New Years Resolution: CONNECTION

On the eve of the eve of a New Year I am thinking about resolutions. With my clients lately I have been using this event, admitting it's a cliche, to suggest thinking of new beginnings, renewed efforts, enriched meanings in their lives. So many of my clients are lonely and disconnected. The social worker in me wants to get them 'out there', involved, volunteering, joining the gym, hiking trails, going to 'meet ups', meditating, in a word....connecting with something bigger than themselves.

Addiction is perhaps an over used word but I do think that when we pull back, isolate, cut our selves off, we open our selves up to our 'lesser angels'. I know this is true for me and my intuition (I've done no research on this) is that it's true for others. Many of us, perhaps all of us, deal with unfillable holes in ourselves. In the attempt to fill these we can easily turn, compulsively (addictively), to all sorts of unhealthy activities. So how do we attend to our fractured, incomplete selves, without falling into the addiction trap??

So my suggested New Years Resolution for all my clients and any one who stumbles across this blog is to find a way to connect with others. There are so many ways: take a yoga class, sign up to volunteer with Nashville Cares or Hands On Nashville, go to your church, temple, mosque or whatever is your cathedral, pray, meditate, talk to your neighbors, ask a friend to train with you for the country music marathon, call an old friend you haven't spoken with in years, join a cause (political, social justice, labor, environmental), join a book club.....you get the idea.

Let 2010 be the year of CONNECTION.