down whatever comes up for you in the process. You might even want to do this over the course of several days in a row – sometimes we hold back a bit the first time, because we’re a little scared of what we’ll find. This definitely gets easier as we go along!

This could change things….

Based on what you discover, you might choose a different resolution all together, deepen your motivation for your original one, or decide it’s not the right time to make one at all.

No matter what you decide for this year, you’ll be a lot more honest about it, a lot more motivated and a lot more likely to succeed!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or on New Year’s Resolutions in general. Share your comments below.

(And if you enjoyed this post, go ahead and subscribe to receive free updates by email or in a reader.)

You might also like these:

1. Why Desires Are Better Than Resolutions Any Day
2. Presents & Presence for Your New Year
3. The 2 Kinds of Motivation

There’s been a major discussion happening this past week, all centering around a post on the Quest For Balance blog about passion, and especially about making our passion make a profit.

Lisis, the author, says:

The Passion Paradox is this: the pursuit of our passion, for profit, is making us miserable.

She herself has walked away from corporate security to follow a passion and while she says it’s been worthwhile, she doesn’t recommend it to others due to the stress she and her family have faced.

She also highlights the huge industry that exists on the internet right now that’s all about selling hundreds of systems, tools, products, classes, books, audios, etc all focused on giving us the next perfect way to stop doing what we hate and start doing what we love…our dreams and passions.

And, while I agree with Gary Vaynerchuck that there’s never been a better time to make our passion a viable way to earn a living, for me the profit is entirely beside the point.

I believe that our passions are there for a purpose and that following them transforms everything….our selves, our lives, our world, whether we ever make a cent doing them or not.

It seems like one of the myths out there is that, as soon as we get clear on what our passion really is, we’re supposed to immediately find a way to make a living doing it. And I think that puts us right into the Passion Paradox that Lisis is referring to.

It can be HUGELY stressful to put this kind of pressure on the doing of our passions, especially when they’re in the early stage.

I truly believe that this kind of pressure is exactly why we avoid our passions sometimes! We love it SO much, but then we heap on some stress about doing it well (because we care) and about others liking it (because, hey, we’re human) and then, as if that wasn’t enough, we have to figure out a way to live on it!

No wonder there are writers who don’t write, and painters who don’t paint, and dancers who don’t dance, etc, etc, etc. Who needs that kind of pressure?

But I also believe that when we take the pressure off and allow ourselves some time to play in our passion, and enjoy it for it’s own sake, and maybe even get pretty good at it, there can sometimes be a way to have it support us financially.

So how would you know if you were called to pursue your passion as your living?

Answer: You’d have the passion to do so!

Because, not every passion compels us to make a living at it. Some passions are just great at a once a month rally, or in the basement on Saturday afternoons, or every day after school.

However, for the ones that DO compel us to go all the way with them as a life, living and career, following our passion will call us to transform absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives that is standing in it’s way.

And this is the greatest gift of our passions. They are meant to call us down a road of transformation that ends with us becoming exactly who we always wanted to be.

That’s why there’s a great alchemical paradox between our passions and our weaknesses.

It’s through following our passions that our every weakness is transformed.

So that’s why the shy person’s passion calls them to master speaking or sales. And the person who’s never stuck with anything takes up a passion that requires them to practice every day.

Think about this for a moment, if your passions were ahead of you in one direction, and your obstacles were off in another direction, which one would you go toward? Probably the passions.

But it doesn’t work that way. When we go off in the direction of our passion, every obstacle we will need to overcome in ourselves will be on that path.

And it’s the LOVE that our passion inspires in us that makes us willing to keep walking and keep transforming whatever the obstacles are, including the obstacles to making money.

And no matter how long we spend on that path with our passion, we will find ourselves changed and transformed in remarkable ways. We’ll find ourselves becoming more and more of who our passion calls us to be.

And I believe this transformation is overwhelmingly worth it, whether we ever make a penny doing it or not.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are you pursuing any of your passions as a career? Leave your comments below.

(And if you enjoyed this post, go ahead and subscribe to receive free updates by email or in a reader.)

