For the last few years, I’ve been hugely cynical about the whole notion of New Year’s resolutions. First of all, few (if any) resolutions survive the New Year altogether—the mass of good intentions getting crowded out by the sheer busyness of life. Second, if the whole point of a resolution is to better your life, why wait until the New Year rather than seizing the moment? Third, if you’re going to change your life, isn’t it better to simply act rather than to make grand declarations?

This year though, I find myself revising my views. For better or for worse, we’re designed to be social creatures, and there’s a tremendous amount of energy behind our collective rites and rituals (the postmodern fragmentation of our collectives notwithstanding). The global cultural phenomenon that is New Year—with its attendant notions of fresh starts and new beginnings—therefore provides a huge wellspring of energy into which to tap if we simply want to take our life into a different direction. Said another way, people just tend to be on the same page about wanting to start over: there’s a greater receptivity towards these kinds of conversations, a greater willingness to share ideas, a greater pull towards creating group structures.

Hence, for this month of January, White Space Wellness is going to tap into that collective energy with its first ever wellness challenge. Our intention is simple: to support people in their efforts to shift into or upgrade their holistically well lifestyles. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel—the whole idea is to leverage existing energy, after all—but we’re going to pull together what’s been seen to work when it comes to engineering mid- to long-term behavioral change. We’ll save more of the details for another blog post, but suffice to say for the moment that we’re going to kick off all this collective resolving this Saturday with the first component of the wellness challenge: our 108 Sun Salutations event. After all, what better way is there to generate group energy than to do 108 sun salutations with an entire room of like-minded people?

But whether you’re going to be there this Saturday or not, we invite you to take advantage of what we’re creating all the same. We’ve got a whole month to ride this wave together, and with enough momentum, we can keep it cresting for the rest of the year. So follow us this January as we rise up to various challenges in pursuit of our well-being.

Happy New Year’s “resolving” everyone.

Eileen and Abbey