A Letter from Pippa: Why Rewilding Your New Year’s Resolutions Might Bring You Back to Life.

Every January, we commit to ‘fixing ourselves’ through discipline and control. What if a more ecological approach — one rooted in rhythm, care and the drive towards aliveness offered a different way to begin the year?

January often begins in private.

A moment between you and a list. A quiet assessment of what you plan to change about yourself this year. More effort here. Less indulgence there. A resolve to finally get things under control. There is sincerity in this impulse. A genuine wish to keep growing, evolving. Yet alongside that sincerity, many people feel something else: a tightening sense that improvement will require a bit more grit, striving and self-denial. That feeling is worth listening to, because its origin will decide whether those goals will actually make you feel better.

Across the country, people are setting intentions designed to help life flow more smoothly: clearer routines, better health, more focus, fewer distractions. A hope-filled annual pause — a turning of the calendar that invites reflection. At the same time, many approach their resolutions carrying an invisible weight. The sense that something about them needs correcting this year.

Beneath many New Year’s goals sits an unspoken feeling: You’re not quite enough yet.

Not fit enough.
Not focused enough.
Not calm, disciplined or resilient enough.
Not optimised.

From this place, motivation comes from fear and scarcity, and it often relies on force. People push themselves, override their own signals, and apply pressure where listening might be needed instead. Effort and improvement become ways of proving worth rather than responding to life.

This pattern mirrors much of our modern culture, where productivity and performance are too-often valued over care. When that logic turns inward, self-improvement begins to feel like self-coercion. The body notices. A nervous system under pressure narrows its world. It becomes vigilant, braced, less able to truly rest and less able to adapt to what the year brings. Because mission ‘I should be more’ has been activated.

There is another way motivation works — one we recognise easily in the natural world.


Living systems respond to conditions. Growth follows warmth, nourishment and safety. Energy gathers where there is interest, connection and possibility. Change happens because something invites movement. Human beings are shaped by the same principles.

We tend to change most reliably when something draws us forward — when a rhythm, practice or way of living feels enlivening rather than corrective. From this place, effort and discipline are still needed, but they carry a different quality. They are guided by curiosity rather than judgement, by attraction rather than pressure.

Seen this way, the body is less a system to manage and more a habitat to tend. And habitats change with the seasons. In winter, much of life slows down. Energy moves inward. Processes become quieter, subtler, less visible. This is not a failure of growth, it’s sensible timing. It is part of how life restores itself.

Human beings are seasonal too, even if modern life encourages us to behave as though we are not. When goals ignore this reality, they often feel brittle and difficult to sustain by the end of February. When they arise in relationship with our rhythms, they tend to last.

To rewild your resolutions invites a different set of questions for the year ahead. Instead of asking what needs fixing, we might ask:

What helps me feel more present in my own life?
Where do I feel most engaged or at ease?
What kind of pace allows me to care — for my work, my relationships, my body?

Questions like these change the tone of your ambitions. Goals shaped this way might be fewer and deeper. They might leave room for rest, for uncertainty, for learning, adapting. They might even make space for moments where you can be totally unemployed in terms of self-improvement. And you will still be intact, whole. Because your wholeness is a condition of being allowed to remain as you are and know that you already belong.

Perhaps the most meaningful resolution this year is not about becoming better, but about becoming more available.

More available to your body.
More available to your energy.
More available to the small signals that tell you when something is nourishing or draining.

In a culture that often equates effort with worth, orienting toward aliveness is an act of resistance. It replaces self-coercion with care, pressure with presence, force with relationship.

From that place, change doesn’t need to be driven so hard. It begins to grow.