How Not What : A Winter Taste of Embodied Peace
“WHEN YOU NEED AN ANSWER, LOOK OVER YOUR LEFT SHOULDER AND ASK YOUR DEATH.” CARLOS CASTENADA
November 10 2022
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I write this as daylight turns to dusk on All Hallow’s Eve. From here forward, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere cascade through an ever-dizzying spin of holidays, culminating in New Year’s Eve. While each holiday brings its own distinct significance and flavors, together these celebrations create a collective ceremony of farewell to the Gregorian year. For many, it is a raucous procession to the end filled with revelry. For many, it is a sustained tumult of anxiety and grief. For most, it is intensely both, and then some.
Winter is a season of extremes, with sharp contrast between our outer and inner worlds. Outside, the night becomes darker longer while inside our homes get ornamented in light. Leaves and branches wither while party tables pile higher and higher with food. Cold air sharpens the privilege of shelter and the hardship of the un-housed. Our inner life may also feel quite stark in its contrast to our outer familial or cultural environment. As we barrel toward the last day of the year, our hearts undergo epic emotional undulations. The disparity between expectations and our perceived reality can bring up worry and self-criticism. No matter how festive our parties, our spirits often feel less connected from others during winter, as we turn inward from the cocktail chatter to the whispers within. We find ourselves in deeper conversation with nostalgia and longing than any friend or family member.
If we imagine the seasons as a life cycle, then winter is nature’s cyclical dying process. Yes, rebirth will come in spring, but for now we must do the letting go. In this sense, perhaps our angst during the lead up to New Year’s is in exact alignment with the phase of the year. Psychically and spiritually, we are confronting the “end”—whether this is the end of the calendar year, or the larger reality that we too, as finite beings, will end. With this inevitability looming, our sense of urgency about all we hoped to accomplish swells, as does our anxiety.
The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson famously identified that with each stage of life, we progress through a distinct set of emotional tasks. At the last stage of our lives, Erikson says, our primary occupation should be private reflection about our past and sense of personal meaning. Similarly, in the Upanishads, Hindu sacred text describes this final stage of life as that of the “sannyasa”, or the renunciate. The householder becomes the sannyasa when he disengages from the material world to devote himself to the transcendence of his soul. Across time and tradition, the sages suggest that in the “winter” of our lives, we are meant to grapple with impermanence and “ask our death” for answers.
In this spirit, the first “recipe” I offer you at the dawn of holiday season is a nonmaterial one—it is a “how” not a “what”. In the whirlwind of holiday consumerism and winter’s existential feels, the supper table presents us with an occasion to choose meaning over materialism. Before we commence our equally important rituals of baking, roasting and glazing, can we acknowledge our deeper longings, aches and ecstasies? With each meal of winter, we move closer to the “end”, so how might we practice letting go?
• • • • •
FIVE S’s TO SOOTHE THE SPIRIT
AT EVERY WINTER MEAL.
SLOW As you sit down to eat, simply pause.
SENSE Feel your whole body in space. Perceive the beat of your heart. Your breath in your abdomen. The saliva in your mouth. The aroma of the food before you. Inhale and exhale with an audible sigh. Vocal sighing helps move nervous system into a parasympathetic or “rest and digest” state.
SEE INTO THE EYES OF YOUR NEIGHBOR. Eye contact fosters connection and enters us into a nonverbal emotional exchange. When we stare into each other’s eyes, our limbic brains perceive and mirror one another’s state. We feel ourselves feeling felt!
SURRENDUR TO ALL THAT YOU HAVE NOTICED. SURRENDUR ANY EFFORT TO CHANGE IT.
Acceptance simply means allowing things to be as they are. Can you accept and surrender to exactly how you feel in this moment? The sweetness, the bitterness, the impermanence. Could we even savor it? Could we even celebrate it?
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