The Auspicious New Year

Happy January. For me, this is always an auspicious time – when the whirlwind of energy around the holidays gives way (hopefully) to some time for reflection and planning. I’ve been noticing all the cynical and negative messages on my social media feeds about new year’s resolutions. I agree with them, in spirit. Yes, any time is an opportune time to make changes in your life. And we are all guilty, sometimes, of over-investing in an idea of change that is not sustainable.

For me, though, there’s something so compelling about having an annual invitation to think about what’s happening around us and within us, and how to make change. And, yes, some new year’s resolutions are rooted in an inability to express self-love (e.g. my annual effort to lose 5 pounds). But I love feeling, with each new year, that there is a new sense of possibility. That I could have a vision for myself and the year that is unstained by compromise and the uncontrollable reality we live in. It feels full of hopeful possibility.

Having said that, it’s taken me awhile longer than usual to settle into some reflective space. Probably, in part, because I compounded the year-end whirlwind by going to India for two weeks in December. I came back to face massive jet lag and fatigue; I had one weekend to get Christmas shopping done and packages mailed; a quick work trip and then it was Christmas. Not much space in there for reflection.

Meanwhile, I realized that one of the other obstacles to deeper reflection is how painful 2018 turned out to be. I mean let’s be honest, this was a horrendous dumpster-fire of a year. Even trying to catalogue everything that happened seems like too much. We came into this year with the hangover from the 2017 tax cut bill being passed. We quickly learned about kids being separated from their parents at the border; the courts upheld Friedrichs (a decision with devastating implications for the labor movement) and the Muslim ban. The Kavanaugh nomination and the fight for women’s self-determination. Toward the end of the year, the new climate change report laying out the dangers if we don’t make change within 10 years. The elections created some amazingly hopeful bright spots, but still, here we are with the government shutdown.

There were also threats to DACA, still unresolved; ongoing confirmation of lower-court justices who will preserve the conservative agenda for a generation. A myriad of rollbacks of Obama-era civil rights and environmental protections. A major set of battles over transgender rights in the military and in our schools. The intensification of the Yemeni civil war, the assassination of Jamal Kashoggi. And this is just what I could list from memory.

If 2017 felt like we managed to hold off the worst of the Trump agenda – the policy agenda, not the effect of white supremacy being elevated to the highest office – 2018 is when it set in hard.

It makes sense that we wouldn’t want to spend too much time reflecting on all of that. When I realized the enormity of the pain of 2018 made me not want to think about it, I decided to refresh my understanding of how the philosophy of yoga talks about memory and remembering. What I remembered (!) from past reading, is that memory is one of the five fluctuations of the consciousness, and it can be helpful or harmful for making progress on the spiritual path. Harm comes when we use memory to awaken attachment to past pleasures. But memory can help us  make progress when we use it to develop our discriminative knowledge and intelligence about what to do now. Like failing to challenge white supremacy in the past allowed those seeds to grow, and helped produce the conditions that gave rise to DJT. Knowing that, seeing it, understanding it deeply means we have a chance to do something different now.

As painful as it may be, we can’t stop reflecting on the past.

But there’s actually a deeper meaning to the way memory figures in the yoga sutras, and while it might not be relevant to trying to make sense of 2018 and what it means for the future, I found it beautiful and inspiring. In fact, memory is not just our intellectual recollection of our past experiences, in yogic thought it includes imprints from past lives or dreams – things that may not have happened to this version of us, but experiences we can tap into that are stored in the collective unconscious. When we practice right action, when we make progress on our spiritual path, those memories get integrated and then dismissed. We become able to be fully present in this moment, seeing what is happening now with complete clarity. Instead of reacting to past experiences, we live fully and presently in this moment. BKS Iyengar says: When memory functions perfectly, it becomes one with intelligence. At this point, memory, which had originally dug for us so many pits, has transformed itself into our true guru. (Light on Yoga, 96).

Not only can’t we be excused from recollecting and reflecting, it is likely the way we exorcise the demons of the past that continue to haunt our behavior and perspective now.

It’s a complicated task we have. We can’t dwell on the pains of 2018, because that would be counterproductive on many levels. We can’t lose track of its lessons, though, and what that tells us about making a better world in the future.

For me, the lessons are clear. Keep resisting. Keep building a collective vision of a more beautiful place. When I think about what was most reassuring and inspiring about the 2018 elections, it is victories by people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who took on a moderate establishment democrat by insisting we should have the courage to ask for more. Already, at an age when many of us were learning the ropes and trying to figure out how to succeed on the terms given to us, she is in congress saying These are the wrong ropes. Our government shouldn’t function this way and we can make sure it doesn’t. That clarity of vision that isn’t just marginally better than what we have, but a transformative shift, is already impacting politics by changing the nature of the conversation. We need more of it.

I think our biggest risk now – especially for white people – is letting the sense of the shift in momentum affect us. We can’t let up. I do feel that momentum is shifting, but the fight is ongoing and many people will continue to be in pain as it plays out. Most of them are not white. If we white people decide that the fight is in better shape and we can ease up on our contributions, we’ll be right back where we started at the beginning of 2018.

I hope to never go back there. I hope there is a beautiful powerful future ahead. But hope isn’t enough. Please stay in the fight with me.

I’ll be writing more this week about my personal intentions for 2019, including how I plan to be in that fight. Whatever your reflections on 2018, I hope for better times ahead for all of us and I’m working to make that a possibility.

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.