Once again, I find myself feeling drawn to write as the end of another year, another cycle, winds down before delivering us into the beginning of the next one. These blog posts used to be my main outlet for expressing myself through the written word, and despite having transferred that outlet to the realm of book-writing, I have to admit it’s lovely to come back to this medium to leave a few words to commemorate this moment in time.

2021 has been, for those of us who have the capacity to recognize it, a microcosm of tumultuousness within which we have collectively been led to inhale sharply and hold our breath, only to exhale once permission was granted. And once that exhalation was passed and forgotten, we found an old pattern of breathing that felt familiar and which brought relief after the season of hollowed fears which convinced us we’d never be permitted to breathe freely again. We knew it wasn’t a one-time thing. We knew we’d be inhaling sharply again and doing our best to get on with life despite whilst holding our breath in anticipation of the permission-to-exhale moment. We knew we weren’t out of the woods. But what we forgot, collectively and in the moments of solitude and isolation, was that perhaps, once again, the literal expression of life as pandemic/variant/fear/inhale/holding pattern/exhale/forget/pretend/uh-oh/inhale was not the sole experience unfolding. We forgot that perhaps the undercurrent of meaning which ties everything together with purpose was having us navigate this experience of life not being easy on purpose so that we could be presented with the opportunity to heal in the face of fear and chaos. We forgot that every so often, we as a race of ant-sized critters scrambling entitledly across this globe we inhabit will be subject to the life education we were enrolled in at birth. The lessons which will be meted out will serve to humble us and remind us that the quality of our experience of life is entirely and wholly dependent on what we do with our thoughts, because the world as we all know only exists in each of our minds. These words exist in your mind, your loved ones exist in your mind, the meaning assigned to a pandemic exists in your mind, as do the ways you will deal with it.

This year brought us way, way down into the depths of despair and then roller-coasted us to the heights of relief and hope, only to do what roller coasters do, which is scare the shit out of us as we breach the crest of the downward trajectory. And as we navigate the ups, the downs, and the sacred moments between them, it would be irresponsible of us to not recognize that life doesn’t present us with turmoil for nothing. The turmoil without mirrors the turmoil within, and the real lesson here is that if we are not ready or willing to work with and find resolution and peace within ourselves, then we have absolutely no right to pass judgement on what occurs without. None. We have no right to judge a pandemic, a government, an anti-vaxxer or those who believe vaxxing is the solution. Understand that life expresses itself as everything, and within that expression will be aspects and elements that make us uncomfortable. We, as those who suffer from the plight of the privileged, have been conditioned to blame others for our discomfort in order to shift it, leaving us feeling better and justified after slinging our shadow onto others. That’s not a fix. That’s a Band-Aid. And there is no healing there. Just hurt.

This year has very much been about testing each one of us to see if and when we will finally be ready to heal. Not from the fallout of Pandemica, but rather from the wounds which we have been carrying with us for decades. Sometimes it takes a pandemic to recontextualize life, and with life recontextualized we find ourselves dealing with old patterns of fear, old patterns of helplessness, old patterns of getting on with life without looking at what’s scaring us senselessly, old patterns of projection/blaming/suppressing/repressing/avoiding/anesthetizing.

This has been a year in which many have finally decided to do the work that will address their shadow, their past, their wounds. The law of karma tells us that if we don’t learn the big lessons initially, cycles will repeat to continue giving us the opportunity to learn. And so the roller coaster speeds along, our stomachs heaving with every lurch and dive, until we understand that we were meant to voluntarily get off the roller coaster and assign the trajectory ourselves. Life has been trying to teach us that we could either be held hostage by what “happens to us” or we could step into the roles that have been our birthright from the first inhalation we ever took and recognize the power and influence we each have in assigning meaning that is helpful and constructive to a life that will present as anything but.

This process of healing requires us to question. Question the thoughts that come into our minds and ask if they’re really valid or if they are the product of years of dysfunction. Question whether being plugged into news outlets is actually helpful. Question whether the “news” should have been named the “bad news” from the get go. Question whether we have been encouraged to thrive in life or encouraged to contribute to an economic system which never had our best interests at heart, but which simply needed our taxes to continue to get paid. And once we have questioned and mulled over possible responses, our responsibility, especially this year, has always been to sit back with it all, find calm in the breathing, the musculature of the body, and the mind, and realize that it’s all just a test. All of it. Every second of all it is a test to see whether we will give our power away to whatever it is that will leave us disempowered and distracted or whether we will be able to witness it all and see it as the trickery of a life that demands that we transcend turmoil and chaos and finally rest in the homeground of our being.

Find rest. That’s the point of the game of life. The game will seduce you into believing that it’s about the race, about the win, about the competition, about the cars, the homes, the travel, the dollars, the stature, the job, etc… The game will demand that you be distracted enough to not realize that to level up over and over until you win the game requires you to find the sword in the stone, the one ring to rule them all, the holy grail, and that is rest. Rest for your mind, rest for your body, rest for your emotional state, rest for your soul.

When faced with situations in life that draw you into fear, uncertainty and turmoil, understand that it is at that specific moment that the game is ON! That’s your cue to find the rest that is yours. Instead of passing judgement on those you don’t agree with when YOU are the one filled with tension, instead of choosing more wound, more hurt, more turmoil, more chaos, choose to finally, at long last, heal. And we heal when we rest. It’s that simple.

I am wishing you all healing. I am wishing you all rest. I am wishing us all that which brings the nervous system back to default settings and which helps center us in calm and clarity, symbolic sight and the reality of truth. Happy, healthy, healing holidays to us all, and may 2022 continue to guide us back to the homeground within which healing awaits.