January: A Hush Holds
This year opens with a hush. A moment of silence. A secret kept. Paying our respects to the year that’s passed and all it has given and taken. This is a moment to watch and take stock. The year 2020 is behind us—and, it is still very much inside of us. Grief and fear, rage and confusion, isolation, restlessness, radical loving, and complicated beauty. This is, and continues to be, a lot to hold. Silence can be restorative after lots of stimulation, but it can also signal a frozen, protective state, guarding our nervous systems from overwhelm.
It’s hard work to hold so much feeling and uncertainty, and our work is far from over. This month is the beginning of a riddle of a year, full of paradoxes and questions with no easy answers. Here are some of our favorite questions to start off the year: What if relaxation is what we need to build strength? What if slowing down is how we cross greater distances? What if opening our eyes to what is really happening around us is the only way to dream up better worlds?
Working with this spell
Working with this spell, we sit in stillness to quiet our winter-mind and consider—what are we working so hard to hold? What compels us to work so hard? Some of what we hold is too important to drop, whereas some of it was never ours to hold in the first place. As we choose what work we are willing to do this year, can we also reorient our deepest alignment from holding to being held?
To work with this spell, we pay close attention to what this transition feels like - here is the tension in my body from holding; and here is the feeling of support as I allow my body, and all it holds, to be held.
Meditation
To begin this meditation, please find a quiet and comfortable place to rest. Let your eyes gently scan your surroundings or have them close. Open your ears and drink in the ambient sounds around you. As you begin to pay attention to your breath, notice how your exhales move through your body. With each breath out, try to melt your muscles into the earth, the floor, your chair, or whatever surface is holding you. Inhales extend into your tissue, exhales carry the tension away and down…
Let yourself do this for many rounds of breath, each time releasing new places of tension, or re-releasing places that are so used to holding on they don’t stay relaxed for long--like your jaw, your shoulders, your belly, pelvis, or legs. Track the patterns, and please be kind to yourself. If it feels natural--or if you want to try it--open your throat and let your exhales make some sound… loud sighs, moans, growls, or purrs.
If you’d like to do more, find an area or muscle group that is very good at holding, a place in your body that is always doing at least a little bit of work. Sit with this place and, as you breathe with it, get to know it better. Whatever that means to you -- you can ask it questions, you can feed it gratitude and praise, perhaps find out a little more about what it’s holding, and if it needs any help.
To close, imagine the time you’ve invested in this practice wrapped around you like a hand-woven blanket. Try to feel the way the earth is holding you, more and more as you let yourself relax. Take as long as you’d like to know this feeling of being held.
This Month
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