New Year’s Promise

The New Year opens the door to our Selves. Marking time this way leads to taking stock: in which areas of our lives are we abundant? In which areas are we lacking? Abundance vs. lack differ for each of us, but it must not be defined by artificial measures. Trust your Soul’s Balance.

Before New Year comes a threshold pause, a break or a holiday. For me, this is Winter Solstice-so peaceful, so quiet and dark. Silent Night. Then comes the clearing of last year’s psycho-emotional clogs, taking stock of soul, remembering the ‘why’ of the ‘what’. 

Have you become caught in the gerbil wheel of capitalism? How about the ranks of harried parents, trying to provide their children a quality education?

My son’s first year of kindergarten in Seattle lead us to some soul-searching. We struggled, Sept.-Dec., with hyper over-functioning, noisy, chaotic environments, aggressive positivity, and no time to enjoy our abundant blessings! 

We live in a region of gorgeous forests, beaches and mountains. We are encircled by friends and family. The metropolis offers endless opportunities for enrichment. Learning, growing, laughing and loving is easy when you get right down to it!

When did Kindergarten become so stressful for the family?

I think I know the answer. It’s called ‘scarcity mindset’ for some, actual scarcity for many.

Mad World for Parents

Wage, salary, and insurance-dependence enslaves parents. Without ever intending to, we acquiesce to a mad pace of life. We find ourselves making concession after concession. Sacrificing our pleasurable activities, eating on the run, and jostling our children into a hectic schedule. With everybody doing it, it begins to look normal.

It is not.

In this nation of consumption and middle-class anxiety, can we trade-in any previously assumed ‘necessities’? Can we trade-in the automobile, the vacation, the bathroom update, for something of more value to us? Like time and enjoyment?

“Uncover what is enough. Not in the sense of playing too small, but the kind of enough that allows our hearts to expand and our shoulders to loosen, that allows creativity to blaze and joy to bloom, the kind of enough that opens space in our lives to hold ourselves and our seed dreams.”-Molly Remer, We’Moon 2023, “Imbolc”. (Visit We’Moon)

What actually nourishes you? This matters, despite how mainstream culture will function to negate your feelings. What feels like ease in your shoulders, relaxed eyes, and spontaneous smiles? We must disengage ourselves from too fast. Too loud. Too stressful.

Nobody is going to do it for us.

We live in a culture of competing personal image. For parents, this pits us in a race to overload our children. We are all competing with how “enriched” we are. Mothers, especially, inhabit the overload:

‘I should get my child in a musical enrichment activity. They only do soccer and robotics. But music will cut into our one time to play. I should set a reminder on my phone to have unstructured time with my child. But when? I think on Tuesdays and Thursdays we will have thirty minutes, after school pickup and before dinner, homework and bed.’

In this frantic society, slowing down is a radical act. Some of us need to slow down, in order to connect with each other and ourselves. Time to enjoy your children. Time to enjoy your Self. These are WAY more important than artificially imposed ‘shoulds’. What is life for after all?

Honoring your Self is never selfish-don’t believe the marketing lies! It is having integrity, following the love in your heart for your Self and the Selves of Others.

Courage to Slow Down

We entered our year of Kindergarten naively. We saw the whites of their eyes-the parents of grade-school age children. We just didn’t think that could ever be us.

Then came the unnaturally early mornings, hurrying out the door. The commuting. The classroom over-stimulation! Leon showed us something was off, alright. He brought on the violent meltdowns, 2/day instead of his usual 1/week average. When I queried our new school community, I found sympathy, empathy, and a few key responses: 

a) That daily violent meltdowns in children are “normal” (“restraint collapse”, anyone?) b) That for us it might indeed be abnormal: we should get my son evaluated.

We are following up on both possibilities, with a major dose of salt. There is a salty, nitty-grit that has popped our sheltered, early-childhood bubble (Not that early childhood is pure sweetness, even in a bubble!)

 Mainstream culture values busyness over stillness, loudness over quietness, competitive personal achievement, and overloading parents and children. 

Obeying that Inner Voice

Around the Winter Solstice, I had the quiet to hear my own voice again. It woke me early in the morning, not with a panicked to-do list, but to this phrase: ‘grounded in a new way of being’. 

This new way of being is self-confident. It is acting in accordance with my values, which include pleasure, quiet, and free time. They include making art, taking nature walks, extended dart-gun battles with my kid, and long moments watching my chickens peck around. (Really, the rhythmic rambles of large fluffy birds is so relaxing.)

This new way of being is coming into an abundance mindset, from long-habituated scarcity mindset. With abundance mindset, I have everything that I need and the time to enjoy it!

No one and nothing will force me to compromise my sanity and joy. Not for long anyway. If I naively get us into a pace that does not suit us, I can get us out.

Scarcity mindset is when we fool ourselves that our survival, on some level, depends on joining a ludicrous pace of life. We have the power to slow it down.

I can feel blessed on every level-not in a mental way that I lecture myself, but in the fiber of my body and being.

Returning to Self

To actually enjoy my blessings, I’ll have to make some changes. Correcting-course can require dramatic shifts! We will be changing how we school our son. Others might choose to move, in order to reduce their commute. Some people take a less “successful”/demanding job-essentially demoting themselves in the eyes of society-in order to free up their time.

Usually, feeling blessed requires some healing. Am I alone in my reliance on coffee, sugar and alcohol, just to get through the day? Certainly not. Yet it causes me suffering.  Headaches. Fatigue. Anxiety. My dentist warns: at this rate, I will grind my teeth to nubs! So I’ll be fitting another expensive mouthguard shortly, but… really?

What I want-yes, even more than a mouthguard!-is to relax.

~This year, I will soak in hot tubs, get a massage, and try CBD ~

(Do you have your own powerful ways of relaxing? Of activating abundance mindset?)

            With this solar & lunar new year and the planets stationing direct, I feel a whoosh of renewal. Like a clear stream I skip toward Imbolc. 

(I also feel a desire to dress fabulous)