Resolutions

Resolutions

This past weekend, I went to River’s Edge in Cleveland for an educational retreat called “Yoga and the Brain”. There, I joined 26 other people, mostly from NE Ohio, eager to learn the latest research on what happens in our brains during the practice of yoga and how our thought patterns affect our everyday experience.

My place in the sun at River’s Edge Yoga Retreat.

The biggest takeaway for me from this weekend was the idea that our minds get stuck on loops. Every year we have high expectations of ourselves and begin the New Year with resolutions of things we plan to do from here on out that we hope will somehow make us be better or do better as parents, employers, employees, spouses, children. Often, these resolutions are just reheated versions of the resolutions we made the year before (and didn’t keep). By February, most of our resolutions typically fall by the wayside and we beat ourselves up, for once again, not doing what we resolved to do back in December and January.

We spend so much of our lives thinking about what we are going to do or ruminating on what we’ve already done that we miss our greatest gift-the present.

Happy New Year, Everyone!