Although Santa has already visited, it seems that his habit of list making and categorizing people into the naughty and nice persists. For Santa and many of us, lists are useful. They help us organize our lives. They make us feel accomplished. But also they too often keep us tied to our constant storytelling of not being enough, of not making the grade, of always having to postpone joy for another more appropriate time when things, and more significantly, ourselves, are just right–perfect.
It’s this part of categorizing that gets us into so much trouble. It keeps us from ever enjoying the moment just as it is. Instead, we are left on a perpetual psychic hamster wheel running after what is unreachable. We want to improve, we want to change the world–we want but never quite fully enjoy. We become estranged from ourselves and one another.
We write this at the start of the year as a way to remind ourselves to drop the resolutions and self-improvement goals of the year, so that for as long as we can, we can bask in the goodness of who and what we are. We want to celebrate ourselves. Allow ourselves to be just as we are.
One of the Dalai Lama’s teachers, Dilgo Khyentse, once said,
Mind creates both samsara and nirvana. Yet there is nothing much to it—it is just thoughts. Once we recognize that thoughts are empty, the mind will no longer have the power to deceive us. But as long as we take our deluded thoughts as real, they will continue to torment us mercilessly, as they have been doing throughout countless past lives.
When we work with you throughout this year, we hope we can come back to this sense of empty thought. We want to encourage you to be as healthy as possible and to do so by unconditionally and wholeheartedly accepting yourself. When this is the base of our work, the body responds, we relax, we begin to notice that the body serves the primary function of hosting our soul, and that the ultimate goal if there is one, is to awaken to the full understanding of who and what we are.
In love and kindness,
