Tag: intentions

February resolution: Have more fun!

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January has seemed like the longest month ever to me. As it – finally – comes to an end, I wonder if that’s because I didn’t set out this year with any new intentions. I just eased into 2020 and almost immediately became bogged down in boredom, and maybe a slight case of seasonal depression too. I’m beginning to see that the new year’s resolutions I’ve always scoffed at can serve a purpose — giving this long cold month something to organize itself around.

If that’s the case, then even if you’ve already given up on your resolution (as most people have by now) it’s still done you some good. Just the process of setting a goal and creating a structure for achieving it stimulated your productivity. And if you managed to shed a couple of pounds, try some new form of exercise, or save some money you would have spent at Starbucks, then you’re ahead of the game.

inspirational quotes on a planner
Photo by Bich Tran on Pexels.com

But don’t give up now. Think of it this way: February is the shortest month of the year, so it’s that much easier to keep up with an intention for the whole month. How about reexamining those January 1 goals – can you tweak them? Or, as in my case, set a new one now?

I decided to turn to my “52 Lists” book for inspiration since its ideas are loosely organized around the calendar year. The prompt for week #6 (which roughly corresponds to where we are in the year) was just the ticket: “List the ways you love to have fun.” And then the action step: “Plan to integrate something fun into every day this week.” What a perfect way to set goals for February – instead of focusing on what’s wrong about self, focus on what’s not satisfying about life right now, and do something about it. In other words, put the spotlight on emotional and social health instead of the physical or mental.

I started making the list of things to do for fun, focusing first on the ones that get me out and moving:

  • Hiking
  • Ice skating
  • Seeing friends
  • Going to the movies
  • Exploring new neighborhoods
  • Trying new recipes

The book provides two pages to list all the ways to have fun, but I think I can start with this list. I got a head start by going on a 3-mile hike last weekend, which was the most invigorated I’d felt in a while. And I’ve been talking about going ice skating ever since Christmas – even though I haven’t gone to a rink in years, something in me wants to lace up the old skates and get out there. I think it’s because I remember the freedom and weightlessness of gliding around on the ice.

Skaters

How to put my intentions into action though? If step one was the list and step two is writing about them here, what comes next? Psychology Today has a good article on goal setting and creating an action plan. There I find out that my intention should have a time frame around it, and include some intermediate steps if they’re appropriate. So my action plan for today could include calling a friend to set up a lunch date; checking the web for the hours of the ice rinks; and reading the reviews of new movies so I can plan what to see and put it on the calendar.

Every day is a fresh start, but it may not be smart to just let a day, or a month, unfold any which way. We can have a plan, and still leave the door open for serendipity. Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” I think he meant that it’s important to create the structure, but don’t make it so rigid that there’s only one particular way of reaching the outcome.

 

 

Books + beach + baby turtles = respite

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Sometimes we need a respite more than we need a vacation, or even before we can be fully present for a vacation. What’s the difference between a respite and a vacation? The dictionary tells us that a respite is a short period of rest or relief from something difficult or unpleasant, while a vacation is an extended period of recreation. When I left my home in Washington 10 days ago and headed for the beach,  I was fleeing from a stressful and frustrating situation. What I didn’t foresee was how many days it would take before I really felt like I was on vacation.

I knew I had to lower my stress level, and so I set some intentions from the start, the most important being to limit my email. I turned the mail function off on my devices and decided to only turn it on twice a day to check for things that were important. The rest of the time, I vowed not to check it at all.

Here are my other intentions:IMG_2188

I had been neglecting my yoga practice at home. In addition, I needed to spend some time learning how to use my new camera and updating my continuing education credits, as well as this blog. But it turned out to be many days before I could focus on the more mentally-tasking intentions.

On my first morning, I went to a yoga class and felt some of the stress begin to lift. On my second morning, I began a week of going out with other volunteers to monitor sea turtle nests on the beach. Each day at sunrise when we would begin our walk down the beach, a feeling of complete well-being would come over me and I would utterly relax. When we released some straggler baby turtles near the ocean one day, and people gathered to cheer them on as they made their way, I was filled with gratitude to be part of something so simple yet so much bigger than myself.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The remainder of my first four or five days was spent reading books. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to do much more than that. Overcast weather justified my couch potato tendencies a bit, but if I’m honest I admit that I just didn’t have the energy or interest to do more than that. I finished three books in rapid succession, and would have read more if they had been available. Other people’s stories have always felt like a refuge for me when I needed one.

IMG_2189

By the fifth day, the sun came out, and with it my readiness to be “on vacation.” I finally felt like I could enjoy the recreation part of my stay — the swimming, boating, biking and other fun. I took my camera out and experimented with its different settings. I spent the hot part of one afternoon doing an online class to fulfill my CE requirement. I went kayaking with my husband, and enjoyed that wonderful feeling of physical tiredness that comes from exertion. It was such a welcome change from the mental and emotional exhaustion I was feeling a few days earlier.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that,

The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest. But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest. We may even come back more tired than before we left.

I feel lucky that I had enough time to give myself both that respite and a vacation. But what I learned is that I need to build in more respites for myself at home, and probably more boundaries to keep myself from getting to the point of so much stress. Time to set more intentions!

 

Warning: This could be habit forming

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There are many people I know who subscribe to the belief that if you want to establish a particular daily habit, it’s best to do it as soon as you get up in the morning. A teacher of mine has the habit of writing first thing in the morning, my husband insists that exercising in the morning is the only way to make sure he does it, and most regular meditators say that it’s important to establish that practice upon rising. You could say it’s the Nike model: Just do it.

But here’s my typical morning when I don’t have to rush out: get up, drink a cup of coffee while reading the newspaper, eat breakfast with a second cup of coffee, have more coffee while doing the crossword puzzle…you get the idea. Can I possibly get into a different morning routine that allows me to accomplish more?

It’s tough to change habits. What we forget when we talk about establishing a “good” habit is that we usually have to eradicate a “bad” habit first. As a health educator, I’m frequently advising people on healthy eating, exercise and stress management, but even though they may have an intention to change, their habits of mind get in the way. If I examine my own life, and think about changes I’ve wanted to make, how often have I made progress? How often have I achieved my goal? And how often have I done that on my first try? Rarely, if at all.

Research has shown that as much as 40% of our daily activity is performed in exactly the same way each day. In other words, much of our time is spent acting automatically. This is great, in the sense that you don’t have to think about how to brush your teeth every time you do it, but it makes it tough if you actually do want to change how you brush your teeth!geisha

We have two parts of our minds competing against each other. One is the intentional mind, which is goal-directed. This is the part we want to activate if we’re trying to lose weight, finish a project, or train for a marathon. The other part is the habitual mind, and it operates mostly outside of our awareness, helped by neurochemicals in the brain that allow habits to take over. We need the goal-directed part to be in charge long enough to get a new behavior established, then hope that the habitual mind kicks in and makes the behavior automatic. But how can we accomplish that?

According to social psychologist Wendy Wood, we first have to derail the existing habit and create an opening for a new one to take root. Because habits form through associative learning, a change in environment can often be a way to derail an old habit because  the cues for the behavior disappear. Some examples might be moving, changing jobs or hanging out with a different group of people.

What are some of the things that cue behavior? Many smokers say that they always have a cigarette when they have a drink. The drink is the cue for the cigarette – take away the drink, and maybe they are less likely to smoke. For others, watching TV is a cue to start snacking. So if you substitute another activity for TV viewing, you derail the snacking habit.

After creating opportunity and letting the intentional mind set a goal, it’s all about repetition. Studies show that it can take anywhere from 15-254 days for a new habit to be established. So repeating the behavior frequently is important, as is creating a consistent context in which it happens. In other words, we need to have new cues in the environment that trigger the new behavior.

It can take a while to figure out the new cues. When I moved a couple of years ago, I found that my writing habit was disrupted because my desk suddenly wasn’t a place where I could write anymore. Only after I began writing at the kitchen table was I able to consistently be productive. Then I could let repetition turn it into habit.chains

The theologian Tryon Edwards once wrote,

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steady gains in strength, At first it may be but as a spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.

While chains of steel sound a little scary, they’re exactly what our healthy habits need. Unfortunately, they’re also what makes it so hard to break the bad ones.

 

 

Resolution = intention –> heart’s desire

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A resolution and an intention are pretty much the same thing. But in the yoga tradition, the ideal is for intentions to come from the heart more often than from the mind’s desires. And that’s why I find myself setting an intention for 2015 even though I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions.

In Sanskrit, the word for intention is sankalpa. It comes from kalpa, which means “a way of proceeding” and san, a “concept or idea formed in the heart”. So setting an intention means acting on an idea or desire that comes from the heart.

What is my intention? Simply to spend 30 minutes each day reading a non-fiction book.

How does this intention come from my heart’s desire?

All my life, reading has been a treasured experience, “the greatest gift” according to Elizabeth Hardwick: “It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.” It has calmed me when I’ve been distressed, stimulated when I’ve been bored, provoked when I’ve been complacent. imageYet I have developed two habits that are getting in the way of reading serving my heart’s purpose. One is reading on the iPad, and one is reading mostly novels.

When I first started reading on the iPad, I promised myself that it would only be for traveling, so that I didn’t have to pack heavy books with me. Then I discovered Overdrive and started checking out library e-books. After that, I moved, and had to drastically reduce the number of physical books on my shelves. So I stopped buying “real” books. But one of the things I discovered is that I dislike reading nonfiction e-books because of the difficulty with flipping back and forth in the book, or easily finding a piece of information. So I just stopped reading nonfiction.

I will always enjoy reading novels more, and that’s okay. In fact, studies have shown that reading literary fiction helps us understand other people better and to build stronger relationships. But there is another world of information out there that I am missing by excluding nonfiction from my menu.

Reading is declining pretty much everywhere. A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed this development and the “Slow Reading” movement that has sprung up in places to counter  it. Proponents of slow reading even get together in some cities to read as a group (each with his or her own book). Research indicates that we need 30-45 minutes of reading in one stretch for true immersion (and presumably, improved comprehension), so that’s what these slow readers do.

I don’t think I’ll be joining a slow reading group, but I hope to model my reading on their design. Even my fiction reading doesn’t meet the immersion threshold most days — if I’m busy, I read for maybe 5 or 10 minutes before falling asleep, and while I mostly switch to airplane mode while reading, the iPad just offers too many distractions that lure me away from the book I’m reading.

The interesting thing about the Slow Reading movement is that their prerequisites for it sound a lot like those for meditation: a comfortable seat, a quiet environment, no distractions, the book as focal point. By bringing mindfulness to the act of reading, we can deepen the experience and its impact on us.

We take time for what is important to us. Thirty minutes a day to rekindle a treasured gift, to illuminate life’s purpose — that’s an intention from my heart.