Yes, you can too.
With Hope and Love

If there is something I have learned in my life it is the importance of those two words.
And they are not just words. They both hold such value when we truly embrace them with full intention and let them guide us as our most basic life perspective.

When my parents both died one year apart I realized there was only one thing that mattered at the end. Love.

I also learned that I needed both
Hope and Love for myself
to keep going.

We are starting a New Year. We all know it is not going to be easy.

But what we can do is learn from whatever comes our way. When I asked a friend of mine the other day, what he would want to embrace most for this year to come his answer was: "To be present to whatever comes my way." Indeed, that is what we need to do right now.

Daily Om had an interesting story about New Year's Resolutions. It talked about making two lists of resolutions or promises to ourselves. One list should be everything we would WANT to keep and the other everything we WILL keep. It then said to take a look at the two lists and realize that what you SHOULD (list 1) or COULD (list 2) do with your life no longer matters. The only thing that matters, from this day forward, is what you MUST do.

And the answer was - LOVE.

This is often the time of year when the talk is about willpower.
To me that is not what we need.
We need is Love-Power.

You might have heard the story about Oprah. How she has gained weight again and so on. Don't be hard on yourself if your past New Years Resolution have not worked for you and at this point you are wondering if it will this year. It is not that easy. If it were, we would not keep the same resolution on the list every year as our goal for the New to come. Like....Lose weight, work out more, be nicer to others and so on...

Research shows that about 80 percent of people who make resolutions on Jan. 1 fall off the wagon by Valentine’s Day, said a NY Times article about the resolutions we make at this time of year.

It also mentions rightly so, that we are not even supposed to be able to change that fast. We are created to make changes as a process. Then how come we expect a complete turn around from ourselves every year on January 1st?. Thinking that we can step into the new year and yupti, it is all going to be different? No, it is not that simple. Change takes time, it is a process. But please also know that for every time you have tried, you have learned something. Your learn about what does not work for you and that is as important as knowing what does. This is how you can do things differently and "better" everyday in the future. When I say better I mean, a step closer to our goals for ourselves. Better is not a value!

And so it is not about will-power, so don't try to tell yourself you need that or don't have it. You can succeed in what you set out to do for you. If you use hope and love as your fuel.