Q&A + Meditation Recording N.8
a reader's question on how to restart
Question:
Hi, thank you for your work and for raising deep, insightful reflections. Every new year, I get this feeling…a mix of excitement but also a bit of a dread. I feel hopeful for what can happen, what’s ahead, what is possible and at the same time a sense of pressure for what I’ve been dragging, for what I don’t have yet. How do I restart?
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Perhaps the question is not how to REstart and more about how to start from where you are. There's a difference.
Perhaps the question is not how to REstart and more about how to live with all the ambivalence inside of you. There’s a difference.
Perhaps the question is not how to REstart and more about how to enter the present moment. There’s a difference.
Perhaps it’s about all of that and also how we hold moments of transition.
As a society we have some agreements that emphasize these markers: Sundays, grades in school, birthdays, seasons. To some people this can mean one thing, to others it can be something entirely different. The end of a calendar year and the beginning of another materializes all of these feelings in an intense way. To me, deep down this is also a conversation about TIME: how we are using it, how we used it, and how we want to use it.
The markers, like New Years, might also bring the feeling of lack to center stage, side by side, with a hopeful feeling that a “better” version of us will match the challenge with all the capacities our “older” self from the previous year wasn’t able to do. I feel this cyclical movement is important for us. As a way to cope, to reset, unplug and plug back in again. From a Buddhist Psychology perspective, hope is something we regard with a lot of spaciousness. We don’t want to hold on to it because it often pulls us away from the present moment. Pema Chodron says, “Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.”
I completely agree, in that, we have to at some point bring ourselves back from future projections or past situations, to our experience in the here and now, to begin to be able to even tolerate some of the discomfort we are running away from by moving to different times. Hope can be a way to bypass what we don’t want to feel, stay with, or face.
However, I’m coming more and more to the realization that hope as a friend of trust or faith is a necessary thing. Especially the way this world is going. At some measure, we can allow ourselves to rest in something hopeful and pause to get some air, reset, and begin again. The rituals of a new year might be a good time to engage with this type of hope, to renew, to recharge - however that looks like for each of us.
From the psychoanalytic perspective, this feeling you are describing is actually really interesting. The psychoanalyst Adam Philips in his book 'Missing Out' says: “The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do; and makes our frustration a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions- How would we know if we had realized our potential? Where did we get our picture of this potential from? If we don’t have potential what do we have?- we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.”
What he’s talking about, it’s always with us and it will always be. This desire for more, for others, for something we can’t quite put into words is part of our psyche. It can get accentuated in these times of transition, of reevaluation, of inventory. He says “wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn’t there…. There’s a gap between what we want and what we can have, and that gap, Camus says, is our link, our connection to the world”
Psychoanalysis is pointing to this gap and helps us wonder: What am I? What do I want? How do I get it? And what happens when I don’t? It’s transformational.
It’s a different reflection to put on a list what is wrong with us, what we are missing, what is not right, or what isn’t enough, than to begin to occupy this gap by listening to ourselves with compassion.
I’d like to offer the image of a threshold: the binding, the gap of one floor to the other. A meeting point. A union. Maybe with this image in mind and reflecting on how you want to create meaning around these complexities at this time of the year, you can start to think, experience a new way of ritualizing this passage.
In general we have moved away from rituals, from the ways people would connect with these thresholds. So maybe this feeling of duality you are describing, could be an interesting meeting point to investigate what you want to hold moving forward? Does the inventory-list feel too overwhelming to you? Would you rather look into the new year with a feeling instead of a plan of action? What part is challenging? What part of you feels the hope and what part feels the dread? You can get to choose how you want to experience moments of transition.
In a way, when we sit down with these questions we are talking about being honest. Perhaps restarting begins with honesty.
With love,
Mariana
MEDITATION RECORDING
A few instructions:
The meditation is exploring contentedness which I think is a good practice for when we move through transitions
Find yourself in a quiet place
Sit as you feel most comfortable, you can either use a couch, bed, chair or the ground. Find a posture that helps you stay awake but relaxed
Eyes can be fully closed or you can have your gaze pointed on a point near you on the ground
Take your time to transition back into your tasks
