10 Ways To Utilise Your New Year’s Resolutions For Spiritual Growth In 2023
A New Year is a great way to reflect on the 365 days or the twelve months that have passed by and a new cycle of life that is unfolding. Resolutions are preferences or choices that we choose, to make our life more meaningful and if we make ten resolutions for spiritual growth, we can be sure that we will not just be free from all misery on earth but we may also lay the foundation stone to the achievement of the freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth.
So, what are the many ways that you can utilize new year resolutions to evolve spiritually? The first thing that you can do before a new year starts is ask yourself questions for which you have no answers. Questions like, ‘What will happen after I die?’ ‘What is the purpose of this human birth?’ ‘What is my way to eternal happiness?’ ‘Is there a way to everlasting peace?’ The first thing that you can do is list down the questions before the year starts. Resolve to find answers to the questions that are lingering in your mind. These questions will lead to the goals that you may want to achieve in the coming year.
The first step is to make these questions into resolutions because these resolutions are our personal choices, affirmations or commitments that we will make ourselves. When we make the resolution, we must ask ourselves, ‘What are these resolutions that we want to make to evolve spiritually? Do we want to continue to live a life of ignorance believing in the myth? Or do we want to realise the truth?’ Once, we answer those questions, we must set our resolution firmly, for example, ‘I will go on a quest, I will realise the truth, I will overcome ignorance or I will stop believing in the myth.’
One way to use a new year resolution to evolve spiritually, is to find a spiritual master, a Guru or a mentor. We must have somebody from whom we can get answers from, somebody who is a Guru, who can take us from ‘Gu’ or darkness to ‘Ru’ or light.
For all this to happen, our new year resolution must be worded, printed and pasted in all strategic points in front of us before the start of the new year. Only when our mission becomes a passion, an obsession, we will pursue it with all force. It may be spirituality. But even spirituality must have the deep yearning known as ‘mumukshutva’. Unless there is a deep yearning for Liberation and Unification with the Divine, our spiritual growth will never happen.
So, what is the spiritual growth that you are seeking in the year 2023? Make a graph. Make a clear chart. Don’t just wish that you will grow spiritually. Spirituality is a science of the spirit and therefore, you have to realise that you are not the body, not the mind and ego. You are the Divine Soul. SOUL means Spark Of Unique Life. This clarity of your spiritual growth must be in black and white, worded and written in front of you and always reminding you before you find ways to use the new year to evolve spiritually.
To make the upcoming year special in a spiritual way, commit some time to ‘silence’. It may be the same time every day, whether it is ten minutes in the morning or ten minutes in the evening. The time that is spent in silence is called the PQT or Personal Quiet Time. Utilise this time in introspection and contemplation about the questions that you have in your mind and are seeking answers for.
For spiritual growth to happen, there is one key challenge – to Master our Mind. The mind is nothing but a bundle of thoughts. When thoughts appear, our mind appears and when thoughts disappear, our mind disappears too. Our mind is like a monkey that keeps jumping from thought to thought. To master our mind, we have to still the mind and kill the mind and reach a state of ‘thoughtlessness’ that is known as consciousness. Reaching the state of consciousness should become one of our biggest resolutions.
Finally, every year comes and every year goes. But in reality, time is not passing at all. Time is still and we are passing through the year. We have passed through the year 2022 and now, the year 2023 is standing and waiting. We are like a train that arrives at the station and departs from the station.
If we truly want to be liberated from this prison, then we have to realise that we are not this body, mind and ego that we identify with. We are the Divine Soul that is immortal, birthless and deathless. We bring nothing on this earth and we will take nothing when the body dies and we depart. These realisations can become the base of our new year resolutions for the upcoming year 2023 and help us evolve in our journey on the spiritual path.
