| A new book suggests that instead of New Year's Resolutions we should practice daily "intentions," with one new intention for each and every day of the year.
Keep Your New Year's Resolutions by Making One Small "Intention" a Day Everyone makes resolutions for the New Year, and yet by August, many of us look back on those resolutions with guilt. Making a resolution is easy, but keeping it, as most of us have found out, isn't. Enter Ann Blakely Rice with a new approach and a new book: Daily Intentions: Simple Spiritual Solutions for a Complicated World. After experiencing some critical personal crises, she persevered and prospered by creating what she called one "intention" for each day of the year.
"An intention is the same as a resolution," she says. "You start your day with a thought about how you want to live in the world and how you want to be, and you spend a little time on it, maybe just a couple of minutes. Some people call that meditating. And some people call it just taking time to resolve that your day will go the way you want it to go."
So intent was Rice on making this a daily practice for herself that she spent one year creating a book that contained 365 intentions. "I wrote one a day," she says. "Every day, I was inspired with a new idea."
Daily Intentions: Simple Spiritual Solutions for a Complicated World can help you keep your resolutions about the things that are really bothering you -- like losing weight, stopping smoking, drinking less, eating healthier and more organic foods and being nicer to your family.
According to Rice, the "intentions" in her book don't indicate that "Today is the day you will lock your refrigerator" or "throw that pack of cigarettes into the trash."
Rather, she says, each "intention" goes a little deeper and addresses the very things that cause us to take on unhealthy behaviors. "We're really not very tuned into what's going on inside," she says. "It takes practice."
Her advice: If you practice being kinder to yourself and giving yourself a break, you'll begin to drop destructive behaviors. If you practice being in touch with your body in a thoughtful way, you won't want to feed it toxic foods or drugs. If you gossip and complain over and over, you may not even know how much that hurts you -- not other people.
She adds, "If you acknowledge how much anger you are harboring or jealousies you are carrying, your perspective will change, and you'll be in a position to begin changing your own behavior. You may eat less. You may start considering others more."
Daily Intentions: Simple Spiritual Solutions for a Complicated World is designed so the reader wakes up every morning, reads it for two minutes and after taking in the message for the day, is prepared to tackle the day with a new thought.
"Really," says Rice, "you should consider it as a way to begin taking one step at a time toward your old and new resolutions. You may be surprised how much you accomplish by the end of 2008 if you take one baby step a day."
Daily Intentions: Simple Spiritual Solutions for a Complicated World by Ann Blakely Rice is available wherever books are sold or through Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and Borders as well as bookstores. Visit: www.daily-intentions.com to learn more.
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