New Years Resolution: Reflecting on Your Life
Forming a Vision for Your Life
With the new year we feel the energetic effects of the winter solstice, which is magnetic and causes us to withdraw our energy from the outer world and back into our core where it can be rejuvenated and used to germinate new ideas in the spring. The magnetic pull of the Earth’s energy causes us to turn inward and reflect on our life as an overview of key moments and evaluate the meaning of our experiences and how they served our growth. We review what was active and prevalent in our life over the past year, the areas where we experienced growth and a sense of achievement, and areas where we failed to grow in the ways we set out to, or due to unforeseen challenges and limitations of some kind. As we self-reflect, we get a distinct feeling of what our life’s about and whether we are advancing and growing into something greater, or stagnating and staying stuck in redundant patterns that we can’t seem to get out of. We usually get a sense of where we’d like to be going, what kind of changes we have a desire and longing for, and the dreams which year by year seem to slip away while we feel powerless to change things. Sometimes, we silently surrender to the fate assigned to us through our duty and obligation to someone else’s dream.
When we withdraw our energy from the outer world and begin looking within as a means of recognizing ourselves, it’s as if we touch on our true self as our soul, which lies within us as a latent force waiting to be recognized and awakened. We access that part of us normally obscured with the chaotic demands of our everyday life which can seem to command our soul and bully us along a path that doesn’t seem to have any exits or crossroads. We get stuck in ruts formed with deep embankments that prevent our ultimate escape from the lifeless illusions that rob us of our destiny by replacing it with a dull form of fate. Each year which passes by like a fleeting memory mostly forgotten, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss of conventional life and the remnants of what was once our vision for life that enthralled us with an eager sense of curiosity and wonder. Our dreams begin fading into the distance, becoming vague and elusive, until we can’t even seem to remember what they were. Our dreams turn into distant memories that haunt us with a feeling of what could have been, and we feel them in our heart like a distant howl relentlessly begging our attention in a desperate attempt to resurrect the life we were born to live.
As we look back over our life the last year, or the last several years, to see how our life is taking form and progressing, we may long for change, sometimes to the point of desperation, while also wallowing in a feeling of frustration and disappointment. Not in others who we imagine have stolen our life, but in ourselves for being powerless to change it. Yet change is something that’s always within our power to create. We have only to be willing to do what it takes to bring the desired change about. All change is a form of transformation that requires a new vision for our life, and direct action on our part to produce it. In order for your life to change, you have to begin doing something different. You need to gain realization around what’s keeping you seemingly stuck in your current situation or preventing you from growing, and how your mindset and attitude need to be transformed in order to produce the change naturally as a by-product or natural form of expression. Change in your life will only come through change in yourself because you are the creator of your life. What appears as the world outside of us is a reflection of the world we’ve created within us.
Longing for Change . . .
There’s a distinct tendency whenever we’re longing for change of some kind to take the attitude of thinking that it’s other people or our situation that needs to change or is what’s preventing us from changing, and that in order for us to change, they need to change. We then become invested and direct all our efforts into trying to figure out how to get them to change, and what we need to do to make them change. After several futile attempts at manipulating others to get them to do the change for us, we begin realizing that not only does it not produce the change we were after, but often makes it even worse because our attempts are met with resistance and a hostel or resentful reaction. This is because the people and situations in our lives are what established and serve to maintain the patterns of our life and only act to hold us firmly to those patterns. If we change our situation or circumstances, thinking that will produce a change in how we feel, we simply recreate the same feeling in the new situation. As we change internally, so does every aspect of our life. But the only change we can actually produce in the real sense, is a change in ourselves, which comes as a form of intentional growth and development.
Growing Ourselves . . . .
