Do you know Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese? It’s one of my favorites and it’s familiar lines run through my mind often during my practice. Especially the first stanza,
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Don’t you love it? You can find the whole poem here. The new year is a good time I think to practice letting the our soft animal body love what they love. While the world is telling us to be a new better version of ourselves, I dare you to practice loving yourself instead. Move in a way that is good for your body, in fact move in ways that your body loves.