Where Does Your Water Go?
By Rebecca Patterson, AMFT
As we move into 2022, I don’t know about you, but this new year both feels incredibly welcome and like a shock to the system that time has moved so fast. With Covid still a part of our lives as we enter yet another year, the idea of making resolutions or setting expectations feels especially out of place.
In a way, I feel like Covid has forced the removal of the rose colored glasses that would especially appear right around New Years. If I take a piece from what I know about relationships, courtesy of Dr. Alexandra Solomon, the removal of the idealizing rose colored glasses is an important milestone in any dynamic as we need to enter a space of seeing something honestly and then still decide to choose it. While we may miss the rose colored lens of our pre-covid lives and holidays, here we are, and now we must choose what we are going to do instead to mark the turning of the calendar.
For me, this question of what am I choosing as I enter a new year led me to a guided meditation on abundance (aka recognizing and welcoming fullness in our lives). As I listened to the guided meditation of Chani Nicholas, she asked that we visualize an open field and within it to see basins collecting the light rain that is falling calmly around you. She asked that you visualize the basins filling to the top, gathering nourishing water for you to keep. As she ended the meditation, she asked that you reflect on how you can give some of the water to those you care for and then keep some just for yourself.
In this, I find a non-rose tinted message of how to enter 2022 that encourages choosing something that is very much based in reality. There has been a dryness to the last two years, and welcoming the waters of change and abundance feels so good even if there is an uncertainty of what that means or what that looks like. In a time when we are still fighting a pandemic and our culture still feels incredibly upside down at times, to survive we must both pour into others and gather and protect reserves just for ourselves. If we do not nourish and quench the thirst of our own needs and wounds, we have little to genuinely offer others. As I start this year, I am thinking of ways I want to continue to show love to those around me while also knowing I must choose to also make space for how I show love for myself.