To quote my son who is a scientist, “A year is merely one (roughly) of earth’s revolutions around the Sun, as it has done billions of times. It is a fact of gravity; an inanimate concept that we use to visualize time, and as such cannot be ‘good’ nor ‘evil’.”
Still, many of us said good bye to 2016 with delight. It was a challenging year at so many levels. The hope for 2017 is to find our way to ‘happy’. In the attempt to find this possible bliss, many of us make new year’s resolutions to improve. Thus we have insured, at least a little bit, that the year will once again become a challenge.
New Year’s Resolutions are one more way to say we aren’t enough.
Not thin enough or rich enough or athletic enough according to the top resolutions people make. What’s more, after the initial exuberance wears off, often we give up. This reinforces our belief that we are broken and not enough.
What if instead of resolving to change, we embraced who we are? What if we began to play more instead of “work out”? Maybe we could experiment more with new healthy recipes instead of diet. We could make a challenge out of finding ways to spend less and save more. It is really a matter of perspective after all.
I was told a story of a woman who bought a lovely home, her dream home near the water. She loved that she could hear the sound of crashing waves from her windows. Until the first night in her new home, when she heard dogs barking. It sounded like lots of dogs and lots of barking. It kept her awake and her anger simmered.
After several nights of the constant barking, she decided to find this kennel and put an end to the noise somehow. She drove in the direction of the noise and found herself going quite a ways, finally to a road that ran right in front of the beach.
She found the source of the barking. On a big rock, out from the shore were dozens of seals, having a grand time, barking at each other and doing whatever it is that seals do in the middle of the night. They were a long way from where she lived, but the noise carried over the water. She stood and watched and thought she would never sleep again.
Funny thing, she did sleep. In fact she slept peacefully. Somehow knowing it was the sounds of joy and seals gave her comfort. She found the noise reassuring, just like the sounds of the waves on the shore or rain on her bedroom window.
I have found the same to be in my life. The young boys from up the street wake me often when they walk with their dog and their father. Yes, on my days off I like to steal a few extra moments of shut eye, but the pride with which they tell their father how high they can count makes it all so sweet.
What if you believed you have value the way you are? What if you started to act as if that was true? What changes might come about if instead of making new year’s resolutions to change you decided to celebrate who you are now? I can only wonder, but you my friend can find out for sure.
Do you find that you count calories all day long, behaving really well and then the evening sets in and the snacking/binging becomes out of control? Late night snacking has long been rumored to cause weight gain. In actuality, the notion that nighttime eating is more fattening than daytime eating or that our metabolism slows down at night isn’t based on recent scientific findings. 
So many times when I answer the phone, the caller on the other end (often a smoker) doesn’t wait for me to say much of anything as they dive into, “I need to make an appointment for smoke cessation, but first I have a few questions. How does hypnosis work, what is your success rate for smoke cessation and what if I can’t be hypnotized?” I have to take a breath and begin with one question at a time.