New Year's Resolutions

How many times have I heard this comment – ‘I’m only making one New Year’s Resolution this year and that is not to make any resolutions.’ This is understandable. Why set a resolution, whether it is to lose weight, go to gym regularly, be patient with that friend who is really nice but still manages to irritate you, and so on, when you know that these resolutions have not lasted long in the past and are unlikely to last long this year? I was reflecting on this point recently when I made a connection between setting resolutions and practising mindfulness. A common mindfulness practice is mindfulness of breathing – a simple practice in theory because all you do is focus on the breath. Breathing is easy for the majority of people – you breathe in – you breathe out. Breathing is the only function of the body which we can control consciously or we can forget about and it still happens. Useful for when we are sleeping!

What is difficult is to keep the mind focused on the breath and the breath alone. I have found sometimes that my mind has already started to think of something else only after 3 breaths. But the aim of mindful breathing is not to stay focused on the breath. The aim is to notice that your mind has found something else to occupy itself and then gently cox it back to focusing on the breath. And it is not important how many times you need to do this. The important thing is that each time you notice, you start again. If your mind is in butterfly mode and finds it difficult to settle then this could be many, many times in one session. This doesn’t mean you are bad at practising mindfulness. It is simply telling you the state of your mind at that particular moment in time. The worst thing you can do when this happens is to think that you are no good at it and give up.

And we can think about resolutions in the same way. It is difficult to get into a new habit or a new way of doing something or thinking about something and most of us will find reasons/distractions to do something else. But, instead of feeling that you have failed, you need to pause, remember the reasons why you set a particular resolution to help motivate yourself again and start again. Just as you would do in a mindfulness practice when the mind has been distracted by something it finds more interesting. Life gets in the way of resolutions – injury, illness, commitments – the important thing is to let go of that distraction when you can and start again.