Happy New Year: Setting Your Intentions vs. Resolutions for The New Year
Setting Your Intentions vs. Resolutions for The New Year, Using Ritual 1 to assist you in setting your intentions for the new year
New Years always brings about the topic of New Year resolutions. We find the word ‘resolutions’ to be off putting. Often the cheers of “Happy New Year!” carry the burden of resolving to fix broken or disappointing remnants of the previous year (or years). These “resolutions” can make a brand new calendar look like an unpleasant, overly serious and uninspiring reminder of everything we failed to accomplish last year. As a human being, as well as a Licensed Massage Therapist and Certified Aromatherapist, I have learned to prefer to ‘set my intentions’ for the New Year and then let nature take its course. I feel the phrase ‘set my intentions’ is infinitely more pleasant and inspiring, if not exciting. I set my intentions around how I want to feel, what kind of person I want to be and who I want to surround myself with first. I set my intentions around my goals, second. Then I use Ritual 1 to get those intentions anchored in my mind, embedded into my future and into action in a way that literally feels good in my body. That to me is exciting and fills me with positive anticipation. For me, it wins over the usual pattern of beating ourselves up for what we didn’t do and resolving to do the same thing over and over again, year after year, with no result. This concept is backed up in the “A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals,” which discusses results of studies whose “participants who set approach-oriented New Year’s resolutions, 58.9% considered themselves successful, compared to 47.1% of participants who set avoidance-oriented resolutions.” (Brown, PLoS One, 2020).
But how do you do that? How do you set your intentions? How do you imbed them into your future and put them into action? Well for me, the first thing I do is journal. I write about what I like about myself (and don’t like), everything I can think of that I’ve accomplished (and not yet accomplished), things that’ve happened (and not happened), what I have (and what I don’t yet), what I want (and don’t want) and the people in my life who have supported me, inspired me and taught me (and those who haven’t). Then I let myself dream big. I want to be the ‘fearless feminine beacon of five sense living’ (my songwriting persona), I want to write and sing my songs, see Portugal, garden, cook, paint and have a sexy, fun, and successful relationship full of love, kindness and appreciation for the other. Then I take my bottle of Ritual 1, Intention-Based Aromatherapy and I follow the steps of the Ritual. See the steps here: https://attractessentials.com/explore-ritual-1/mind-mist-manifest-with-ritual-1/
After I’m done with my journaling, I put a picture in my mind. I visualize my future as if I’m there right then. I make it present tense. Next, I mist Ritual 1 into the air letting it settle lightly, deliciously on my face, inhale and enjoy the fragrance. Then, I let my brain do the rest. My good friend and life coach Claudia Bayr-Nobel, PCC, CDC borrows Walt Disney’s famous quote: “If you can dream it, you can do it” as her tagline for good reason. Download her article “Dreaming is Serious Business” and read more about that here.
Since we’re here, I’m going to share with you my Ritual 1 visualization and what happened with that. I was living in New York City, in my one apartment, which I loved and adored and I was happy with who I was and what I was doing, but I wanted more. I had fallen in love with the ocean, palm trees, access to sky and the beach lifestyle and I wanted it. So, I took up my bottle of Ritual 1 and did some visualizing using all my five senses to fill out the image. I pictured myself surfing, literally, feeling the sensation of the movement of the waves under my board, I had a martini in one hand and I could smell and taste the salty ocean air. I was wearing a silk surfing outfit and took a moment to imagine the feel of the fabric caressing my skin in the breeze. I heard the seagulls soaring playfully in the summer sky and saw the boldly stunning orange sun, rising over the vast everchanging blue-greens of the ocean. To my left and slightly behind, my partner was surfing with me, behind me the beach, the land and my house and I was smiling. That was over ten years ago, but now I have all that. Well, I don’t drink martinis much anymore, and I’m not currently surfing, but I moved to Miami in 2018. I have the ocean, the sunrises, my Spanish tile roof house with a curvy swimming pool in the back yard and my partner to go through life with and I don’t feel that I worked hard to get it at all. I went on autopilot and found myself doing what I needed to do to get here. Everything’s not perfect, it took a long time, but it felt like a blink of the eye and I have everything I intended. I trusted the process, the universe, my unconscious, my higher conscious, whatever you want to call it. I trusted myself and I trusted the mechanism of action (the brain).
So that’s how I did it and that’s how you can too and I invite you to try the same. Set your intentions, imbed them into your future with Ritual 1 and then find yourself automatically putting things into action, naturally, enjoyably and engagingly.
From my business partner Rodd and myself, wishing you the very best successes for the New Year.
Essentially yours,
Sherrin and Rodd