New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Change a Thing

Don’t promise yourself you’ll lose weight, give up chocolate, spend 5 mind-numbing mornings at the gym every week. Don’t promise yourself you’ll finally start flossing, stop biting your nails, get that raise you’ve been chasing after, climb Mount Everest, call your mother. Just don’t.
 
Make this the year a year of stripping away the excess, the stuff that gets in the way of you being more of you. Eat the chocolate anyway, and notice how it really makes you feel. Slowly start to learn that you don’t really want the chocolate—you want a hug, or a kind word, or a tall glass of water. Or that sometimes you just really do want the chocolate.
 
Be too busy to call your mother, and notice that too. Notice how it really makes you feel. Maybe your priorities naturally start to shift, no resolution required.
 
Do your job, one day at a time, and learn to see the small rewards. Be enraptured by each moment of satisfying work. Make each task a kind of offering, a prayer. And keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.
 
Don’t resolve to create better packaging: a better body, a fancier house, a higher degree. Let yourself unravel so that your beauty can unfold.
 
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A year is an arbitrary way of creating the illusion of endings and beginnings, but while we’re in the business of taking stock, 2015 was our year of big love. We rang it in on the beach in Mexico, freshly engaged. We were married in Canada in June, at an intimate ceremony with the people we most adore. We traveled to Croatia to scout a location for The Groove: Island Jam, Austria to teach at the Yogafestival Kitzbühel and gape at the Alps, and to India where we ran the first Groove Yoga Festival: Retreat Experience; we connected with old friends and newly-made friends; we wormed our way through a heap of inspiring books; we continued to be influenced by and study with Roland’s teacher Tsakpo Rinpoche; Liz spent a week attempting to become more mindful at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen monastery in France; we burned many candles and took frequent baths. Liz ate chocolate. All of these experiences opened our eyes and our hearts so that we could see more clearly who we are and how we want to be in this wide wild world.
 
Our wish for 2016: more of the same please.