Hello Spark Peeps!

I knew that I'd been neglecting my blogs, but I didn't realize how much neglect was there. No posts in pretty much two months! I think that is a record for me.

This is the time of year when, if you're like me, you do a lot of reflection on the past year. Maybe you make some plans for the year just around the corner. I've been doing a lot of both.

It's pretty obvious to me that I need to make some life changes. I'm over-scheduled and over-stressed and I've got to let some things go. Then I need to gradually select some new things to add in.

One thing I'm going to work on in the new year...

I need to consciously start working on my love affair with myself.

I've noticed lately that a lot of my mental conversations are nasty. I'm constantly beating myself up. For eating the wrong things. For having a messy desk. For not working hard enough to maintain relationships with friends and family.

If anyone else said these things, I'd go on the war path. I would make it my mission to take down the person with stinging, self-serving passive aggression. But if I'm the author of the noise, it settles in like background music, the constant hum the soundtrack of my daily life. I imagine it's kind of like the the hidden messages that were supposed to be embedded into your records that you could only hear when you played them backwards!

So the skeleton of my 2013 goals will revolve around ways that I can learn more about and honor myself. If I don't extend kindness to myself, I can't expect anyone else to either. It also limits my ability to share kindness with those I encounter.

I'm still working it out, but I'll post more about it as we get through these last days of 2012 and early days of 2013.