5 New Year practices to improve your life
The new year, provides great opportunity to decide how you want to set the tone for 2017. I've come to think of New Year's Day as a sacred time to honor, whatever I want more of in my life. Want more time with friends and loved ones, plan to spend time with those you care about on that day. I try to use the change in year as a time of refection regarding what I'm grateful for and what I'd like to change or work towards. Below are 5 New Year practices that may improve your life:
- Vision board. Vision boards can be a great way to identify future hopes, goals, and dreams. They can also be a great project to work on within a family, with your children, or significant other as it's symbolic of working together towards common goals. Check out my old vision board diy here for more info.
- Detox. Holidays are a time of indulging. Bad habits can rear their heads again as the holidays encourage consumption. We often consume lots of unhealthy food like processed sugars, factory farmed meat, gluten, and alcohol. We also consume more as a capitalistic society around the holidays, with excess spending, excess wanting, and excess busyness. Detoxes can be for mind, body and spirit. It's not a coincidence that people diet as part of their New Year's resolutions. Detoxing your body from all processed foods, sugar and alcohol, detoxing your bank account from excess spending, detoxing your mind from electronics, and detoxing your life from toxic relationships can be great ways to begin the new year.
- New systems. Creating a system which supports what you want can be one of the best ways to achieve your goals. Instead of focusing solely on your goals, spend some time creating a system in your life which fosters habits in support of your goals. Want to decrease anxiety, create a daily meditation routine and schedule weekly time to reflect on main stressors for the past week and strategize how to decrease those stressors. Want to get more clients? create a monthly system in which you analyze which tactics are working, which seem to be a waste of time and energy, and brainstorm new tactics to try.
- Gratitude. Bringing in the new year with gratitude is always a good thing. Making a list of experiences, relationships, things you're grateful for from the previous year, beginning a gratitude journal, going for gratitude walks are all ways to practice gratitude with grace. For more info check out my post on ways to practice gratitude part I and Part II.
- Connection. Gosh you guys, I think much of our suffering stems from our loss of connection. It could be loss of connection to ourselves, loss of connection to friends or significant others, loss of connection to mother nature. The new year can be a great time to figure out what you want to reconnect to. Spending more time with friends, family, out in nature, in yoga class can be great ways to reconnect to whatever it is that you've become lost from. Journaling, meditating, art or creative work can all be great ways to reconnect with the self. Spending time with friends or family free from distractions of electronics can be a great way to reconnect with others. Going out into nature, meditation, yoga, tai chi, surfing, biking, can all be great ways to reconnect with your spirit.
I personally plan to start out the new year spending it with dear friends, eating clean to give my body and my gut a reset button from all of the unhealthy foods I've been eating over the past month. My husband and I have already begun our daily meditation practice again, and plan to continue it through the new year. I'm also going to review last year's vision board with my husband, take inventory of what has come into our lives, what we are still working towards and if there are any goals we want to add or change from last year's board. Might have to spend some time in nature too ; ) Happy New Year to you all. May 2017 be better than 2016.