“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Hello, dear being. Here we are. At the start of 2025.
I have been experiencing a lot of physical and cognitive dissonance over the past few days. Los Angeles, the city in which I grew up and where my parents still live, is burning. Asheville has settled into winter, barren and still ravaged by the flood, but now quiet and serene. Utilities restored, life is out of survival mode and back to being more normally lived. And. I unlock my phone and open the news and I see image after image of this place that holds all of the formative experiences of my development and in which my parents and some dear friends reside, engulfed in flames.
I am sitting with the question: how do we tend to what is in front of us when the world beyond us is collapsing? How do we maintain hope and stay connected to positive possibility—in this moment of now as well as for the future—when there is so much to grieve and feel enraged about and fear?
After Helene, I did not volunteer. I did not distribute supplies or clean up debris or make calls to locate missing persons. My nervous system couldn’t handle it. All I could do was tend to myself and provide physical and emotional support for my people.
Truth be told, I did not fully escape self-judgment around that. Did not avoid the internal recrimination that I “should” have been doing more. And. If I know anything, I know this: we need to learn to lovingly accept and meet ourselves where we are. You can’t stretch farther than your nervous system will allow you to go.
And so, here we are. At the start of 2025. How is your nervous system in this moment? If you’re able, please pause, take a breath, and tune into your body. Notice what is present—physically, energetically, emotionally. Can you sit with what is alive in your system for even a moment and allow it to be okay?
Twenty twenty-five is likely going to be an unfathomable, devastating year; in ways, it already is. Some of us will be galvanizing and community organizing and lobbying and taking a political stand. Some of us will be stretched to our limits by our jobs and keeping our kids safe and healthy and engaged. Some of us will be navigating challenging relationships and doing deep work in therapy and healing core wounds. Some of us will be doing our best to simply get out of bed in the morning and feed ourselves. All of it matters, and we each need not do all of the things. We are all learning how to exist in a world of relentless horrors, while continuing to orient ourselves towards the sun. Towards connection and beauty and dare I even say, thriving. The both/and of being with what is while visioning—holding in our hearts and consciousness—what we yearn for reality to be. We are learning how to grieve and heal and care for the world at large while tending to our own selves and what is immediately in front of us at the same time.
It can be a disorienting dance. Here is what I have learned: at the end of the day, no matter how far outside of myself I have stretched, I must always come back to my body. My breath. This is where the witnessing, the homecoming, the transformation happens.
There is so much pressure at the start of the new calendar year to “reset” ourselves. To commit to new habits, mindsets, ways of being; to set grand ambitions and concrete plans for the year ahead. The irony and trouble is that, new calendar year or not, we are in the depths of winter. And our bodies are of the Earth. We are implicitly compelled to mirror nature; energetically, January is not a time for action. It is a time to strip down, scale back, lay bare. It is a time for slowness; for restoring our energy; for being with the emptiness of the void and all that it reveals to us about the core of ourselves. Please let this be your reminder that within the socioeconomic system in which we live, choosing rest is radical. It is okay if you are not yet feeling ready to make big changes or go and do. If you are still metabolizing events from last year, or years before that. Shedding, darkness, and gestation are all a natural and essential part of the cycle of life.
The past five years have been unbelievably intense, for each of us personally as well as on a collective scale—and the start of this year is brashly unfolding in kind. My invitation to you this January is to allow yourself to move slowly. To let yourself swim through the dream space. To ask your heart and body what they need, and to give yourself space to witness and honor that. In the stillness, ask your spirit what it feels ready to call in, to heal, to grow towards in this coming year. Listen to the whispers it shares without feeling the need to activate, create, or move towards those desires immediately—trusting that the thinking of it, the seed planting in the depths of your psyche and your energetic field, is initiating the doing in the most subtle yet no less real way.
I am still in the process of creating the calendar for my group workshops for the year. If you’re interested in being held in compassionate space and somatically processing grief, stress, anxiety, heartache, or uncertainty, I am available for one-on-one coaching, astrology, and breathwork sessions. It would be my honor to share space with and guide you.