Looking for the Gold in 2016

I find this teaching a universally helpful reminder. There are many situations where I find myself good in the beginning, fizzling off in the middle and completely absent in the end. (See incompletes on to-do list!) Or sometimes I just jump right into the middle with great enthusiasm and no attention to the beginning- the foundation, the intention, the soil quality. I can hold this inquiry about beginning, middle, and end in terms of how I inhabit a day, or write a newsletter, or teach a course, or prepare a meal….

So here I am at the end of 2016- and I wonder, how do I close this year in a good way?

I like to spend time around New Years Day with my journal, reflecting, digesting, grieving, appreciating, bringing to completion the previous year, and planting the seeds of what I want to embody in the next year. This year, I find it even more necessary.

I’ve had the earworm of the Shitty 2016 Song  stuck in my head for weeks, and while I find it delightfully cathartic, and admire the skill with which the British can weave together a tapestry of humorous profanity, that is not the way I want to hold this year.

We have often used neurologist Rick Hanson’s image of how our brains are wired to hold on to negative experience like velcro, and release positive experience like teflon. No doubt, this has been a year filled with things sticking to the velcro- it feels like the velcro is at max capacity!  And there was a ton of goodness and positivity that has likely slipped off from the teflon.

Working with an embodied gratitude reflection is something we teach in our classes and hold as a central practice for ourselves.  We often do it as an end of day practice, but it is great to do at the end of the year as well. Going back through the year and reviewing and reconnecting with the myriad moments of simple connection, of joy, of gratitude- and really feeling them in your body is powerful. We sometimes will do a slide show of our photos of the year on our computer (usually to the repeating song of Sean Hayes’ A Thousand Tiny Pieces) and let ourselves be touched by the moments of goodness and blessings in our life.  It’s amazing how deeply nourishing and reorienting a practice like that can be.

It’s not Pollyannaish or “just look on the bright side” or denying or bypassing the heartbreak, fear, or challenges that may be present, rather it is a very necessary counterbalance to our neurological bias toward negativity, toward labeling this year as “Brexit, Violence and Trump.”

This year has seen several of our luminaries die. There is a kind of “2016 is taking all of our great beings” mentality that has been going around. Again, not to deny the grief of losing these awesome humans on this planet, but for me- many of them have been more alive in me in their parting than they have been since they were on posters on my wall as a child. (I recall having Prince, Bowie, George Michael, and Carrie Fisher posters.) I have probably heard and appreciated more Leonard Cohen being played in the last month than in the last 20 years.

Two weeks ago, one of our friends and favorite Feldenkrais teachers, Dennis Leri, died. I have felt great loss and grief in his passing, and I have been so filled with the light that he carried in the world. Doing the movement lessons he taught via audio recordings, feeling how his presence shines through my work with clients, I have felt so much gratitude for this man’s presence.

Like so many things, for me it comes down to the ability to hold complexity and paradox in my heart. To hold the shittyness and the goodness of the year simultaneously, to hold the grief and gratitude of losing so many great beings. When I notice something in me that just wants to pack up this year as “Brexit, Violence and Trump” plus a bunch of celebrity deaths and move on, I realize that I am likely missing something of great value. I appreciate the perspective of Carl Jung or of Michael Meade, the mythological perspective that recognizes the gold, the goodness, the essential next ingredient is right there in the midst of the shadow, in the darkest and most challenging times.

May we continue to look for the gold. 

As a New Year’s poem I’d love to offer a favorite blessing for beginnings and endings from John O’Donohue:
For a New Beginning
by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

One of the many things we are looking forward to in 2017 is offering our “Art of Sitting”  home study course that will open for registration in January. We have been developing this work for years as the exploration of ease, naturalness, alignment and embodied presence in sitting has been a central passion for both of us for the last 20 years. We are grateful to be able to bring this work forward and share it more widely. Look for more details and registration info in the next couple weeks.

Wishing you well in the New Year,
Carl and Erin

p.s. Details are firming up for the fall retreat with Erin & our friend Nan Seymour in New Mexico. Mark your calendars for Sept.21-24 at Ghost Ranch! We are so excited. More details and a registration link are coming soon!