A New Year of Beginnings

Good evening everyone,

Namaste to you all. I hope this this finds you all safe, healthy and grounded.

As we have all been forced this past year to shift our usual in-person work routines to remote-based work routines due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have also been forced to shift our usual routines in maintaining our health and wellness.

While many have succeeded this past year in establishing a seamless transition from the work office to the home office, they have also encountered significant challenges in transitioning from a multi-person physical wellness environment to a single person private wellness environment.

I am one of these people who have encountered several obstacles this past year trying to navigate the loss of human contact and interaction with my “tribes” which include my yoga students, my law students, and my law colleagues at my law firm.

Now, those of you who have followed my blog may think that because I am a trained yoga teacher that I must have been able to navigate the ebbs and flows of the COVID-19 pandemic without any issues. I will tell you that, in fact, it is because of my training and yoga and mindfulness that I have struggled immensely this past year coming to terms with the experience of tremendous loss from the ability to maintain regular physical contact with members of my law, yoga and work communities.

You see, it is the sense of physical connection to my law students, my yoga students and my work colleagues that I have missed the most this past year. The sense of me being able to hold physical space for another person, and vice versa, is something that is central to who I am as a person. This type of human connection cannot be replaced with a Zoom connection. Nor can it be substituted by a conference call.

There is something particularly and exceptionally intangible about the ability of human beings to experience together the beauty of such things as love, hope, joy; and, equally, the sorrow of such things as pain, despair and loss. To be cut off from this type of human connection has felt, at times, as if I am suffocating and unable to breathe.

And yet, in this place of utter despair, I have arrived at a place of acceptance of my circumstance. Rather than continuing to dwell upon that which I cannot control, I am reminded by the wisdom of my yoga teacher who taught me that it is the deepest caverns of the mind that we are most susceptible to our storylines and habitual patterns of thinking.

When the physical things in life are taken from us, we must always remember to operate from a place of equanimity and not be moved to an extreme position on the fulcrum of emotions. This is the difficult lesson I was forced to re-learn this past year.

It is a year that has forced me to move out of a place of loss, fear and despair and instead move toward a place of hope, expansion, resilience and gratitude. To stay balanced on the fulcrum and to aspire to equanimity.

We have all collectively lost so much this past year, it is hard I am sure for some to imagine how much more they could lose as we embark upon the coming year.

Now is the time to flip the script.

In this upcoming year, I have committed myself to consciously return to a place of love, hope and gratitude in my daily life. That instead of defaulting to a place of fear, anger and despair, I will consciously affirm those things for which I am grateful in my life.

It is from this place of conscious gratitude that I will conduct myself as a yoga teacher, as a law teacher, and as a mindful lawyer in the coming year. Although no one can predict when the COVID-19 pandemic will finally end, we cannot and must not dwell upon this. What we can predict with certainty is how we choose to meet the moments of joy, doubt, fear, loss and pain that we will undoubtedly encounter as we continue down the path of our dharma.

I am grateful for my health, for my family, for my friends, for my ability to earn a living, and to be able to live in a free and democratic society.

Now, it is your turn to flip the script. What are you grateful for?

Let our collective gratitude and resilience never be extinguished but instead grow in its reach from the individual, to families, to communities, and to the world.

In closing, may you be blessed with an abundance of love, happiness and hope this day and every day.

Namaste,

Alex