Yes there is hope for 2023

Dear Friends,

I hope your holiday has been decent so far and I especially hope that you have had or will have some down time to rest and restore before the new year.

Starting a new year feels to me like a moment of hope. Things can be different! Even if we have struggled and suffered, felt alone, depressed, or like we have messed things up, we can remember that a new year is right around the corner.

As mindfulness practitioners, we do try to live in the moment as it is, but we don’t need to get stuck in thinking that things will always be this difficult.

One of my Buddhist teachers, Roshi Joan Halifax writes that “Wise hope requires that we open ourselves to what we do not know, what we cannot know; that we open ourselves to being surprised, perpetually surprised.”

My friend the dharma teacher and author, Valerie Brown writes about hope in her new book Hope Leans Forward: Braving your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace: “It’s in our capacity to see things as they are and to believe that our actions matter even if we don’t know, can’t know the outcome. We are guided by what we care about, what matters most to us, and what we can do to support healing with ourselves and in our beautiful and broken world.”

As we move into 2023, here are some questions for you to reflect upon: