A NEW New Year’s Tradition: Give Up Resolutions!

Are you planning on making resolutions for the coming calendar year? Many of us, Pagan and non-Pagan alike, make New Year’s resolutions, only to crash and burn in ensuing days or weeks due to a bad set up that we’ve created for ourselves. An overwhelming majority – 88% – of well-meaning New Year’s revelers will fail in achieving the resolutions they set out at 12:01 AM, January 1st.

It’s obviously possible to be among the elite few and ace your New Year’s resolutions. However, even at that I believe that resolutions come from a somewhat limited, and limiting, perspective. Given such rigid parameters there is little-to-no margin for course correction, reevaluation, or revision of goals. So instead of resolutions I’ve created a more responsive and resourceful system for New Years observations. Years ago, instead of making resolutions I began the practice of making lists of New Year Dedications, Intentions and Big Dreams.

And always, with any commitment, New Year’s or otherwise, it’s helpful to remember that while any marker – New Year’s day, any of the sabbats, the new moon, an anniversary, or a birthday – can serve as an activator for a commitment, every breath and every moment is a chance for a new choice. When you fall short of a commitment or intention, offer yourself compassion instead of self-denigration. Gratitude for a lesson learned is far more helpful and resourceful than self-blame.

An even more resourceful frame it to think of your New Year Dedications, Intentions, and Big Dreams as magickal practices. You can fold your new commitments into your already existing magickal practices and path, perhaps even rolling them in with commitments and intentions you made at Samhain, or Solstice, or any and/or all momentous occasions over the past number of months. With this built in the process of observing and celebrating the new year becomes part of your magickal process, and in the coming year each day (and moment) will offer the opportunity to grow in your commitment to your practice.

I find the phrase I am growing more committed to my practice every moment to be very helpful when I’m feeling shaky in my process and practice. It can work as a prayer or mantra to remember and recite as needed.

In the list structure I’ve designed, each list category has a descending – higher to lower – level of commitment. 1: Dedications; 2: Intentions; 3: The Big Dreams List.

Here’s a quick and easy guide on how to build these lists, and a few examples per category.

List One – Dedications:

The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary offers four definitions for the word dedication.

1 : an act or rite of dedicating to a divine being or to a sacred use, 2 : a devoting or setting aside for a particular purpose, 3 : a name and often a message prefixed to a literary, musical, or artistic production in tribute to a person or cause, 4 : self-sacrificing devotion <her dedication to the cause>, 5 : a ceremony to mark the official completion or opening of something…

I think all of these definitions have relevance here. Dedications are like vows that I’m making with my gods, my family, my community, the flow of life in general. And my life in specific. Of the three lists described herein, this one carries the highest level of commitment.

This category is about daily practice. In building this list think of the things you truly are committed to enacting in your everyday life. Consider the ways you want your life to shift, the relationships you are working to reconfigure or revalue, how you want to interact with the people you are responsible for or to.

Then set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as case may be), and get writing. You can write out as many or as few as feels right.

In this step and the others, if your lists gets too long for you to feel solid in committing to, you can number each item by level of importance or resonance, and cut the ones that rank lowest until you reach a number low enough to remember without actually consulting your list.

Here are a few examples from my list:

To recognize that every area of my practice is part of my work of dedication to the liberation of all beings pervading time and space.
To recognize that being of service to my my family, my friends, and my community is an inherent part of my spiritual practice, and to treat it as such. And, to remember that this is also a practice that engenders the attitudes of enlightenment that may lead eventually to the liberation of all beings.
To continue following the path that my practices open for me.
To continue growing in my knowingness that there is a plan for my Work that is greater than I can see, and that everyday I’m fulfilling that plan by living my life in accordance with my True Will and with as much consciousness as I am capable of achieving in any moment.

List Two – Intentions:

Mirriam-Webster has six definitions of the word intention. Of the six, I feel that the following five are all interestingly relevant in this case.

1 : a determination to act in a certain way : resolve, 2 : import, significance, 3 a : what one intends to do or bring about b : the object for which a prayer, mass, or pious act is offered, 4 : a process or manner of healing of incised wounds, 5 : concept; especially : a concept considered as the product of attention directed to an object of knowledge…

Intentions are thoughts, experiences, and occurrences that you are casting forward into your future. Merely creating an intention is, in itself, a magickal act. In this, the etymology is also interesting, because for me it illuminates a function of intention as a magickal Working. At the root intend means to direct one’s attention to, from a coupling of the Latin terms for toward, and to stretch. I envision the magickal act of intention as a sort of stretching of time and space that allows me to create outcomes in future time/space that I am steadily walking toward.

