The resolution failures club?

When New Year fades and the bitter winter kicks in, those heartfelt intention that were supposed to change our lives get pushed aside by the realities of life. It is quite possibly one the most difficult things to do, to
think your way to a better place, to use your mind for long-term change. Whilst being very good at pointing out what is wrong, when it comes to delivery it is never at home, it is always out looking for the next problem. That is the issue with New Year resolutions, they can set your intentions, but they do not necessarily transform them into actions, they are what happens before you can think about what action you would like to take next, they are not an action in and of itself, they are the preparation before the first action, and the first step is the difficult part.

Getting your intentions to align with your actions, to change them into action, requires that extra step, your focus might be on the action that you want to take, whereas for real long-term change, you have to become the person that takes the sort of action you are intending upon taking. There is a misunderstanding of the world, that you have a happy and healthy body, therefore you do the kind of things that a happy and healthy
person does, which means you are that sort of human being. Rather the truth of the matter is that happy and healthy people, do happy and healthy thing and as a result have developed a happy and healthy body, however that might manifest for you, no judgement here, I save my judgement for myself.

Which raises some interesting questions, do happy and healthy people, have the intention of losing weight, becoming fitter, stronger and better rested, or do these things happen by themselves as a result of a thousand little decision. Not decisions that were agonised over but ones that arose naturally, simple decisions such as am I hungry, thirsty or tired, do I need to close my eyes and rest my forehead muscles or eat a chocolate biscuit and have a cup of tea. Do happy and healthy people, think about chocolate cake for four hours before giving in to temptation, or do they just recognise that they want it at the time they wanted it and then make the decision whether they want it or needed it at that moment, they are probably quite happy to let the feeling of wanting something be for awhile, and then if they still want it later they have it.

Letting things be is the action of letting things go, you do not let things go by thinking about letting it go, whether that is emotional trauma or temporary desire for chocolate cake. The mind can be a trap, it gives you a thought then if you think about it will give you some more thoughts about the same thing, as you so clearly wanted to think about it. If I were to give you a million pounds for not thinking about dancing purple elephants for an hour (which let me make clear I am not, not even theoretically) it would be a pretty safe bet, the thinking mind does not know what you want, what your preferences are, it will just think about it whatever you think about, it has no discrimination, it is just a repeating mirror.

Healthy and happy people do not think about being so, rather they think about just about anything else, they make little decisions about what to eat, and they stay little because they do not give them any more attention than they need. They think what do I want to eat now and then they eat what they want given the information they already have, if they ate cake last night they are probably going to eat salad for lunch, not out of some grand plan but because of balance and because they have the experience that eating a salad now will make them feel better, and that is what they want or at least really want.

As they do not get caught up in the drama of wanting cake and not having it, they do not have to waste four hours of energy on a internal debate about the relative merits of eating cake or not doing so, they take a little
decision in the moment to make a better quality decision. When you are not putting your awareness into what you want but do not need, you can instead become aware of what makes your life easier, which is going to be different for every person with their individual characters and life circumstances. However you are not the first
person to take this path, there are plenty of people in the world who are happy and healthy, it is certainly worth adsorbing what their habits are and how they live their lives. It is good to have examples that you can follow, that answers the question about what a happy and healthy person do in these circumstances, and that is the question that they ask except they ask what would I do, as they happy and healthy part is implied by their being.

And the easiest way to get to that being is by the experience of having, is if you are already happy and healthy you already have the experience, and it is easy to continue having that same experience, you would not expect anything else in those circumstances. However if you are not, you still have the opportunity to visualise it, you just have to tell your mind to do so and it will, visualise being the best plausible version of yourself, the only limit being what is plausible to you (which changes over time as you make progress). As the feeling of
having a healthy and happy body is the same as being a happy and healthy person, and you get to be that person as soon as you choose to be, if you magically added hundred pounds to someone who was happy
and healthy, the chances are they would lose that weight in a timely fashion just by being who they are, because they do not get stuck in quicksand of over-thinking, turning mere circumstances into personal
character flaws and reasons for poor decision. That is the magic of being someone on a journey rather than someone who is stuck where they are, you get to choose where you are going.