Resolutions are Not an Ending; Rather a New Beginning

December 18, 2022/Heather Plant

I don’t know if you’re someone that likes to make New Year’s resolutions or if you’d rather grab a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and say forget it. I’ve done both depending on the year 🙂

I really struggled sticking to resolutions and only wound up being frustrated and angry at myself for not achieving them. The common one I would make years ago was to get healthy. Then New Year’s day would fall on a Saturday and I could forget about eating healthy as there were still leftovers from the night before. By the time Monday would come around I already viewed myself as a failure and tossed the goals out the door. Following year… repeat. Does this sound familiar at all?

When it came to resolutions I always thought I had to give something up.

Completely.

Forever.

And that’s nearly impossible!

Giving something up for infinity… well we’re human and how is it truly living when you’re punishing yourself for the rest of this life time. That’s also something so rigid and just saying you’re going to give something up doesn’t mean it’s going to happen… it lacks any plan to actually make that happen.

Thankfully the meaning of the word resolution actually varies. If you google resolution you also get as the meaning “the conversion of something abstract into another form.” This definition has a lot more depth to it. With this meaning you can see instead of having to give something up, it’s essentially a change, a transformation. Thinking of making resolutions then can take on a whole different viewpoint and it turns them into something you are actually in control of.

Transformation- the hidden truth needed for growth

In the Tarot there is a card known as the Death card. It’s one often dreaded by those that don’t know the meaning as the thought of death of course can be very scary. The Death card however doesn’t mean a literal death of a person, but rather a transformation. It refers to something that is going to change greatly in that person’s life which is a wonderful thing.

We often dread change and struggle with it. Partly because we like things to stay the way they are… the way we know it to be. Change can be scary though. The unknown can be scary. The permanency is often a part we really struggle with. But transformation isn’t just an ending. It’s also a rebirth into something new that came out of that “death”.

It’s like a caterpillar that lived its life eating leaves and then one day created the most comfortable home for itself so it could rest. While it was in its blissful slumber a huge transformation happened however and the caterpillar awakened into something absolutely beautiful and free- a butterfly. Butterflies are actually one of the main symbols for transformation as it’s the clearest example that humans can relate to.

Thinking about transformation is one of the ways I changed the way I looked at resolutions. Instead of being something rigid and committed to letting go of something, I realized they’re not an ending, but rather a brand new beginning. They’re a transformation of one thing into something even greater. Through looking at them as transformations we don’t disregard the part of us that we were casting away, rather instead, we embrace the parts we’re trying to let go of and bring something into our lives with it to help us live the life we desire even more than the one we already have.

Sounds better than thinking they’re all about tossing the Ben & Jerry’s out right?

So after years of pondering and tweaking how I approached the New Year, I decided I really wanted to spend time reflecting on how amazing, and the not so amazing parts, of the current year in addition to contemplating on what I wanted to focus on in the future year. A whole lot can happen in one year so a lot of transformation can happen year to year and there is always some form of change that occurs.

We often get so busy in life that we don’t even have time to realize a lot of what happened in the moment, and if we don’t take time to really reflect on what happened, do we even notice what happened? I know it’s in the memory somewhere but it gets lost so easily with the white noise of the world. So after years of tweaking how I viewed the New Year and resolutions, I developed a system that has completely changed and inspired my life in so many ways.

Each year I perform a ritual where I honor my prior year and all that I accomplished. I then take what I learned and apply those lessons to create the version of the next year that I truly want by creating goals I can actually accomplish and feel amazing about, rather than defeated and depleted over. Crafting resolutions this way guarantees that growth happens in one way or another and isn’t growing the real part of living?

This ritual has turned into one part of the cyclical system I use to work on continuously manifesting the life I desire. We all deserve happiness and peace. I’m not saying simple planning will provide that immediately, but it sure does make life seem a lot more meaningful at times and creates a massive change in a way that one truly desires, rather than feeling like you’re at the whim of what the universe sends you.

Want to learn how you can craft Magical Resolutions?

I turned my years of refining this ritual into a course called Magical Resolutions where I show you how you can craft your own resolutions for your best year yet. If you feel called to join us this round check it out at the link above.

In Magical Resolutions we go over: