As we stand on the threshold of a New Year, contemplating what it is we would like to change within ourselves, there is no better time than right now to really feel into the deep connection between what resides in each of us, and what it is we are watching play out in the world.

This can be hard to see because none of us wants to imagine the darker sides of the world existing within us. And, because it is far easier to blame the world for its current state than to figure out how to change yourself to contribute to the world you would like to see.

This week, I’m going to do something I’ve never done: Share an entry from my journal. I do this in the spirit of my experience serving as an example of what is possible when one woman dedicates herself to looking closely at how she engages with others when the going gets rough.

I am aware that as I shed my fears around others and how they might respond to me, as I get more skilled in seeing what I see, as I get less willing to carry what is not mine, as I become less interested in doing penance for another’s dysfunction…I am able to be in a place of naturally and organically arising clarity and compassion for the one who stands before me.

More tolerant. More accepting. More appropriately boundaried. Less reactive. Less desperate to have them be something I need them to be. Separated from the morass of dysfunction between us, I am able to claim a piece of Earth to bear witness to them. Their struggles. Their magnificence. 

And in that moment, there is no separation between us. No difficulty we cannot resolve. No need to blame, shame, manage or control. No need to take on what is not mine. Instead, a naturally arising organic compassion that knows beyond the labels. That offers from a place beyond good/bad; right/wrong; what he said/she said.

A holy place beyond what you need to do and who you need to be to confirm my worldview and for me to feel safe. This is where I aspire to live. This is where I yearn to be with another.

For what I know to be true is this: The only way for me to find my way into this state of being is through the committed effort on my part to learn how to be with myself in such a way that I run down every single personal response to another and claim it as my responsibility to figure out why I feel the way I do. Why I think what I think and react how I react.

A lot of work. Yes. A lifetime of work. But the rewards are great. And vast. They touch the generations to come and reach into the past to heal the wounds of our ancestors. They lay the foundation of Life here on Earth, with others, based on what we all yearn for. Peace and love between us.

And so, it is no small thing to wonder about yourself. To dedicate time every day to ask yourself the question, “How’s it going for me?” To pause long enough to hear and feel deeply into a real answer, and then to set yourself to the task of pulling on that thread long enough to get to the end of how it is you are feeling. And why. 

It won’t happen overnight. Nor will it be easy. But in the end, when you come to know how you tick, you are more generous with how others tick. Along the way, those ticking time bombs between us, get defused.

You don’t need me to point out that things have gotten more intense in the world as the years roll on. Or that life here has gotten more confusing, fear-based and confrontative. And now, through the “advancing” capabilities of the technologies, we can add dishonesty and betrayal to the growing list of what undermines a fundamental and necessary sense of trust in Life itself; leaving us not knowing who or what to believe anymore.

Is the social media post a real representation of someone’s life, or has it been heavily curated? Is the news you’re watching accurate, or is there the heavy hand of corporate money driving the flow of information? Is the customer representative you are speaking to a real human, or a robot?

While many of us would say, yeah, yeah, it’s awful, but that’s the way it is now. Or maybe, we hate it or are outraged or anxious because of it, but we don’t think there is anything we can do about it.  And while this and more may be true, I find it misses the point of what is actually available to us at this moment in time. For though we live in a day like no other when it comes to the levels of false appearances and widespread deceit making its way into our day to day living, there is actually another way to see this.

That being, seeing all of the curation, the dishonesty, the confusion, the outright lies and the betrayals as one of the greatest blessings you will ever receive. I know it sounds ludicrous on the surface, but give me a moment.

When any of us has the good and great fortune (not misfortune) of being betrayed by a system we felt protected by, the pain we feel is one of the greatest wounds we will ever experience for it shreds our beliefs about the world, ourselves and what it is we can count on. When the rug gets pulled out from under us in this way, whether with one big pull or through a series of little pulls, the faith we have in Life itself can get blown right out of us.

