As we start a new year, we are reminded frequently that we need to wake up and actively look to the 525,600 minutes ahead of us. We are told to shore up our physical immune system using food, exercise, and resolute strategies. The success of those strategies, however, can depend on how we first shore up our emotional and spiritual immune systems.

Find Time to Go Within

That can be a hefty task, especially if wrapping up the year was more difficult or fatiguing than we anticipated. The passing of a holiday season can leave a trail of emotions that may cover the gamut from joy to despondence, leading to what Mark Nepo calls bittersweet. 

                    Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
                    This is how the heart makes a duet of
                    wonder and grief.
                                                                   — Mark Nepo

Life’s mixture of pain and pleasure can cause us to reflect with some melancholy about endings. “One of the great truths in this life is that if we know love, we will know loss,” says Mark. “The more we love, the more the loss will hurt. Yet, if we don’t love, what’s the point in being here?”

Master Mingtong Gu also speaks of this experience as part of our wholeness, which we note when we turn inward.

Perhaps it’s a good thing to let ourselves be sad, says Sylvia Boorstein. "Perhaps these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what perhaps can only be seen in the dark."

Although Boorstein is clear that meditation isn’t a cure-all, especially for depression, she suggests that mindfulness supports the development of insight. 

Embracing solitude, whether it arrives by choice or circumstance, can unlock the process of coming home to our deepest self. In Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the late Catholic priest and scholar John O'Donohue calls solitude "one of the most precious things in the human spirit."

“It is different from loneliness," he says. "When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging."

Creating time for contemplation can also lead to increased resilience—something many of us need in order to rise to the demands of everyday life. Writers Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan warn against the downside of continuously demanding more of ourselves and reframe what it means to be resilient to include time and space to recover from any demanding activity.

“If you really want to build resilience, you can start by strategically stopping. Give yourself the resources to be tough by creating internal and external recovery periods,” they write.

Define Your "Non-Negotiables"

Activist and yoga teacher Seane Corn leans on a set of what she calls her “non-negotiables”—the things she needs in order to cultivate and retain a sense of presence and connection during challenging times. Yoga, meditation, sleep, prayer, nourishing food, and play help her remain grounded during her political activism and defray the tension and anxiety that can result from conflict and crises.

“Yoga allows us to discharge and communicate energy and be where we need to be with less reactivity,” she says. “It helps us connect to our vulnerability, which will always lead toward surrender, not shut down."

In an interview with Sounds True, yoga teacher and activist Beryl Bender says she has a tremendous amount of faith in her yoga practices because she’s seen them bear fruits. 

Yoga teacher Colleen Saidman also offers a practice to help build the stability, strength, and courage that enable us to stand on our own two feet. Her approach is to find confidence in the body’s beauty and grace and arrive at a love of self through discipline, diligence, and dedication. “These are all keys to becoming a well-adjusted woman in this crazy world. I aspire for every one of us to be real, to look in the mirror and say, 'You are the bomb.'" 

Working Toward an Enduring Good

Words of wisdom from such teachers such as Mark Nepo, Master Mingtong Gu, Pema Chodron, Beryl Bender, Colleen Saidman, and others can help keep us on our path when overwhelm, confusion, or our own habitual thinking threatens to take over. In her essay, "We Were Made for These Times," Clarissa Pinkola Estes offers her perspective on how to rise to circumstances that may feel outside of our control. “My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times,” she writes, and goes on to laud the human spirit and the mystery inherent in the role we each play.

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely,” she says.

Whether we're working to repair a corner of the world or going within to root to ourselves, our well-being rests on some combination of tending to our bodies, minds, and spirits. 

Author and activist Rev. angel Kyodo williams Roshi offers an exercise to remind us and root us in what matters most. 

“The most important thing is to allow our center of gravity to drop down out of our heads right into our bellies," she says, "and to feel and to allow what matters to us right at our core. Not up in our head, not in some vague sense somewhere out there, but to really allow what matters to us to be held in the core of our belly… Whenever we forget why we are here, whenever we are lost, we come back to what moves us, again and again and again.”