New Year Resolution
By Sr. True Precept
“For the year to be new, you have to renew yourself. You have to make yourself new. “New year–New Me.” You need a new me in order to enjoy the new year.”
(Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh’s quote)
I’ve been writing my New Year Resolution almost every year since I became a nun and learned this practice of writing my New Year Resolution taught by my teacher, Ven. Nhat Hanh.
In the past years, I would be quite ambitious at writing down the goals I have for the next coming year, and these goals are usually not so easy to achieve. I would feel somewhat disappointed in myself and start setting new, hopefully easier-to-achieve goals.
But the more I reflect, the more I see that it’s not about being perfect or transforming all my negative habit energies, but more about how much understanding and love I have for myself.
When we understand and love ourselves, we’ll know what we truly need. It’s like the mother or father who takes care of a toddler—we need to observe our child closely in order to know what he or she truly needs.
We need to have the time to stop, reflect, and look inward to see ourselves for who we are. We can take this time at the end of the year to look deeply into our body, our feelings, and our perceptions.
We can take a moment to observe our physical body, our health. How is my heart, my liver, lungs, or my intestines doing? Do I have any physical pain in my body right now?
Once we see the physical health of our body, we can begin to find ways to take care of ourselves. Our body is very intelligent; it usually can heal itself. However, with modern healthcare medicines, we don’t often allow it to heal naturally. Sometimes, just resting or relaxing our body gives it a chance to heal and renew itself. Also, the way we work, eat, rest, or entertain can affect our body.
Write down 2 or 3 things you can do to heal and take better care of your body. If you have time, you can write more.
Then we can look into our feelings. There are times we react to things we saw, heard or feel. Some of our reactions might be beneficials because it safeguards our survival. But most of the time, our over-reacting to things can make other people uncomfortable or annoyed.
For instance, you might hear someone make a comment about you or your love ones, and you assumed that the other person is negatively judging you and you react strongly toward that person. Perhaps next time we can learn to listen deeper or to calm our emotions before we shout or get angry at the others. Or we can excuse ourselves from the conversation and tell the other person that we are not ready to listen at the moment and would like to do it at a later time. Or when we are calmer, we can see that perhaps that person didn’t mean to hurt us, but because we have had some suffering regarding that similar situation, we tend to get hurt easily when someone said that exact same thing to us.
Thus, we can write down some preventive ways to help us not to react so strongly next time, like to pause and breathe before replying or to listen with compassion so that we don’t get hurt and react.
You can do the same for your perceptions. There are many times in a day when we encounter certain situations and some of our perceptions might not reflect the truths in things. We can re-check our perceptions and ask ourselves, “Are you sure?” every time we have a perception about something or someone, or even ourselves.
Maybe next time when we see someone, and a perception about that person arises, we can smile to our old perception and try to look at that person in a new light.
For instance, there was a younger Dharma sister of mine who is very particular about what beans she uses for what dish she cooks. I was a shopper at the time, and she had asked me to buy aduki beans for her. I was not familiar with all the beans so I assume that all beans were alike. Thus, I suggested for her to use the beans we have, like red beans, black beans or kidney beans. She was quite upset at my suggestions and didn’t speak to me for a few days afterwards. After several days, when she was calmer, she asked if I could sit and listen to her. When the time comes for us to sit down together, I practice mindful breathing and calming myself so I could be present. She began to share with me that she can only cook with that bean, and when I told her to use the other beans, she thought that I didn’t understand her enough, and she felt hurt. I apologized to her and said that was not my intention; I was just trying to ask her to make use of what we had on our pantry shelves. When the understand is clear, we both felt lighter and happier.
After the session, we did the practice of hugging meditation and was able to reconcile.
Therefore, we can reflect on the past year of our unskillfulness and start to write down what we can improve.
For instance, we might want to let go of certain perceptions we have regarding ourselves or other person, if those perceptions brought us some difficulties or suffering. Perhaps how we perceive our body, our look, and so on, that might prevent us from being happy. Or the expectations we have towards our love one that can hurt our relationship.
We can write down the perceptions that we would like to let go and substitute with new perceptions, or to say the mantra “Are you sure?” every time a perception arises in our mind.
When we have the time to pause, to look deeply at our body, our feelings, and our perceptions, we can find out ways to care for and to transform them. Once we can transform ourselves, we can become a new person and can look at others with new eyes. We can see things clearer and deeper, and more understanding and love will arise in us.
The New Year 2025 is coming in a few days. We wish you have some time to write your New Year Resolution. Write a resolution that you will enjoy doing and is easy to accomplish. It can be simple resolution.
For instance, instead of saying “I will walk or exercise 1 hour a day”, we can write “I will walk or exercise 20 minute a day”. Try not to set the bar too high or something that is unsuitable with our day-to-day-schedule. Create a resolution that would bring more peace, joy and happiness to yourself or your loved ones.
You can also include doing things you enjoy as a hobby, or to have a quiet moment in the day to breathe, to smile, to calm ourselves in the midst of your busy life.
Hope everyone enjoy writing your resolution and wishing you a very peaceful, happy New Year 2025!
