Updated 08.01.26

By Khemagita Farley

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We’re all being bombarded this last while with blogs and videos and posts about New Year’s resolutions and setting intentions and improving our health, fitness, efficiency, energy levels, relationships and so on and so on. Many of them offer good and useful advice, and can help to start the new year afresh with healthier behaviours. What many of them miss out, however, is the best way to identify the behaviours you want to change and how to sustain the behaviour changes. This is where mindfulness - awareness and compassion - is invaluable. Practicing mindfulness makes it much more likely that the new behaviours will actually continue in the long-term. So how does this work?

Knowing Your Values

Practicing mindfulness, especially by regular meditation, brings you much closer to knowing what your true values are. The culture that many of us inhabit encourages distraction, with its endless stream of input and information and entertainment. When we’re caught in its slipstream, we’re living on the surface of our lives, rarely pausing long enough to see into the depths. Our minds are like the surface of a lake on a windy day, the constant movement preventing any view of what’s beneath. Mindfulness practice calms the mind (even if it doesn’t always feel like that!) enough to be able to catch glimpses of our deeper selves. And that’s what puts us in touch with our values - the things that really matter to us.

When the group on the HEALS course I attended were asked to share our values, after doing a reflective exercise, what emerged was this wonderful word cloud of the values that motivated us - freedom, kindness, truth, curiosity, adventure, relationships, beauty, creativity. Once we know what our values are, it becomes much easier to identify the habits we want to establish. Knowing that you value beauty, for example, and want more of it in your life, makes it easier to stick to learning to play the piano, say, or to take a painting class.

Awareness of what behaviours feel like

A frequent exercise in mindfulness courses is eating a raisin mindfully. It can feel silly at first, taking five or more minutes just to eat one, single, tiny raisin! But it’s a revelation to see and feel fully the taste, smell, touch and even sound of the raisin as you pay full attention to eating it. Many people say that they had never realised what a raisin actually tasted like until then. Of course we can’t live our lives slowing down all our behaviours to that extent, but mindfulness and awareness allows us to experience things more fully.

So with awareness, because we're more tuned into our body and emotions and thoughts, we really know what different activities feel like in our body and mind. The pleasure of eating a bar of chocolate is enhanced by being more aware of the taste and the effect on your mood. The displeasure of eating the next bar of chocolate - feeling too full, the taste too sweet - is also enhanced by awareness.

At the time that I learned how to meditate, many years ago, I was drinking alcohol regularly. I was increasingly uncomfortable with this but it was a habit, and my social life revolved around meeting friends in pubs. After a few months, I started to notice the precise point in the evening at which the alcohol was taking effect on my mind and body, and how unpleasant it felt to have a muddled mind. I had experienced having a clear mind in meditation and how pleasant that was, so I could really sense the difference. While of course I had always known, cognitively, that drinking too much was bad for me, it was the experience of really feeling and seeing it that led me to cut down my alcohol consumption, and eventually give it up altogether.

You can do this with any habit that you want to either let go of, or one that you want to establish - bring your awareness to how it feels (physically, mentally and emotionally). You’ll see how the behaviour actually feels, which may or may not be the same as what you think it feels like. This helps you to make a more informed decision about the changes you want to make.

Awareness of your patterns

We all have patterns of thinking that have formed over many years - perfectionism, over-analysing, worrying, denial, self-criticism etc. The practice of mindfulness and meditation really makes you more aware of these patterns. Crucially, you become aware of them in an increasingly non-judgemental, even compassionate way. This awareness helps you to spot when these unhelpful patterns arise as you’re either choosing or implementing your new habit.

You might think ‘What’s the point, I never see anything through, I always fail’. Your awareness and compassion may then arise - ‘aha! Here’s self-doubt, I know this and I know what happens when I listen to it, I feel awful. What would it be like to do this anyway and see how I get on?’

If you have this tendency, or a tendency to perfectionism, for example, then the Tiny Habit method proposed by B. J. Fogg, and adopted by the HEALS course, is fantastic. In this approach you choose the smallest action to start with - so small, sometimes, that it hardly seems worthwhile, but the point is that it’s easy to do. So the perfectionist in us might resolve to completely cut out sugar from our diet, for example. The likelihood of this lasting longer than a few weeks is low - it’s too much all at once to be able to sustain. A Tiny Habits approach might be to substitute a few squares of dark chocolate for the biscuits you have with your tea. This is much more likely to be sustained over time, and you can build on it to reduce your sugar intake, once each tiny habit is established.

We’re all imperfectly human

Even with all the best intentions and the best conditions for initiating and maintaining a new habit, things happen that throw us off course - a change in routine, illness, mounting stress etc. This is where compassion comes in. Without compassion, we can slip into self-blame and self-criticism, or resentment if it’s other people who are the cause of us not doing the new habit.

Compassion towards the disappointment, compassion towards the sense of failure, compassion towards the frustration, compassion towards the resentment - all this means is acknowledging that they’re there, holding back on judging them, being kind to the hurt beneath.

Doing this makes it much more likely that you’ll be able to return to the new habit, perhaps with modifications if needed. Practicing compassion in this way also brings perspective. It’s not the end of the world if you miss a few days, it’s not ‘all or nothing’, you can always go back.

In my experience as a mindfulness practitioner and teacher, kindness and compassion is probably the most transformational aspect of behaviour change. It frees people from all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ that we beat ourselves up with, so that any changes they make are from a place of clarity and kindness, rather than from a place of feeling like they’re falling short and need to fix themselves.

If you do one thing...

So one thing that you can do, before, during and after you make your intentions and start putting them into practice, is to cultivate self-compassion. One surprisingly effective way of doing this is to simply place a hand on your heart whenever you feel anxious, or irritated, or worried, or sad, or frustrated, or resentful. Sense the warmth and gentleness of the touch of your hand on your heart for a few moments, or longer if you wish. It’s a very direct and embodied way of expressing kindness and compassion towards yourself. You might even want to make this your new habit for 2026. You may be surprised at what else will unfold over the year from this simple gesture.

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About the Author: Khemagita Farley

Khemagita (formerly known as Fidelma*) has been teaching Breathworks courses since she became an accredited Breathworks mindfulness teacher in 2008. She has been training mindfulness teachers since she became an Associate Trainer in 2013. She teaches the Breathworks Mindfulness for Health and Mindfulness for Stress courses, and teacher training events. She mentors teacher trainees, and supervises accredited teachers. She also leads workshops for Breathworks, for the general public and for a variety of groups and organisations, including M.S. Ireland, the Irish Heart Foundation, staff at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and students at University College Dublin. 

Having worked as a university lecturer prior to becoming a mindfulness teacher, Khemagita is an excellent communicator and group facilitator. She became an accredited Life Coach in 2016 and finds that her mindfulness and coaching practices inform each other in creative and meaningful ways. Khemagita has long-standing meditation, mindfulness and Buddhist practices, which continue to ground and sustain her and enrich her life. Her teaching is inspired by the desire to give others the opportunity to enhance their own health and happiness and to find more meaning in their lives through mindfulness practices.