Inside Yoga 154 (4/1/2016)
The New Year represents for many of us the opportunity to make a fresh start or a time to make a change to our lives; or perhaps it represents a chance to stop something and leave it in the previous year. But why now and why does this date have more significance than other dates in our calendar?
Making changes around this time of year can feel easier because there is collective support, as many of our peers will also be making New Year resolutions. A collective consensus does make doing something easier, and the majority of us do not ask why now, but just simply accept that is what is done at this time of the year.
The fact that many of us wish to make changes and start something new at this time of year helps us to have the energy to do this, like a collective wave carrying us along. But is this the best time of the year? Being in the depths of winter when all we want to do is sleep is possibly not the best time of the year to find extra energy to make changes to our habits, work or lifestyle? Yet this is what we do, or rather, what we are really doing is looking for excuses to make a change, or perhaps not make a change, and the fact that everyone else seems to be making New Year resolutions helps us make ours.
The truth is that at any time of the year we could make changes and usually find the reasons to do this. Over the course of every year we are faced by the need to make a change, and realise we must start or stop something, and we make decisions, for example, “after the summer holidays I will do XYZ”, or “after Easter I will start” and so on. We are repeatedly faced by the need and the desire to make a change but we will procrastinate as much as we can, because the status quo is far easier and always has been!
Yet the New Year presents the best opportunity, so why not take it? Then again, if we delay we might be able to do it after Easter. This highlights something that we learn in Buddhism and yoga: that this pattern of behaviour needs to be understood for what it is – namely, underneath all the worldly explanations (ie work, habits etc) this is all about the mind jumping around and not being aware of the truth that every moment of every day presents us with the opportunity to make a change.
Another way of putting this is that most of the time we are sleep walking through our daily life putting up this and that, not making changes, but when we come across an event like New Year something inside turns on and suddenly we feel awake and aware of what we need and want in our life.
It is good that New Year does stir up these changes but from a meditational perspective it is better to be aware of these patterns so the changes do not feel so dramatic and tough to implement simply because we have let so much time pass which results in entrenched behaviour, for example, unhealthy lifestyle. Meditational awareness therefore acts like a regulator and safety valve on our life which helps us to keep it all ticking along nicely and ensures that we remain awake.
There is another way of looking at this view of changes and doing something for the first time: reincarnation is generally seen as being about life to life regeneration, for example, when I die I will be reborn (not necessarily as a human). However, reincarnation is not just about the big picture of a whole life, but our moment to moment existence. If we consider that the very next moment will be new, it is argued that it has never happened before, and it will be a new life. For example, the next breath you take will never have happened before, because it will be a new life. Yes, you might think, “but I have been breathing all my life”, so each breath feels like the previous, so it is the same. But it is not, as each breath is unique, it has not happened before.
It is akin to a rebirth, because if the next breath is new, so is your life, every moment is a new life, in other words a rebirth, because you are born again with every breath. This is largely metaphorical but it does point out something very important about our relationship with our self and time.
In meditation we learn to treat every breath as the first so that we stay awake to the present, to the “now”, so that we are more awake to the reality of our existence. It is hard to do this, but that is why we keep on reminding ourselves to watch the breath and to be present, because we aim to treat every breath as an opportunity to live our life fully and as well as we can. Not once a year when it is a New Year.
And that is what happens when we make our New Year resolutions, because in that moment we have woken up and realised XYZ about our life and want to make a change.
If we realise that every moment is a New Year perhaps we can avoid the bad stuff building up and causing trouble because it got out of hand, and make changes earlier or even, see the problems before they arrive. Instead of sleep walking through our life and falling over, perhaps we can stay awake and walk through life more at ease and safely with our self and who we are.
Happy New Year to you all!
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