You want to exercise more, eat better, read more books? Spend more time with your kids, get more sleep and cook more delicious meals at home? Wonderful. Have at it. Me, I'm going a little esoteric, a little vibrational this fine year of our apocalypse. It just seems appropriate. Starting with:
1) Extra moaning
I know people who hold it all in. I know people who never make a peep, who are far too quiet with their expressions of joy and bliss and yum, who think any sort of yelp at the exquisite pains/pleasures of this life is for hippies and porn stars and obnoxious teenagers who won't shut the hell up and turn down that goddamn hippity hoppity musical nonsense.
I feel terribly sad for these people, in no small part because I used to (sort of) be one myself. What a silly way to go through life. What a relief to not have to be that way anymore. I blame Burning Man. I resolve to keep it going, more than ever.
2) Wilder sighing
Heavy sighing is when you think the world is a miserable madhouse of suffering, violence and very little else. Sad sighing is when you think it's just tragic what happened to poor little Kim Kardashian and, oh my goodness, look what's happening to all the puppies and the honeybees and the supercute baby seals.
Wild sighing, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely. More guttural, raw, emerging from just below the genitals and shooting straight up the spinal chord like liquid fire, it pours out the throat like a slow, feral grunt, like you just ate raw unicorn heart from a skewer made of porcelain hummingbird skull you now wish to thank the gods without saying a word. You know?
3) Truer breathing
There's breathing, and there's breathing. There's the everyday, automatic background drudgery, the shallow, mundane inhale/exhale that you take for granted until it finally stops, you fall over in a dusty heap and the gods shrug and go back to their knitting.
And then there's other kind. There's being fully, exquisitely aware of how you're moving life force through your body, through your pores like it was vodka traversing the blood/brain barrier, like cocaine being passed around the Last Supper, like 1,000 naked angels wrapped around your body and they were squeezing you like a divine accordion made of sex and blood and really strange dreams. Choose wisely.
4) Gentler grip
I do it. You do it. Everyone you know does it. We all hold on far too tightly to the things we love, the things we hate, the personal stories we're so desperately convinced of, because if you let go of them, well, what's left?
Who are you, really, without that car, spouse, haircut, job title, attitude, sneer, Facebook status, enemy, body issue, income level, family trauma, abusive relationship, broken heart, need for attention? Who are you when you soften the mad grip and realize the nature of consciousness is an ever fluxive cycle of expansion and contraction, over and over again, forever? Hint: it's not what you think. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that terrifying?
5) Deeper penetration
Penetration into what, you might ask, shifting hungrily in your chair? Penetration into the meaning. Into the soft and beckoning darkness. Past the surface of things, through the glittery BS of the popular culture, deep into to the engines and the forces that make it all go.
Penetration into the source. What is the source? Consciousness. What is consciousness? You're soaking in it, right now. How do you know? Close your eyes for a moment, sit very still, and try to imagine God and the Devil are sitting around a raging campfire making s'mores, and your heart is the marshmallow. There.
6) Drink the awe
It's a brutally fast-paced, Facebooked, hypertext-drunk world, my loves, and it's just ridiculously easy to take it all for granted, to sit there and type your message into your glorious little device and attach a video and send it halfway round the world as you sip your coffee that came from 8,000 miles away and think nothing of it all, when in fact there are roughly 1,008 astonishing miracles banging around your life right this second if you just were able to realize their wobbly gifts. What a thing.
7) Invert the melancholy
Yes, I know, you're all jaded and wary and sick of it all. The world is corrupt, everyone's out to screw over everyone else, men are tactless pigs and women are manipulative gold-diggers and it's all enough to cast a permanent pall over everything.
Whatever. Choose that if you want to. It's certainly easy. It's also exceedingly lazy. For 2012, maybe choose to take that feeling and flip it over like it was one of those cute old novelty pens with the naked women on it, as you watch the black bathing suit slide down and reveal the naked truth of the silliness of it all. Then write me a note.
8) Up the vibration
Have you heard? Everything has a pulse. Everything has a flicker and tremor of existence, from rock to ocean, dog to docking station, politician to power drill.
Here is your choice for 2012: You can pump, kick and feed into that pulse, join forces with it to help yourself, your loved ones, the whole of the ruined and gorgeous world leap to the higher realms of consciousness, or you can remain sour and small, refusing to celebrate anything at all. You can vibrate high and helpful, or you can vibrate low and pessimistic. What's it going to be?
9) Down with zippers
On one hand, it's a hyper-pornified, revoltingly explicit, over-sexualized culture with far too easy access to smut of such low and inelegant quality it makes my classic, porn-loving heart sad.
On the other, a trembling horde of puritanical GOP and Tea Party dinkbuttons who don't know the business end of a vibrator (much less a clitoris) would like you to please return to the sexually ignorant closet of roughly 1951 and slam the door tight.
Somewhere in between, a call for a refreshingly filthy and delicious, respectful and educated, fearless and open-throated sexual awareness that is neither that, nor that. I'm working on it, eagerly, every single day. Help me?
10) Occupy heart space
Wait, so I'm not the only one to make a cheesy pun on 2011's favorite protest acronym? To flip it around and make it into some sort of personal self-help mantra? Oh well.
OWS was about taking up residence in the corridors of power and making joyful, egalitarian noise. OHS is about taking up residence in your own power center, feeling around in the box of your own bulls--t and shoving out the demons of bitterness and fear, and replacing them with something resembling trust and bliss. I have no idea if I can do it. But what the hell else is worth trying?
11) Appreciate appreciation
Everyone loves something. Gratitude abounds. I hereby resolve to wallow and soak in the sheer joy that others pump out toward the things they love and celebrate, even if it's something I find ridiculous or annoying or WTF. Unless it's destructive or hurtful, ignorant or violent, I hereby resolve to be more grateful for the whatever the hell you're grateful for. Even cats.
12) Ecstatic stillness
Do you know why many of the wisdom masters and wizened gurus of the world are always laughing? Why their eyes sparkle and they seem to beam out pure love and joy, when they often have almost nothing in terms of worldly possessions, fame or wealth?
It's because they know the secret. They know when you are fully dialed in to the moment, when you are awake and alive to your body and your life, when all senses are alive and the light illuminates everything to the point of absolute bursting, well, there's nothing else to want.
It's the sheer ecstasy of existence itself, blood pouring through, heart aflutter, eyes luminous, body pulsing, air like the finest wine, god in every breath. For 2012, far more of that, please. Join me?
