Welcome to 2016! May yours be the best one yet.
I admit to loving New Year’s resolutions. I just adore the divine consciousness within each and every one of us that is aspirational. We so want to get it right – do it better, move in the right direction, make a difference, life a healthy meaningful life. I say yes to that.
But as the wheel of the year turns, it’s easy to get sidetracked. Some of you have already broken those vows you made just a few short days ago. No worries! Positive change usually involves missing the mark – and in fact, close but no cigar is a really good sign – a sign that you are heading in the right direction.
The way to begin to keep the aspiration rolling is to think more in terms of intention than resolution – if you did make a promise, let’s take a deeper look at it – what were you looking to cultivate through that resolution – what is it you are heading for? For example, as you might imagine I am awash in resolutions to lose weight – it’s my job, after all. Here. In sugaropolis.
What is it you are cultivating through your resolution to lose weight – do you want to be healthier? Feel better about yourself? Often the things we are really looking for can be cultivated regardless of, in this case, the number on the scale. If you want to, for example, feel better about yourself, there are things you can do right now to do that. Aiming at what you really want is actually a wonderful strategy to make the number of the scale get in line too – more easily and happily. By getting clear on just what we really want is the first step.
Here are a couple previous posts that can help you think about setting intention.
Before you set intention, practice letting go.
Intention in action.
It’s not too late, by the way, to set intention for the year to come. May your intentions take root deep in your heart and blossom beyond your wildest dreams.
Pinterest
I love the holidays. I come from a big family with classic Christmas celebrations filled with kids and board games and beauty and fun. My family still loves to gather. But now, I choose one of the fall/winter holidays (and Thanksgiving is so great for gathering) to be in the frenzy, and let the rest of the season be quieter – reflective.
As the wheel of the year turns, this is an auspicious time to reflect on 2015 and dream of the year to come. My newsletter this month focuses on that process – sign up this week to get it.
But first, how do we find time during the shopping and gathering to be reflective? To take stock of the year that was? Or, to just enjoy the moments of social fun that happen over these holidays.
In my world it only works with deliberate simplification – to cull extra travel, pass on finding the perfect gift and sending out the perfect cards to absolutely everyone, accept fewer cool projects, even minimize gatherings to those I really want to attend. I hold off on entering the holiday bacchanal of food for as long as I can…so even though I love a little soy nog in my coffee, and make a truly killer sugar cookie, I’m in no great rush to jump in. Believe me, it’s coming, but my strategy is to delay the sugar! This year decorations are minimal, and mostly things I gather from outside.
Meditation is the key! Daily meditation practice is the anchor that keeps me out of the swirl of the commercial holiday season.
For my morning meditation this month, I plan to practice reflection on 2015. I’ll work on receiving the gifts I’ve been given, embodying ways that I’ve grown, and reflecting on times that I missed the mark or things did not go well, and learning from and clearing those experiences. I think of it as a process of putting the year to bed. Of digesting, clearing and completing.
There are certainly other years that I dive squarely into the center of the holiday frenzy, and that’s great, too. Certainly one way of doing the holidays is not better than another. We can each choose to what degree we’ll participate in the frenzy – and use the barometer of enjoying the season to let us know how we’re doing.
Are you aiming for a reflective holiday this year? How will your holiday unfold?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a program at Kripalu that I am leading with my friends and colleagues Aruni and Lisa called Self-care and Mindfulness through the Holidays. It launches the night before winter solstice and runs to Christmas eve. If you are interested in doing the holidays mindfully, this will be a few days of prayer and ritual, joy and laughter. We’ve planned a collection of activities to help us find our own way of marking this auspicious time of year. So regardless of your past or current holiday traditions, here is a place to come together to practice, reflect on the holidays, and have a great time.
I love Thanksgiving, and our ancestors for marking a day when most of us pause, feel the love and express our gratitude.
I’m grateful for anyone who takes the time to read these blogs, my books, or studies with me – this work is a container that reflects the light of others – so thank you.
For those who show up for others in this life, thank you. It’s not easy nor often appreciated, but I am awed when I see it and I see it all the time.
For those who sing their song, true and clear as you can, regardless of who hears or how others respond, thank you.
For those who meet the dark in themselves and others with light, thank you.
