A sweet start
Wishing you sweetness in 2024, where some edges feel softer, where some hurts feel soothed.
Hoping your holiday pause, if you had one, was filling in the ways you needed–chosen family, rest, meaningful meals.
While I wish it for you, I don’t make any assumptions that the holidays were easy or easeful. So, I’m also wishing for you the time and space you need post-holidays to heal from them too.
What’s your relationship with “new year”? With resolutions, intentions, goals? Do you set any, name things, share or journal or declare things? I do love the blank slate, sometimes hopeful feeling of early January. I’m also old enough to set myself up for success with the seeds I plant and the aims I claim.
My husband and I have a new year’s ritual: at the start of each new year, we set our kids up with a craft or quiet activity, and then hole up in our bedroom, review last year’s intentions, craft a handful of new ones, share them with each other, and ask how we can support the other in feeling or reaching them. It’s one of my favourite moments.
For years, though, my resolutions were often body-shaming (if not outright body-hating). More and more, they are compassionate and experiential. Like this year, though it’s still forming, one intention I have is not so much to “get more fit” and reclaim some of that strength that I’d lost in the homebody-ness pandemic, but to feel and be embodied. I want to feel my body more. Feel its feedback, its needs, its asks, its boundaries more. Its yesses, its nos, its requests. Like more rest. Always more rest (which I’m still practising at heeding).
What are your early January rhythms?
Whether you’re into wishing folks “happy new year!” with exuberance, or taking it quiet and slow; whether you vision board quarterly aims, or prefer to see how things organically unfold; this newsletter here, short and simple, is about how we can do some of this. How we can do this time of year—with practices that help us feel whole, with pushback against needing to do / buy anything.
#1: Manageable, creative reflection
When folks would tell me in the past, “you need to engage in more reflection,” I would bristle. “With what time?” I’d wonder silently, feeling anger on the rise. Looking back, I think what was really happening for me was that “reflection” didn’t mean very much to me. Akin to words like “prioritize,” “study,” or “manage your time,” “reflect” doesn’t give away how to do it. Does it mean sit quietly, does it mean journal, and do I do it daily or weekly, do I have to be still…?
So this NPR Life Kit episode on how—”How to slow down and reflect…”—felt so good to encounter. It’s about the small, doable, gently fit-in-able practices. Some of their suggested reflection practices are artful, some are candlelit, all are short and purposeful. If it feels right to you, enjoy!
#2: Slowing into the sensations of the body
Several years ago, I suffered a major concussion. It was my fourth, and it was my worst. Things slowed right down. Well, they actually stopped altogether. There was so little I could do in those earliest days.
One voice was a true salve: JoAnne Hardy. She’s a brilliant, justice-oriented meditation teacher, and her speaking tone, kind content, and awake approach were a lifeline for me. And they brought me away from the panic or impatience I was feeling, right back into the restful refuge of my body in this moment.
In my genuine intention to re-embody in 2024, to feel my body and its… fatigue, hunger, fullness, desire for play, aches, nudging to stretch, yearning to move, I find myself revisiting JoAnna’s teachings. Here is a stunning practice from JoAnna, inviting attunement into the sensations of the body.
In my own lecturing, I craft and lead meditations for my students as a way to settle into the learning we’re about to do, to sink into that tenderised and open-hearted readiness that’s so helpful when encountering new ideas or ways of doing things. And indeed as a way to help feel what we’re feeling–to feel what the body is sharing, what the mind is off and running with, what is calling out for care.
Is there anything in your body, in your context, in your life, that might be calling out for care?
And so, with the deepest of care, I’m wishing you sweetness from the start, and an easeful rest of the month–ease in re-entering work if you were on a holiday break, ease in the goals you might set, ease in the body during these darker, colder days.
Wishing you kind learning,
Deena