Chinese New Year – Another Chance for some New Year resolutions!

Happy New Year and Welcome to the year of the Dragon!

As it was Chinese New Year yesterday I decided to revisit my New Year resolutions of a few weeks ago and to reset and refine my intentions and goals. Also Debbie told me that Marie Diamond had told her that whatever you focus on or do on Chinese New Year will be your focus or come back to you for the rest of the year. So, we were very pleased to have 3 meetings in Central London with Bernardo Moya of NLP Life Training, who we are working with on some exciting projects; Karen Mann, who we hope will be our new North London IRG Meet Up Leader; and Susanna Page of Alternatives at St James’s Church, who has been very supportive of IRG.

Apart from our busy day of meetings I spent time finishing my Blog about IRG, which I’d been working on for a while and I almost finished my review of Tim Freke’s New Year Mystery Experience in Glastonbury, which I attended from 30 Dec 2011 – 1 Jan 2012.  As one of my intentions is to write a minimum of two books this year, as well as some workshop materials, finishing one of my Blogs on this auspicious Chinese New Year day was a good omen.

I’ve always made New Year resolutions on 31^st December and when I was younger I often felt disappointed a few weeks later when I was unable to maintain the changes I had set in motion.  I know that I have the power to consciously redefine myself and evolve in every moment but sometimes the day-to-day stresses take over and I start to feel I am not living in a way that serves me.  Then it occurred to me that I could reset my resolutions on the 30^th January as this is my birthday and it’s really more of a new year for me personally.   Often I found that I had more success starting or restarting new behaviours or achieving particular goals following my birthday.  That got me to thinking that in order to sustain change we need to revisit our intentions and reset them more frequently and I have made a point of doing this on a regular basis over the last 4 – 5 years. These days I’m also far more forgiving if I have a bad day or find the challenges too much and just restart again with renewed vigour and even stronger intention.

When you review your behaviours and achievements I think it is important to focus on how it feels to be you, all the amazing things about being you and then think about how you can be the best you can be in this incarnation.  I have also found that if you share your intentions or goals, especially those relating to behaviour, it can put more power behind them. So I am going to share with you that I decided to celebrate Chinese New Year by reverting back to being largely vegetarian, eating no meat and just some seafood and fish. I was interested to read that on day one of the fifteen day Chinese New Year celebrations, also known as the ‘Spring Festival’, Buddhists traditionally refrained from eating and killing meat. I felt very in tune!  I have also been intending to take a break from alcohol for a while as it depletes my energy and makes me feel less inclined to meditate or exercise, which are important for my peace of mind, creativity, inspiration and well-being.  So yesterday I also stopped drinking alcohol for 3 months, after which I intend to enjoy champagne or wine on special occasions.

In Eastern philosophy the Dragon is said to be a deliverer of good fortune and is regarded as a divine beast so I welcome the Dragon and it’s Yang energies of power and strength and feel positively energized by making these decisions and taking action to change some of my behaviours to create what I feel is a better version of me. Now I need to practice every day to make them easy and automatic and part of my subconscious.