The Perfect Moment.  The concept presented in the play was this:  10 or so people are trapped in a subway car, all of them suddenly made aware of the fact that they have died.  The conductor informs them that they must come up with a Perfect Moment from their lives and if they do so, eternity can be spent in that perfect moment.  Oh if that were actually true!

So slowly but surely, each of them arrives at their perfect moment.  For an older woman, it is a moment from the 1940′s when she was dancing with a soldier at a USO dance and he asked her to be his girl.  For a doorman, it was when his Dad took him to the 1954 playoff game where he saw Willie Mays make a ground-shaking catch.  For a young Hispanic bicycle delivery man it was when he dressed up as the tooth fairy and gave his daughter her 50 cents.  For a young woman who spent her life in Manhattan selling perfume at Bloomingdales and living in a make believe world of the rich, it was a night on the beach in Brooklyn with her sweetheart.  And so on.

I give my clients undergoing divorce a ‘time-out’ exercise that allows them to bypass a negative emotional reaction. They sit quietly and spend a minute or so taking deep, cleansing breaths to slow down their heart rate and thus calm themselves. In the past, I have asked them to then visualize a time when they were joyful or at peace.  Now I plan on using the Perfect Moment.

Here a few of my Perfect Moments:

- playing in the woods with my gang of neighborhood friends when I was a kid
- Sitting   at a dinner table with my dearest friends for my 50th birthday
- Lying in bed with my teenage daughter and just talking about her life
- Falling asleep with my children when they were young, cuddled up to me in my bed
- Awakening from a deep sleep and seeing my two year old son, standing with his blanky, staring intno my eyes.
- Hiking in the rain-forest
- Sitting on my Dad’s lap
- Immediately after my wedding ceremony when my ex and I sat alone together for a half an hour to ponder the wonder of being married..
- Lying with a sleeping infant on my chest.
- Talking on the phone late at night with my first boyfriend

There are so many of those perfect moments in our lives but we forget about them all too soon.  Its the muck of life that seems to be on our minds most of the time. We have to remember to remember the perfect moments in our lives, especially when life is not treating us so good.  These are gifts we can give ourselves to bring a smile to our face and realize that life is indeed good.

Resolutions must be extremely compelling to us personally in order for us to keep them. They must resonate on a deep level.  They need to be truly important with a clear connection to our values and passions.  That is why so many people fail in their resolutions…they just aren’t important enough to them.

What could be more compelling to a woman who is newly divorced than to resolve to heal herself and build a new life based on what she wants now? In order to determine what she wants, she needs to know herself, the self that is emerging from the end of her marriage, a phoenix rising from the ashes.  The past is gone with no hold on your future self except the hold that you choose to erect.  It really comes down to choice.  You are blessed with free will, the will to choose how you want to live your life.

I took a wonderful yoga class this week that reminded me of how impactful the practice of mindfulness can be on our well-being.  The instructor gave us many affirmations to recite, each corresponding to a different chakra.  One of them really stood out for me because it seemed to apply to my clients in divorce recovery.  It states:  The process of purification dissolves who I am not and reveals who I am.  If we substitute the word purification for self-discovery or divorce recovery, it clarifies exactly what divorce recovery is all about:  finding out who we are now and creating a life that is based on that person.

We dissolve the mind chatter that attempts to sabotage our self-esteem and confidence, the mind chatter of our wounded ego and the pain that wants nothing more than to keep us stuck where we are after our divorce.  We reveal the person behind that mind chatter, the person who we have always been meant to be.  We dissolve or let go of what holds us back and venture into a new life filled with possibilities for our future.

Use your divorce and the New Year as opportunities to heal, let go, claim your power and a life that will fill you with joy, meaning and fulfillment.  Resolve to move beyond your perspective of pain and doubt and to remove anything that is standing in the way of your happiness. Resolve to do the work of divorce recovery.