You might also like these:

1. A Doorway to Your Desires

A while ago I picked up the book ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield. He’s the guy who wrote the book ‘The Legend of Baggar Vance’ which became a movie of the same name, and one of my all time favorite life mission movies.

‘The War of Art’ had been highly recommended to me, but I avoided it for years because I made the big mistake of thinking that it was about the art world.

It’s not!

It’s the distilled essence of Steven’s immense experience battling his resistance to writing and being a writer over the course of many years… and it’s pure gold.

One of my favorite concepts in the whole book is his discovery that resistance always points to the true north of our heart’s longing and our soul’s greatest desire.

In fact we can actually measure the strength of our desire by the strength of our resistance to it!

In my experience that’s been true over and over again, but I could never see it at the time.

So the person who long’s to be a writer will resist writing more than anything else in her life. And she might even resist all the other things that would support her being a writer – taking a class, joining a writer’s group, getting a new computer, etc.

In my way of understanding resistance, what I’ve often found is that

…resistance often works to keep a new self from surfacing.

In Steven’s compass metaphor, resistance actually points toward our most authentic self as it’s seeking to emerge!

So for our writer, the question is not “Why isn’t she writing?” The question is “Who will she become in the writing and what part of her is defending her against becoming that?”

That brings us right back to remembering that all resistance is a wise messenger with a message that needs to be heard and fully addressed. In my own inner work, I find that once the message is fully acknowledged and received, my inner messenger can finally stop working so hard to get it through.

It might be that our resistance remembers a time long ago when expressing ourselves fully got us into big trouble, or in our family that quality was definitely “not welcomed”.

This is how we end up burying parts of ourselves and our gifts and these parts collectively become our “shadow” or our unexpressed self.

And our safety brain (fight or flight system) gets very engaged whenever we try to bring a shadow part of our authentic self out of the closet. It will do whatever it takes to get us AWAY from the dangerous possibility of our authentic self fully surfacing.

Now…are you ready to have some fun?

Take a look at where your resistance is strongest and try out these questions:

1. What desire or longing is your strongest resistance pointing to?
2. Who would you become if you fully followed that desire?
3. Why does your resistance think that would be dangerous for you?

I have to thank my teacher Kimberly Herkert at The Way of the Heart for question number 3. Her body of work called “The Shadow of the Beloved” has taught me many of the incredibly insightful questions that get right to the root of this kind of resistance and claim back all of our beautiful qualities.

Remember to breathe and hold compassion for your resistance as your answer these questions. Softening our tug-of-war is always the first step.

I’d love to hear your insights as you work with your truest compass…your resistance. Thanks Steven!

You might also like these:

1. The War of Art Revisited…
2. Why Your Resistance is Perfect
3. The Value of Jealousy

My husband and I have been in deep negotiations the last month or so. We’ve just had our 4th wedding anniversary and I call this stage:

“These-are-the-things-I-secretly-thought-would-change-about-you-and they-haven’t-so-how-am-I-going-to-live-with-them-for-the-rest-of-my-life.”

It turns out there are some very specific things that we each want from the relationship that we aren’t getting. And when we talk about them, it’s so very easy to come at them from the level of complaint.

“We never…”

“I always end up…”

I’m sure this approach is entirely unfamiliar to you, gentle readers! But in our house, we’re pretty good at it.

One of the things I’m working on these days is being more present to what my heart is longing for.  I couldn’t always feel it or tell what it was, but now it’s a tangible sweet ache, a slight magnetic pulling on my heart.

So this time, when we got into our complaints, I started looking for the desires and longings underneath them.

And lo and behold, instead of feeling “wrong” for not initiating walks and bike rides, I was able to hear how much connection my husband feels between us when we do outdoor activities together, and how much that means to him and how much he misses it.

What a different response! I was feeling understanding instead of just retreating inside myself and feeling blamed.

But when it was my turn, I noticed it was easier to listen for his longings than to share my own.

It’s a deeply vulnerable thing to share a longing with someone close to us.

Our inner defenses want to keep us in the story of how we’ll never have it, and how much that sucks. A part of us wants to stay bitter and distant and keep on complaining.