And in its wake, it can leave an inner devastation so great that it seems like we can never come back from the betrayal; even as we scramble to make sense of something there is no making sense of. To be led astray, intentionally or not, by those people and institutions we put our deepest trust in can feel like the highest form of treachery and deceit. Can feel like a tear so great, there is no repair.

But, and this is a big but, if you can see betrayal as something to learn from, it becomes a gift. That gift being the chance for your feet to be placed, knowingly or not, on the road to greater self-trust. A chance to turn your faith back into yourself and to Where Else it has always truly belonged. This gift then becomes something you can share with a world deeply confused about what to believe in, as well as whose hands that belief is meant to reside in.

Then, in times of universal deceit where telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act as George Orwell once wrote, you are in the needed position of holding something others cannot yet hold for themselves. A perspective that sees the rampant universality of not knowing what to believe in as the directest route to an abiding self-trust, whose truest power can only be forged in the fires of betrayal.

I sit looking out the window at the dawn of a new day wondering, “What if nothing was wrong? What if what I’m feeling isn’t a problem?” This wondering drops in after a night of troubled sleep filled with apprehension, doubt and second guessing.

Is this even possible? Or desirable. To choose to live without needing to make something or someone, wrong. Would this be a sane approach to life? Or incredibly naive? Would it leave me unprepared or ill-suited for the world? Vulnerable to being caught off guard and open to something horrible happening?

When something feels wrong to us that’s all we can see. That and the compulsion to make it stop. Make it go away. Assign blame. Be clutched with fear. Fight it. Demonize it. And then of course, create the teams of “right” and “wrong.” But what if nothing was wrong, what then? What would we see? What would we know?

What would become possible?

This is an incredibly courageous step to take, trained as we all are in who the good and bad guys are. Conditioned as we are to default to believing we know what is right and wrong. And while yes, we need a code of honor to live by when it comes to our words and deeds, it is far more complex than the black and white nature of choosing for and against based on party lines, political affiliations, religious beliefs and more.

We can favor a clear sky over a cloudy one. And yet, the presence of the clouds is what makes for the most sublime sunrise because of how the clouds help to create a multidimensional light show on the eastern horizon. There are traditions that liken the beliefs and thoughts we hold to be like clouds passing through an expansive open field of greater awareness. That part of us that knows beyond “the taking of sides.”

So when the clouds of “wrong” pass over your mind, see them for what they are; a fleeting opportunity to decide what you most want to see and create in the world. Recognizing that the clouds offer the very contrast necessary to help us decide whether we will see the beauty emerging at the dawn of a new day, or…

Every day, we get to choose how to perceive what it is that life offers us. Right and wrong are easy. Child’s play actually. But to contemplate beyond wrong is the realm of participating in a new dream for our world. One that says, I will challenge my ideas of right and wrong in the service of something far Greater.

So just for today, what if nothing was wrong with the weather, or the traffic, or what someone else does? What if for just one breath you could wonder, “If I wasn’t making this wrong, what would I see?”

I fast once a month. It’s hard. Even though I’ve been doing it for years, I start dreading my fast day the night before; fretting about how I’m going to be able to pass through the discomfort. And where I’m typically not hungry until around 11am, on a fasting day, I wake up hungry. Then, I stumble through what I need to get done as best as I can given how I’m feeling. Even though I know what to expect, it never seems to get easier.

This week, I heard someone say that whether you choose to take care of yourself or not, both are hard. So pick your hard. This flies in the face of the world we inhabit where we are constantly being steered towards doing what’s easy, what’s fast and what’s convenient. More to the point, we’ve been educated to believe that nothing has to be hard. We’re all supposed to feel good all the time. We’re all supposed to be winners.

Everyone gets a medal. Everyone finds a four leaf clover at Disney World. Everyone’s everything gets a pass these days because we don’t want anyone to feel excluded.

But here’s the thing, experiences in life that are difficult and that we find a way to meet and be strengthened by, give us something to be proud of. Give us a sense of who we are and what we are capable of. Give us an inner strength and grit to cleave to our values and what matters most in a world at a loss for both.

