Hello Every Body,
I hope your winter holidays were everything you hoped for! I always get to the end of the year feeling like I'm skidding down hill and hoping for something soft to break my fall. But these days, soft things are in short supply. If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.
New year is the time a lot of us feel motivated by a fresh start, and my goal for 2023 is softness. I want to be soft with how I treat myself, soft with my relationships, soft with my expectations, and soft with my interactions as I try where I can to give every being I come across a little softness and recognition of their humanity.
I'm already seeing benefits from this goal. If my orientation is softness, it is really easy to avoid the temptation of all the wellness capitalism salespeople screeching promises about how their thing will solve all my problems, that their thing will make me better, faster, harder, sharper. I don't want sharper. No thank you. I want soft.
This time of year the voices get so loud, each one swearing that they know best. And logically, one of them does, so how do you find them among all the sources of misinformation, bias, and wellness predators? I think it takes time getting wise to their tactics. People can promise all kinds of things, that's meaningless. What are the outcomes? Do you feel better? Are you happier? Are your relationships seeing that too? Does the promise leave room for individual differences? Is the person ever willing to say, 'I don't know?' Are their services priced higher than market value? Do they have a clickbait sales funnel? Does their clientele or staff feature diverse representation?
The specific solutions that work in your life right now are going to be different than what works for someone else. Anyone promising that their way is the only right or true way is someone you can tell doesn't have your best interests at heart. If something doesn't work for you, it's because it is the wrong intervention for you at this time. It's not because you are failed or didn't do it right, or enough. You just haven't found the right approach for your needs. These needs aren't just "you need exercise," it's "you need a way to move that works with your ability, available time, responsibilities, access to resources, personal tastes, education, etc."
Maybe you haven't failed at your self care goals, maybe you just haven't found the right intervention yet.
A healing journey is a fraught one, and I don't know that any of us have the support and information and protection we need during one. I hope that you can remember that you deserve some softness too, and give yourself some credit for all the ways you've tried, all the times you've gotten back up after one promise or another turned out to be bogus, all the times you've kept at it when things seemed hopeless.
If you really feel motivated by the New Year New You pressure, I hope the New You honors all the work the Old You did that got you here, and that the New You offers them some softness and gratitude. | 