But something happens when we’re willing to stand in the deep honesty and vulnerability of our longing.

A bridge is built, a distance closes between our hearts. Truth and aliveness are there.

Something more is possible.

The biggest difference I notice right now between longing and complaint is that longing always seeks to move forward, and complaint always wants to stay put.

Have you noticed that? You would think that complaining about something would bring it to light and start to change the situation, but I don’t find that happens.

It’s almost as though the part of us that’s complaining has a secret agenda that doesn’t really want things to change, it just wants to get energy by complaining about it!

I suspect this is the part of us that doesn’t want to acknowledge the hurt of an unmet desire because…

… longing and pain often go together.

That’s why longing often stays buried, so we don’t have to feel the pain of not having it yet. And that’s why it’s such a vulnerable thing to share our longing with another, or sometimes even with ourselves.

So the next time you catch yourself complaining, ask yourself “What am I really longing for?”

And try listening more deeply to others’ complaints for what they’re longing for.

In both cases, you’ll be deepening your relationship.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with longing, complaints and the like. Share your comments below.

You might also like these:

1. Why Desires Are Better Than Resolutions Any Day
2. A Doorway to Your Desires
3. How Your Longing is a Promise from the Universe

I couldn’t figure out why I was waking up pissed off. That’s not my usual morning state.

But for two mornings in a row, I was irritated from the moment I woke up. I tried to stay with it for a while the first evening, but in the end I distracted myself with sugar and magazines.

The second day, when I woke up and realized that my emotional state had not simply “reset” overnight, I was determined to get to the root of it. So I just observed and questioned my state all morning and into the shower in the early afternoon.

And suddenly, voila, it hit me. I was jealous. Enormously, all out jealous. Of a blogger. And not even a blogger who’s blog I’m currently following. No, it’s a blogger in a book that I’m reading and her blogging experience happened in 2003.

The book is Julie & Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously. I’m enjoying it immensely and parts of it are really laugh-out-loud funny and I can’t wait to see the movie…

but for right now Julie Powell is pissing me off. I’m jealous of her. And my training has taught me to pay great attention to jealousy.

Jealousy is one of the single biggest clues we can get to our purpose, life mission, and about who we’re longing to become.

And the more I questioned my jealousy the more apparent it became that part of what I’m longing to become is a blogger.

So, even though I had “Post to my blog” on my weekly To Do list on my phone and I had finally started opening my blog panel and tweaking things recently, in the end it was the pure fire of jealousy that got me back here.

I just couldn’t stand any longer reading about her posts and all the comments she was getting and how connected she felt doing it. A part of me was screaming inside “That’s MY life. That’s how it’s supposed to be for ME.”

And truly, I had never even really acknowledged that I was longing for any of that when I started blogging last December. I just knew I was incredibly excited by it and didn’t fully understand why.

And then, of course, I did what I do to all really great and exciting things that come along in my life….I sabotaged it.

I stopped. I lost interest. I got busy for really good reasons.

We all do this. And the more longing and desire there is around what we’re doing and the higher the stakes feel, the more we resist and sabotage  it.

Until something wonderful like jealousy calls us out of our self-induced fog about it and smacks us upside the heart.

If we’re lucky.

So look for the jealousy in your life. Where is it? Who’s living the life that’s “supposed to” be yours? Who’s got what you want?

Sometimes we won’t even know up front that we’re jealous – we’ll just be pissed off at them for no apparent reason.

Excellent…dig deeper. And honour what you find. It’s important.

You might also like these:

1. Resistance is Your Soul’s Compass
2. Our Passions Have a Purpose

The 11th century Sufi poet, Rumi, knew a lot about returning and about not giving up.

Rumi

Through the brilliant translation of Coleman Barks, here in modern North America, Rumi can still share with us these thoughts:

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wonderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.

It doesn’t matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times

Come, yet again, come, come.

This poem has framed my journey for the last 14 years since I first heard it read, and it keeps unraveling itself to show me more.

From these lines I’ve learned…   that it’s never too late to answer the call in my own heart. And that there’s really no point in feeling badly about our absence, “It doesn’t matter”.

