Happy Chinese New Year! And Nihao if you are celebrating Chinese New Year! The change in the calendar is very often a time to start anew, namely starting resolutions. Anyone with a resolution will have a reason, or reasons, to hit that [REFRESH – F5] button of life. Yoga as a New Year’s resolution, or part of your regiment of reasonable, attainable resolutions, is a great way to address the heavy foods we just consumed over the holidays and football season. Yoga as a New Year’s resolution also gets us back in touch with everyone in your immediate surroundings instead of using hand-held devices.
Sally Susinno, RYT-200, of Wellesley, Mass. Cautioned that “resolutions can be wasteful [and that] there’s no past or later, there’s always now.” Susinno did encourage students not to wait but start with something specific vs. striving for the unattainable. She also voiced her concern that “we live in a diet culture…[and we] binge before dieting.” The best approach to Yoga as a New Year’s resolution then is to find a practical, productive intention such as, “May I be right with myself.”
Overall Susinno likes to see people take a more meditative approach making yoga as a New Year’s resolution such a relevant opportunity. Other helpful, healing mantras she likes are, “May I forgive the people who imposed upon me” and “What does health mean to me?” Furthermore, this could mean watching to make sure we did not have a donut for breakfast vs. oatmeal or anything else that keeps us full longer. Yoga for New Year’s resolutions can also mean getting away from the ceremonial aspects of the time of year.
A way to avoid any drudgery with Yoga as a New Year’s resolution is to open ourselves to the different yoga poses and to experiment with that broad spectrum of yoga classes. If time or money is a challenge, consider learning one yoga asana per week for 52 weeks. While doing so spend January through August to explore the eight limbs of yoga, one per month. More often than not most New Year’s resolutions come to a crashing halt before Valentine’s Day. So focusing on one pose per week (one breathing exercise, one sitting exercise, one standing exercise) is the chance to stop and embrace when Susinno talked about the now vs. past or future.
With all this embracing of personal strengths and weaknesses, this recognition to forgive ourselves and others it is good then to focus on the best yoga poses for New Year’s resolutions.
Resources
[1] https://www.artofliving.org/yoga/yoga-benefits/reasons-yoga-new-year-resolutions
[2] https://chopra.com/articles/5-new-year%E2%80%99s-resolutions-to-expand-your-yoga-practice
[3] https://www.doyouyoga.com/5-yoga-poses-get-ready-new-year/
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