Intentions may not take as much day-to-day attention as dedications do, and may not be as interactive with others in your life. In this case, intentions are personal acts of magick that may or may not be witnessed by others. Intentions are personal even if the desired outcomes are about how we interact with others.

Whatever my intentions are on paper, often lot of intention has to do with feeling-states and the outcomes of them. Feeling-states are a powerful tool that allow me to stay in alignment with my intentions. When I start feeling uneasy in my practice, I allow my intuitive sense – which for me lives in gut feelings and muscular response – to help find my calibration and direction. More often than not the NLP-based techniques that I use in my coaching practice are grounded in tools that use different levels of communication with feeling-states.

Some intentions however are more solid and goal-like in nature. Some intentions have a solid finish line where a real-life manifestation will take place.

Some examples of my Intentions list items:

* To follow the attraction and direction of my heart with grace, trust, and joy.
* To allow abundance to enter into and flow in my life, and to have less attachment about how that flow occurs.
* To revamp my business model and presentation in advance of Jailbreaking the Goddess hitting the shelves.
* To tour with Jailbreaking the Goddess starting in July. (Yay!!!) (Want me to come to your town? Help me plan an event there!)
* To begin writing my next book.
* To build my coaching client-base up, while integrating tarot into my basic coaching programs.

List 3 – The Big Dreams List:

I got the idea for a what was called a WHY NOT list from Self Magazine actually, way back when I still read magazines. I have recently renamed this category Big Dreams. When I first read about the WHY NOT list, it offered an opportunity to make time and space to give myself the chance to dream big, and think outside the moment-to-moment details of daily life. This practice has yielded awesome results in the past number of years. I have renamed this the Big Dream list because that more accurately says what it is for me.

In creating this list, take a few minutes and get very self-focused. If you could do anything, what would it be? Anything you truly desire, you most likely can pull off.

In my life I’ve found so much inspiration from people who have come up against challenges and beat the odds; a man with a prosthetic leg finishing a marathon in just over five hours. My dad being diagnosed with cancer and, instead of succumbing, actually choosing to live for the first time in his life. My sister, an amazing woman, summitted Mount Everest in her mid-40s. My mom mothered a handful of kids on her own for many years, myself amongst them.

And my own past accomplishments are no small feat. As a neurodivergent person living with invisble illensses life can be a real struggle. Sometimes just getting out of bed can be a major feat. And still I am learning how to work with my ebbs and flows, to take care of myself well, and balance that with parenting, writing, teaching, coaching, and staying strong in my own practices. When I center into awareness of what I have been able to achieve already I become more confident that I can reach further without straining myself too badly. I can aim higher, and overtime, with patience and diligence, I will hit my goals.

This resilience and willingness to strive relies so much on a willingness to dream big. For me this category can be less confined by time limitations. My Big Dreams may not be achieved within one calendar year. However, if I don’t allow them to come forward and receive attention, they will for sure never be achieved.

The Big Dreams category can also be more light-hearted perhaps than the others. Our Big Dreams don’t all need to be ultra-meaningful, magikcal, or daunting. Big Dreams may be fantastical, whimsical, playful. They may even feel unreal.

But, being Workers of Magick, we know that one step – or even the decision to take one step – brings about shifts.

I am reminded of this quote:

‘But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money–booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’
– W. H. Murray in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951

Even if you don’t complete all of your Big Dreams befor NYE of next year, just the willingness to reach for your Big Dreams shifts the possibilities and probabilities that will open before you.

Some of my Big Dreams:

To achieve my best comprehensive health in my entire life.
Go find my body able to easily and powerfully dance again.
To create my own tarot deck.
To travel – off continent, and within the US.
To take amazing trips with my kids.

And, my final commitment to practice: to view these lists at least once every three months, and mark off the things that actually have a completion point, and put stars next to the things I’m doing well with as paths without destinations.

Creation of an accountability system is something I often recommend. Creating an accountability framework around these lists will help you keep to your practices around your Dedications and Intentions, and to create space for your Big Dreams. This may be a one-on-one buddy system, a group, or even a public declaration with scheduled check-in days. Share your Dedications, Intentions, and Big Dreams with people who care, people who believe in you, people who will support you in your desired growth. And you can offer the same support back.

If it appeals to you, you can join my brand new membership area to be part of an accountability system there. Feel free to post some (or all) of your Dedications, Intentions, and Big Dreams in the comments section there.

With wishes of joy, abundance, and greatest gratitude, and a very heartfelt prayer for a New Year that is beyond your sweetest dreams, from my heart to yours.

WANT SUPPORT CREATING YOUR LISTS?