Today, December 31st, is the day when we all have a least one moment thinking about what we have or haven’t achieved that year. When I woke up this morning at 10:19 am (no shame at all) my stream of thoughts flowed a little bit like this:

I never finished that dress I started over 6 months ago. I bought that pattern two years ago. I said I was going to train for a marathon and even bought that expensive training guide but never got around to that. That cost me sixty dollars. Ugh. I promised I would post more blogs, but that didn’t really happen. I bet no one even reads them anyways. I should have submitted more work to more places. Well, lets hope next year will be better.

Needless to say, I pulled the covers over my head, grumbled slightly and did not wake up until midday.

It seems that the two hours I have been awake have brought me more wisdom than anticipated. I dragged myself to the Yoga Mat, as I have to do most days, even though I would much rather be watching the Dateline Episode in which some woman dissolved her husband in a bucket of acid (that was hard to admit).

I start Day 29 of my 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene, and begin to breathe. “A deep cleansing breath,” Adriene says. The breath travels through my nose, and out through my mouth. Into my nose, out through my mouth.

“Focus on your breath”, she says.

Suddenly, I feel present. Strange how just a few deep breaths, just some good old oxygen, can transform your state of mind. I don’t want to say I had an epiphany, but something jiggled inside me for sure. This whole year was full of disappointments, as most years are. I didn’t do many of the things I set out to do, as most of us do. However, by waking up this morning, and packaging up the year of 2015 into a small parcel of disappointment, I was casting a dark black muggy cloud over everything wondrous that happened that year and placing a huge amount of pressure on myself for the year to come. Recipe for success, I think not.

I had seemed to forget that I took a mind boggling fantastic trip to Europe with one of the most amazing humans on this planet. It had just slipped my mind that I had gotten into the BFA Creative Writing Program at UBC, a dream of mine for quite a few years now. I guess I didn’t notice that I was alive, sitting in my own clean, comfortable bedroom, breathing oxygen, and being able to enjoy the luxuries of a yoga practice. For all this, I am eternally grateful.

Today I propose a task to anyone who reads this. Sit down for five minutes, take at least ten cleansing breaths, and think about how you feel right now. Think about all the things that have happened this year, amazing and hardly amazing at all, and think about how those things make you feel right now, in this moment. Write it down, sing about it, do an interpretative dance about it. Your past experiences are important. They help you grow and learn, but at the end of the day, you are the one who decides what you want to carry with you into tomorrowland. So choose wisely.

 

Mad Love and Happy New Year.