On Thursday it was a new moon, a solar eclipse and the 1st September. That’s a pretty big deal in astrology terms. I’m all for making a fresh start, but as normal, my view is sometimes a little different from others.
I’ve made more fresh starts than I care to remember; eating healthily, practicing yoga, being more patient with my parents, being more thoughtful….all these things got me excited to be ‘making a fresh start’. I got to wipe the slate clean and pretend I hadn’t failed a million times before.
Here’s the thing though, I’ve never been very good at pretending. In fact, I’m pretty rubbish. So whilst this ‘making a fresh start’ was a way to wipe the slate clean, my head was full of all the times before where I’d failed. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that because I’d deemed whatever day it was as the ‘day of the fresh start’, I was remembering all the times I’d failed before even more.
Some points to note here:
- I used ‘failed’ a lot above. Purposefully, because that’s how I felt at the time. Slowly but surely I’ve managed to reframe that term to mean something else – to mean that the timing or the goal was off for me. It was out of alignment with where my learning and energy was at the time. So I didn’t fail, it just wasn’t the right time, it wasn’t the right goal, or the outcome was there to teach me a greater lesson than achieving the goal would have done.
- You are the one who defines your fresh start. You can make a fresh start every year, every month, every week, every day or every second. I tend to favour the latter. A Course in Miracles teaches that we are much happier when we come into every moment with a fresh perspective, untainted by what has happened before. No. it’s not always that easy or simple, but it is true (for me anyway). Making a fresh start can be a continual process – it’s a bit of a different take on it but hey, my weird takes on things is probably why you signed up to this blog! This idea is also encapsulated in the concept of mindfulness and, as some of you know, I’ll be setting up a course on that by the end of the year if you want to learn more 🙂
- Beating yourself up never helps. If you messed up, fell off the wagon, were mean to someone (or yourself) or spoke or behaved out of turn, go and apologise and try to make it right, but don’t waste any more time beating yourself up over it. If you spent half the energy you spend beating yourself up on being kind to yourself and others; on choosing to find the joy in your life; on seeking out delicious healthy recipes to try; on reaching out to friends….you would be a much happier and more productive person, and would move past whatever you think you did wrong and make up for it way faster than if you used your time to be miserable and self-deprecating.
So they’re the bits of knowledge I’ve gained from going through the making a fresh start cycle more times than I care to remember – I hope it served you in some way, and if it did, please do me the honour of liking or sharing it on social media 🙂