And that’s why I fast. Because it strengthens my resolve and my determination to remember and honor the preciousness of food. Because it serves as a counterbalance to all the excesses we are constantly being force-fed to indulge in. Because it reminds me of what I will do to keep myself in health.

It’s hard to have a long overdue conversation, and it’s hard to carry what is unresolved.

It’s hard to make changes in your life, and it’s hard to not feel good. 

It’s hard to take the time to discover what your offer to the world is, and it’s hard to work at a job you hate.

It’s hard to admit to the limitations of what you can and cannot influence, and it’s hard to try and control what you cannot control.

It’s hard to learn about who you are and what makes you tick, and it’s hard to live believing the wrong things about yourself. 

Pick your hard.

As I write this, we are upon a full moon lunar eclipse. An astrologer I love talks about how all full moons are chances for deep release, and that an eclipse amplifies this opportunity. This eclipse though is even more powerful because it is in a house where the Lord of The Underworld (the planet Pluto) rules. Meaning, we can think of this astrological moment in time as an even greater chance for release. A little death, if you will.

Now death is not something most of us want to think about, never mind read or talk about. Many of us even going so far as to act as if it won’t happen if we just don’t admit it. And yet, it is an experience we will all have. It is an experience that everyone we know will have. So why not get more skilled at it? Why not choose to meet it, as opposed to fearing it?

Not meeting death on its own terms will always come with a cost. Much of which we may never realize until the actual moment of our death. A moment where we will no longer have the opportunity to make course-corrections to our lives. So while the moment of death may be a powerful learning indeed as some door swings open, wouldn’t it be “better” to open that door all along the way as you live your life?

Swami Kripalu, the namesake of the yoga tradition that I teach from once said, “The ordinary person dies just once, and for them, death is painful. But the yogi dies a little bit each day, and for them, death is just the next thing.” Can you imagine that? Can you imagine physical death just being the next thing? Can you taste the freedom in that? The zest for life that would originate out of that attitude?

Of course, this would mean a lot of preparation. An intentional way of being with your life where you willingly let go of things over and over and over again. Releasing that grudge. Dropping that old and harmful belief about yourself. Putting down that habit that you know is hurting you and those around you. Honing in on all the things, large and small, that don’t matter a single bit when you hold them up to the light of your own death.

Today could be a start. Use the power of the eclipse to think of something that plagues you. Run it by Death to get some clarity about how valid it is. Then take whatever it is, write it on a piece of paper, and burn it. Let it die with the flame. Let this little death be the start of learning how to meet Death on Death’s terms, and watch how your life lights up because of it.

Whether we think about it consciously or not, on some level we all know how our past can influence our present. Whether it is the childhood we got and how it continues to impact us, a health issue that runs in the family, a family secret, wealth passed on, being a college legacy, or carrying the hopes and dreams of those who came before you. In whatever the form, the truth is, what came before us, is in us. A part of us. That doesn’t change. But what can change is how we choose to be with what came before.

In the Energy Medicine training I am in, there is a lot of focus on the ancestors and it has gotten me to think in different ways about the people who came before me. Ways that are taking me beyond the stories I was told, as well as the ones I have told myself. A new light being shed on things I took for granted, didn’t recognize or believed were set in stone.

This week I decided to make space on my alter for my ancestors. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had nothing to place on my alter to represent them. But I didn’t let that stop me. Instead, I decided to begin by cleaning things up. Which in hindsight seems like the very place to start when working with our past; a desire from within to clean things up. One that says, things can be different.

So I began by taking everything off the alter. A kind of clean slate for myself and my ancestors. This turned on another truism for me; once we open to cleaning things up, we actually have to do something with that intention. We can’t just think about it and expect things to change. We can’t just wallow in the blame or the bad luck of the bloodline and expect that our lives will be any different.

