Welcoming the New Year with Mindfulness

As an old year ends and a new one begins, I like to find a few quiet moments for a simple practice that helps recognize this transition and honor all that has happened and all that awaits. I’d love to invite you to join me.

You might want to have a tissue or a journal handy. I find this practice brings so many emotions to the surface, making me teary and grateful and excited to be alive all at once. 

A Practice for Honoring The Transition to a New Year

1. Sit comfortably, relax your body, and close your eyes.
2. Slowly, gently, breathe in through your nose, imagining that you are breathing in all of 2019 and what transpired for you, holding the whole year in your lungs for a couple of seconds.
3. Survey your memories as they come in on your breath, catching glimpses of the year’s high and low moments.
4. Allow yourself to feel the good, bad, disappointing, marvelous, wondrous, thanking everything that life brought to you this year.
5. Let it all go. With a deep, long exhale, let it all go.
6. Experience the tides of your breath a few times, in and out, and then rest, sensing the air coming in through your nostrils, and flowing out.
7. Let your breath flow naturally, effortlessly.
8. Next, imagine a field of snow, freshly fallen all around you, pure, expectant.
9. Allow your heart to swell and your ears to attune: What is calling to you this year? Where does your heart long to go?
10. Feel and sense deeply and when you are ready, let your eyes flutter open: Welcome to a new beginning.

Take some time to write down whatever came up for you during that meditation—the residue of moments are important, funny things you remember. Those are the things that stick with you. You have to cherish the good moments as they’re there. Know that the bad stuff passes. Like waves on the ocean, it’s the just the highs and lows that you remember.

Explore the February Issue

And welcome too to the love, hope, and laughter in the February issue of Mindful. Mindfulness icon Tara Brach teaches us how to find true self-compassion in the face of our restless anxieties. Ali, Atman, and Andrés of the Holistic Life Foundation bring us hope in the power of mindfulness to transform lives and communities. And Barry, Mindful’s beloved and Falstaffian founding editor, brings us laughter by sharing that none of us, alas, is the center of the universe. 

Wishing you a new year filled with deep breaths, wonderful beginnings, love, hope, and laughter.

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