In order to grow in our lives, we have to have an attitude of consistent and continuous improvement of some form. We have to have a vision for our life that serves as a navigational tool for who we’re becoming and what direction we’re intentionally moving our life in. We have to have a clear idea of what aspects of our life we want to change, what type of growth we want to produce, and how to form it as a congruent idea that produces harmony in all other areas of our life, and what the actual changes need to be. It’s not just behaviors we’re changing, but our attitude and mindset that are producing the behaviors. Whatever we’ve created or exist in a natural relationship with up to this point, is because our mental paradigm is producing it and acts naturally to maintain it through the current behaviors we’re employing. The behavioral dynamics and activities we engage in and consistently produce are the end result of a whole psychology. They’re produced congruently out of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, emotional states, values, preferences, and so on, that all act together to express and create through congruent actions of some sort. To change the action, you have to change the paradigm as a mindset that’s acting to produce it.
Change your mind, change your life
Change your thoughts, and you change your experience
So as the year comes to a close, and a new one is on the horizon, and you reflect back on your life, forming a sense of what you accomplished in terms of desired growth, rekindle your vision for your life. Recall what your vision is, and as you compare it to your current life, form clarity around what changes you need to produce to grow yourself into the person that will naturally and consistently produce the life you desire. We are all born with a vision inside of us as a calling that we consistently imagine as an experience that we steadily gravitate towards in our life. Our vision is a guidance system designed to lead us into telling a certain kind of story by how we live our life. We have everything we need inside us to live the story we came here to experience. Our dream reveals our potential which unfolds through a journey that aims towards a particular destiny that requires us to grow ourselves in specific ways in order to produce and then sustain it. We have to become the person (character) that naturally tells that story by how we live our life. Who we become and how we’re being is always up to us.
So as you reform your vision for your life, ask yourself, how do you need to deliberately act on yourself to become the person necessary for living that vision as your life story? What are you currently doing in your life that’s preventing it, or contradicting it by serving to create something else? How would you need to change yourself to begin living out of a new story for yourself? What beliefs do you hold about your current life that prevent you from being able to live the life you dream of? What values do you hold that keep you in the position you’re currently in? In what ways are you negotiating away your dream and what you really want in favor of someone or something else? How could you build your dream into your current life so you can live it through your circumstances without conflict? How would you need to transform your current situation to support your desired life? What story are you telling yourself that keeps you stuck in a situation that you long to leave or change all together?
You need to not only identify the desired change while forming a picture of it in your mind, but also recognize what is acting to create your current experience. What role are you playing in your own life story, and how would you have to develop your character in order to play a different role in a new type of story? What are the psychological components maintaining the areas you need to transform, and how will changing them affect the other areas of your life? You need to begin gaining an in-depth clarity around your own psychological make-up, and work at the level of cause that will produce a natural effect as the behaviors that will form new types of experience. You need to recognize and become aware of the emotional component driving the current behavior, and what emotional state will be necessary to drive the new behavior.
The Nature of Transformation . . .
Transformation is a holistic process that affects every aspect of your being and produces new cause and effect relationships. By changing how you relate to everything else will naturally and spontaneously produce new types of experiences, which will give you a new sense of yourself within those experiences that serve to transform your identity. As you create new experiences, you simultaneously identify with your own experiences, and they reformulate you to automatically produce more of the same type of experiences. While growth requires effort and deliberate action initially, once exercised repeatedly over a period of four to six weeks, it becomes a natural behavior that we do automatically without having to think about it. This frees up the energy being expended to produce the new behaviors making it available for new growth and development.
Deliberate growth and development requires a vision as an ideal for our life that we use to evolve ourselves. Whatever our dream is we have to develop the necessary qualities and traits to be able to tell that story in a natural and automatic fashion. It gives us a formula for developing our character that shows us how we need to act on ourselves to transform our current character into the desired character necessary to tell the story of our dream. Life sets the stage necessary for growing ourselves through self-created experiences by way of our life conditions and circumstances. We know we’ve achieved the desired growth when we consistently produce the experiences as a story (of our dream) in an effortless and natural manner. Our constitution determines how we express to create our life experience. In order to change our outer experience, we have to change our inner constitution which is producing and maintaining it. All growth is initiated from within as an imagined result or outcome, and then projected outward through actions as self-expression that produces an outer experience analogous to the inner vision.
Dr. Linda Gadbois
Transformational Coach / Spiritual Teacher