As I cleared each item I was tuning into what I wanted to keep, and what I didn’t. This is the discernment phase that says, “I get to choose. Things are not chosen for me based on what came before.” I get to decide how to move these things through my life; what to keep, what to let go of. I found myself with four possibilities in this very tangible process of discernment: What to Keep. What to Repurpose. What to Pass on. What to Let Go of.

That about sums it up. What is it that got passed on to us that we actually and truly want to keep? Not because we are supposed to, but because we have done our due diligence to determine its importance in our lives. What is it that we got that doesn’t quite work in its current form, but could be rearranged to suit us? What is it that we have that no longer serves us, but could be offered to another in a way that serves them? And finally, what just absolutely needs to go?

To know ourselves is to know who came before us. But it doesn’t stop there. It is also to own the sacred responsibility that what we choose to carry forward, and how, is always ours to decide.

One of the things I am always wondering about is how can we make the changes in our lives that are not only necessary for some specific reason, but that would actually bring us closer to who we truly are, and what it is that we most desire. While I have explored with myself and others many, many reasons for resisting what we most need to do, it still confounds me. And while there are those who have laid out clear maps to what stops us and how we can change, more often than not, we don’t.

What’s going on?

I just can’t seem to accept that we would work so thoroughly against ourselves. Sure, maybe we don’t feel like we deserve it. Maybe we don’t know any other way. Maybe, as Freud would have said, we have a death wish. But still…Something continues to nag at me. It feels like there is something that is so much Greater than all the roadblocks we put up, that is just bursting to get out.

This past week I had a mundane experience around all of this that felt anything but mundane. I take a weekly yoga class that has been bringing me through road construction that is slated to last for four years. Right at the beginning of this, my husband gave me an alternative route to take. But the first time I tried it, I overshot where I was supposed to turn off and had to spend time trying to figure out how to get back to where I was going.

Since I don’t have GPS or a cell phone, it truly was me trying to figure it out. It created some tension over being late for class, so I never tried it again. Only, the delays have been getting worse; in response to which, I have been leaving earlier and earlier.

But for some reason, unknown to me consciously, this week an impulse came over me to try the alternate route again. It was incredible! The roads took me past farms and wild life sanctuaries. The mountains in the distance stood in contrast to a clear blue sky with fluffy white clouds sailing along. I saw two hawks sitting on top of a barn overlooking their domain. It was all so magical. And it took far less time, and I was far less tense.

What the heck had I been resisting? Prior to trying the new route, like a rat in a maze, I was immersed in a myriad of traffic lights, construction, car congestion, pollution and stress. Not to mention moving through a kind of visual urban ugliness. And right next to it, this whole time, was a kind of traveller’s paradise that I had been turning my back on.

I know we can prefer the devil we know and I know there are many, many facets to why we change and why we don’t. But on that day, it felt like beyond all the specifics, all the things we do and do not know in this regard, it really does boil down to some kind of unconscious readiness. Some kind of alignment with what already exists within us, or at the very least, right next to us. And while we can know some of what allows us to be ready or not, there is also something mystical at play here. Something unknowable by our rational minds that want it all to add up so perfectly in terms of exactly what we need to do. Leaving us to believe that there is some magic formula code out there that we just need to break.

This makes sense to me. Think about all of the advice, all of the information, all of the programs and all of the degrees and theories that focus on change. You would think we would have it figured out by now. Since we don’t, there has got to be more to it. More than it’s because of our past, or because we are weak, stubborn or without willpower.

What if all the doing has us running right past something? What if instead of trying to fit ourselves into the existing models, the million dollar question we need to be asking ourselves is, “Given that I want something else, what do I need to do in order to be ready?”

Bottom line? What if instead of all the efforting and all of the failed doing, this is about accepting what is already there and already wants to happen? This then becomes an issue of timing and evolution; like a flower blossoming in the spring that has done nothing more than say “Yes” to its time. This is in no way to say we give up or make up excuses. Instead, I am proposing we wonder what it would be like to believe that there is more to what we know about change. And from there, to tap into what it is inside, beyond good and bad, that wants to change, and ask it what it needs to blossom.