For those who create beauty, thank you.
For those who have been in my life in countless ways, large and small, kind and mean, thank you.
Thanks for all of it. Thanks.
Is there an inner path to environmental change?
I believe so – Yes and Yes. If there is an inner path to outer change, including healing our very planet, who better for the job than those who have navigated their inner landscapes for years, decades? Yogis to the rescue. Let’s save the planet the inner way,
In May of 2014, during a Kripalu “shutdown” (when we don’t have guests in the house so that we can build, revamp and make a lot of noise), I traveled to Southern California to visit friends and attend an Imagination and Medicine Conference at Pacifica Graduate Institute. That’s where I met Stephen Aizenstat, Chancellor of the Institute, and developer of Dream Tending, a method of deepening awareness of dreams as a means of more fully awakening to our own consciousness.
Dr. Aizenstat spoke on the last day of the conference. I was mesmerized by his stories of how we have all witnessed environmental degradation: he described how the grass used to stay green in Santa Barbara while now grass is a memory replaced by brown dust. He described working with gifted local youth who, after hearing recent news such as the oceans will be devoid of life within the first part of their lifetime, have dropped out, cancelled college plans – why bother?
So many of us are in deep grief and deep denial about what is happening around us. Might working with our dreams to expand our consciousness be a way forward?
Aizenstat has a lot to say (and do) about this.
“To develop a respectful and sustaining relationship with our dreams, we must return to a more “indigenous” sensibility, one that is informed by the psyche of nature—an awareness that our own essential psychological spontaneities are rooted most deeply in the psyche of the natural world. We are born out of the rhythms of nature, and to ignore these rhythms is, ultimately, to deny our psychic inheritance.” – Stephen Aizenstat
As he described how tending dreams helped these young people suffering nightmares (and I’m afraid children everywhere share these nightmares), I thought – here is a practical tool for an impossible problem.
If more of us can awaken more deeply to our dreams as a means of becoming more creative, can we back away from the tipping point of environmental degradation?
So, I invited him to Kripalu. Then I spoke to my colleague and gifted scholar of yoga and consciousness, Stephen Cope, who agreed to be involved and signed on to spend time during a weekend. And Dreaming the Earth, Tending the Dream was born.
Save this date: April 29-May 1, 2016. Come to this one.
Please join me in this psychic global experiment with the modest aim of coming into balance with the planet.
For me and many of those I serve, weight management is nothing less than a spiritual path to wholeness. Do I get sick of having to manage my weight? Absolutely. Do I wish that there would be a time when I didn’t have to think about it? Are there days when it’s the last thing I want to think (or write or teach!) about? Yep.
That’s the thing about spiritual paths. It’s not fun and games all (or even most) of the time. The ecstasy is fun and with practice comes more easily, and I know that my weight fatigue is a necessary part of the ecstasy I’ll be feeling tomorrow.
Feeling really sick of my spiritual path is an indicator. It usually means that I need to look at my path in a new light or from a different angle. It’s tempting to give up, backslide, binge and give up. But no, this is my path, and feeling sick of it is on the path.
I also start to look around for ways to be fantastic to myself while staying on (or near) my path. This is how I was taught. To be compassionate to myself, stay, and to get curious about the experience of what I am feeling. Hmmm…I wonder what that being sick of it is about – really? To stay with it and watch it rather than react.
A Materia Medica is a library of medicine, usually botanicals. Herbal books and websites often have an area where the health and medicinal qualities of particular plants are gathered. Likewise, many cookbooks have a section that focuses on the use and perhaps benefits of particular ingredients. Herbalists and cooks have great respect for the qualities of each plant.
My recipes use whole food plant based ingredients which are naturally healthful. Certain foods and plants carry specific health and healing gifts, and by knowing who you are, and who your ingredients are, you can surround yourself with delicious foods that keep you in balance.
Over the next year, I’ll be building my materia medica of botanicals and plants with particular healing gifts. I will include a roundup of Western literature, as well as herbal and folk wisdom, and the plant-spirit energy template of the plant. Plants have so much to teach us, and we can heal so deeply from getting to know them as individuals and arranging them in choruses as recipes.
For your pleasure! Enjoy the journey!
