Hello you, Happy New Year! I’ve been hiding away for a few days over the holiday season and it’s given me the headspace to relax, focus on relationships, and visualise the future of this blog. All in all, it’s been bliss!
Now, you’ll have to excuse my wide-screen grin as the photo for this post; I’d been playing around with the concept of videos and in the end decided against it, but did garner this photo which I thought would do well for a smiley intro to 2017. What it does represent is a certain level of optimism that I have for this new year – I’m hoping to seed a real conscious lifestyle across the main aspects of my life, and echo this online in the form of thoroughly researched, informed posts, more collaborations, and regular and frequent posting (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with constant updates on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest).
So, to start of the year on the right foot, I thought it would be worth outlining my intentions (rather than resolutions – I’m not resolving anything, instead I’m aiming to better myself!)
Mind
I’ve decided to divide my intentions between three key wellness aspects, and my first is all about the mind, baby. I realised quite recently that I’m good to myself and others when I’m happy, but when I’m not feeling so chipper I lose that. When I’m unhappy, I normally try to remedy it with too much shopping or too much chocolate, and I can categorically say that I’ve never gone to the gym when I’ve been unhappy with myself. So for me my first goal is to look after my state of mind, practicing taking a step back and evaluating what’s making me unhappy when I’m a grump. I’m not going to label it as meditation, but instead an internal focus without distraction, be it at work, at home, on the bus, wherever. I think a lot of things could be improved if this was a widespread practice, don’t you?
Body
Does anyone instantly feel a nervous pang at the words “weight loss”? Even though I’m happy with my dress size, the phrase fills me with dread, visualising parts of my body I’m not happy with. And even though we’re only two days into 2017, it’s already everywhere – SlimFast ads, gym membership promotions… And here’s me, visualising my little belly, round and squishy. Or my bingo wings, weak and wiggly. Or what about the tops of my thighs, where a beautician once applied a cream and said “that’ll help with the cellulite”. Cellulite?! What cellulite?!
I’ve learnt over the years that motivation based on fear and the feeling of not being good enough does not work for me. I also hate that there’s no real distinction between skinny and healthy – I’ve been overly skinny, and was unhappy and unwell during that time of my life. To really look after my body this year, I’m moving on to a more conscious diet (I’ll be blogging about what this entails soon) and feeling strong. Strength is becoming the new skinny, and I love it. I love how I feel after body weight training, knowing I’ve achieved more squats than my last session. I’m turning to Zanna van Dijk for inspiration here – I’d suggest you give her a follow if you’d like to join me on my quest!
Soul
My final aim is around soul. I feel like even though I have the best intentions in the way I go about my life (public transport, healthy diet, natural cruelty-free beauty products, etc.) I need to give something back, and more than my spare change to the odd homeless person. I’m not sure what I’m going to do to fulfil this intention yet, but I’d like to start focusing more on the environment and giving back where I can, be it volunteering, activism, or regular donations. We’ll see.
