At this time of the year many of us have made a commitment to change something. We call them resolutions, New Year Resolutions. Similar words in keeping with resolution are decision, aim, declaration, purpose, perseverance, intention. Words we should remember when we struggle with these promises we have made.

Whatever we have promised ourselves that we will change we will have done so with good intentions. However, many of us start to lose focus after a couple of weeks. We lose the motivation that inspired us around the Holiday season. We become angry with ourselves and the promise we made starts to feel like a burden.

I made a promise to myself that I would simply love myself more. After all of the turmoil I had gone through in the past few years I decided it was an easy enough thing for me to do. Nothing too taxing, nothing that would make me feel like I was being hard on myself.

Love myself more.

For me, loving myself more means:

•Being kind to myself.

•Practising Self-Care.

•Setting boundaries.

•Not pushing myself too hard.

Seems easy enough, right? For the first week of January it was easy to be kind and gentle with myself. It was easy to make sure nobody was encroaching on my boundaries. By the second week I was struggling with a virus and it was all I could do to just function, self-care and self-love slipped down my list of priorities as I struggled to get through each day. I felt like a failure. How could I have failed at something so simple?

Last week once the effects of the virus had gone and I was starting to feel more human, I got to thinking about resolutions, my promise to myself, and what it all means to me. I began the year with the intention to love myself completely and that included not being too hard on myself. Yet here I was being hard on myself. Beating myself up for failing at something as easy as loving myself.

Feeling so much better had given me clarity and allowed me to see that when I was ill I was giving myself self-care and self-love. By just doing what I needed to each day and not over taxing myself, that was an act of self-love and self-care.

When we make promises to ourselves at the beginning of each new year we need to remember that life will always throw curve balls our way. Rather than giving up we should thank life/the universe for whatever lesson it was teaching us at the time and recommit to the promise we made ourselves. Losing our way also gives us a chance to tweak the promise, because life isn’t static and neither should we be.

• 

•