Radical Resolutions

By Kirstin Lindquist

If you truly want to create change in your life, the most radical thing you can do is to accept yourself fully, exactly as you are right now.

How many New Year’s resolutions have you actually kept? If you are like most people, the answer is few to none. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, and at the root of most of the reasons is that fact that typically your new year’s resolutions are formed out of reactivity to what you don’t like about yourself. The missing ingredient to achieving new year's resolutions is incredibly simple in concept, yet quite difficult to achieve: self-love and self-acceptance.

Likely you have a litany of things you don’t like about yourself. Some of us have longer lists than others, but we all have a list. And this is the list you go to when you are setting your annual resolutions. Which means your resolutions are created from negativity, which is not the energy of creative change.

In the acupuncture clinic, the first thing we need to do is fully accept and understand the current situation a patient is facing. From that place, we can begin to chart a course toward change. But if we can’t lean into and get to know the place of imbalance, we are going to be less effective in charting a course of change.

You are capable of change, but true, lasting change can only come from a place of acceptance and love. When the resistance drops, and you can truly love yourself in this moment, perfectly imperfect, then and only then is your system able to shift and change, because now you have found ease and flow within yourself.

Yes, it is one of the great ironies of the human condition- that true change only comes from a place of true acceptance. In a sense, you have to cultivate a perspective that, to your linear mind, is the opposite of what your grasping mind is telling you to do.

Chart a new course this new year, and resolve to love and accept yourself exactly as you are, right this moment.

 Kirstin Lindquist, L.Ac, Owner

 “I assist people in shedding obstructions and old patterns so that they may bring  more of who they are, their true nature, into the world.”