Category Archives: Mindfulness

Mindfulness

Winter Solstice & the Dance of Duality

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The sun stands still.  And then it reverses.

The stillness happens at 2:47p MT on the day this post is published. I sit at my desk on the morning of darkest day of the year, wanting to root down, to burrow into the dark and shield myself from the cold, to rest and see what may germinate when light returns.

winter solstice, summer solstice

Each summer and winter solstice, I think back to a class I took while I lived in Japan. I filled my weekends that year dabbling in shiatsu, cooking, Japanese language, an obscure martial art that I can’t recall now, and macrobiotics.

I’ve remembered the most about the macrobiotics class. As the sensei introduced us to he way of life (the Tao), he explained a few fundamentals. The one that goes with solstice, in my mind, was this:

When something reaches its zenith, it begins to become its opposite.

This, to me, is profound. We reach the peak of summer, and we then head toward winter. Once the darkest part of the night passes, day advances.

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Mindfulness

Competing Forces: Centripetal In Here and Centrifugal Out There

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There are two competing forces exerting pressure on me these days. Maybe you feel them, too.

Centripetal: Inward Toward Unity

Here’s a list of things in my life that tell me it’s possible — desirable! — to bring opposites together, to transcend beyond the duality of opposites.

competing forces in 2020
  • Yoga, which means the yoking of opposites. Such as inhale/exhale, inner/outer, masculine/feminine, upper/lower, right/left, front/back, root/rise, effort/ease, contraction/expansion.
    • I want to be both strong AND flexible, not one at the expense of the other.
  • DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is a “philosophical dialectical process of hypothesis and antithesis, followed by synthesis.” Through metacognition (mindfulness), I expand my thinking/believing/feeling to cover both poles, both opposites. Being able to do so can make me feel more whole.
    • I aim to love all parts of me, including the ugly ones I try to hide even from myself.
  • Open-hearted adoption. Over and over again I see that a BothAnd view serves all parties better than an Either/Or view, which splits the baby. The BothAnd concept goes not only for “real” parents, but also for the range of emotions anyone in an adoption has about adoption.
    • When I honor my children’s connections to their original family, it adds to my children without taking away from me. Also, I acknowledge that open-hearted adoption is really hard at times — as well as rewarding.
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