And, sure, OK, I’m probably not going to be able to stick with whatever I commit to 100% the first time. That’s what the “lover of leaving” part means to me.

Its much more likely that I’ll walk away and come back over and over again. And I’ve noticed that feeling bad about staying away just makes me stay away longer.

But now I know, “It doesn’t matter”. The only thing that ever matters is the returning, the coming again.

I understand now what Rumi is saying with the “thousand times” – that every return to what we want, what we love, what we long for is a triumph. And there’s no such thing as a number of times so high that we can’t come again. Every return makes our resistance to returning smaller.

So all this is the prelude to saying “I’m back”.  I stepped away from blogging for a bit while I acquired a business and about 40-60 hours per week of additional work.

And yet, it never stopped calling to me, this dialogue. The important things never really leave us alone – they keep tugging on our sleeve as long as we’re still breathing.

So if you’re still breathing, and something’s still tugging on your heart, it’s not too late to come, come again.

No related posts yet.

Happy New Year!

And with the New Year comes the inevitable media blitz of reviews, resolutions and top ten lists. And of course all kinds of reviews and stats on how well we generally do at following through on our New Year’s resolutions!

Generally, the stats say we don’t do so well at sticking with them and in my experience, and that of my clients, there’s one big reason for that…  we haven’t dug deep enough to find out why we really chose our New Year’s resolutions in the first place.

Some resolutions seem so obvious – we KNOW that we’re 25 pounds over our healthier weight, or we KNOW that the smoking or junk food is bad for us – so OF COURSE we should resolve to do something about them.

In this case, too, we’re often making the obvious resolutions for the benefit of someone close to us. We say we’ll do it because it makes THEM feel better and also gets them off our back for a little while.

Or we may pick a resolution because THEY picked one and if you live in the same house it’s a lot easier to BOTH quit smoking or eat healthier.  And, of course, you want to be supportive…

The downside is : this isn’t always the truth of our own hearts and it sets us up for a lot of inner struggle, defeat, self-judgment and maybe their judgment too, when we don’t succeed in staying with it.

There’s a much more powerful and satisfying way to go about this and it requires a little digging – into our desires.

You see, all the kinds of resolutions I listed above seem like perfectly good “ideas” – but that’s the problem, they’re just ideas, they’re in the mind and we haven’t brought them down to heart level yet.

The heart level is where all the power is and the fuel that will keep you going even when you want to quit, and even when your spouse or room-mate quits!

Let’s say you’re faced with the obvious choice that resolving to lose 20 pounds would be really good for you – and everyone else in your household thinks so too. That’s a fine and healthy and well-intended choice – but lets take it deeper now.

Take some time and sit down in a quiet space, maybe first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and simply watch your breathing for a minute or two as a way to quiet your inner world. Notice your body relaxing just a little bit and just breathe.

Then take a few minutes to reflect on WHY you would want to resolve to lose weight this year. You can play with any of the following questions and see what comes up for you:

• What feels important about this for you? Why?  (And when you get an answer, you can ask Why? about that, and so on, peeling layers into your heart as you go)
• Is there something happening in your life right now that makes this choice even more important than before?
• What are you longing for? Is there an ache for something that you’re missing in yourself or your life? And how does that longing relate to your choice?
• Is choosing this a way to stop feeling badly about something? Is there an underlying desire to simply feel good again, with or without the change?
• Is choosing this a means to something else that you desire even more? (for example, choosing to lose weight in order to find a relationship) If so, what’s the desire that’s even stronger?

Write down whatever comes up for you in the process. You might even want to do this over the course of several days in a row – sometimes we hold back a bit the first time, because we’re a little scared of what we’ll find. This definitely gets easier as we go along!

Based on what you discover, you might choose a different resolution all together, deepen your motivation for your original one, or decide it’s not the right time to make one at all.

No matter what you decide for this year, you’ll be a lot more honest about it, a lot more motivated and a lot more likely to succeed!

Let me know how it goes!

You might also like these:

1. With Resolutions, a Good Idea Isn’t Good Enough
2. Presents & Presence for Your New Year
3. The 2 Kinds of Motivation