Meeting 2025 with power, strength and joy

Many people in my life don’t have optimism for 2025. Instead, they see a darkness looming. I feel like this often too. The social media provocateurs on “both sides” are dedicated not to describing reality or helping you understand the world, but only to stimulating your vitriol. That is the business model. I’ve had a 2024 full of that, and I want to be free of it in 2025.

I also want my life to be about much more than constant dread and outrage and finding distractions from both. I also want to help, in my tiny way, to participate in building a better world, a more loving world. I refuse to fall into the emotional trap set for me by the influencers, the talking heads, the pundits, the screamers. All of them are intent on drawing me down into their small universe, and I’m staking a 2025 claim: I freakin’ refuse to live in someone else’s small universe. 

For me, 2025 is about two core strategies: 1) protecting myself from being devoured by the purveyors of the small universe, and 2) calling in expanding powers, life force, the binding power of love-mystery. 

Here are my strategies for thriving in 2025

• A daily spiritual practice. A spiritual practice has one basic goal: to replace the power that we lose as the world drains us. There are uncountable practices, but I believe the core is doing the practice in the morning before the whirlwind of the day begins. Dedicate time for intimacy between you and creation. 

• Refuse to get lodged in outrage. Outrage is a useful splash of energy to kick open the door to justice. But it’s a terrible bathtub to soak in all day. Outrage is also a dopamine blast, and that’s why once we get lodged in it, we need more and more. There are two movements out of outrage. First, the (not easy) practice of acceptance. Acceptance is a savvy spiritual practice. It is not “giving up,” withdrawal, or denial.  Acceptance is seeing reality for what it is, without succumbing to vitriol. Check out Pema Chodron or Tara Brach for help in this.

• Pick who you want to help and focus your energies there. 

• Explore tonglen meditation (a Buddhist technique). See here . Or here.  

• Commit to taking in live arts made by, presented by, and attended by, live humans. Especially try unfamiliar art forms. This opens your curiosity which is core attribute of the creator spirit. 

• Rather than texting that friend, meet them. 

• Put strict limits on your social media intake. What you eat, you become. If there is evil in the world, its name is algorithm. Decide not to add that comment that echoes the outrage. Decide not to post that new outrage. Refuse to play the game called “add to the woe.” 

• Stop multi-tasking and pay attention to one thing. This is the critical skill of “concentration” taught by shamans and Buddhist masters, among others. This skill imbues you with the defense against distraction, and distraction is a tool used by the small-universe purveyors to keep you confused and powerless. 

• Sing. Sing praise and blessing to the trees, the wind, the birds, the earth, the sun, the moon. You don’t need words, and you don’t need to sound good. You only need to open your love and give it voice. If that love-singing is lubricated by tears, congratulations. 

• Make art, especially shitty art. Unhitch yourself from any desire to make it appealing, or fine, or pleasing, or valuable to the world. Focus on using it to open the feelings you are afraid to open. 

• Cook meals for yourself and others. If you think you’re a bad cook, just use salt and garlic powder on everything. 

• Read poetry out loud, and sloooow. Speak it three times more slowly than you want to. Repeat some of the lines over and over.

• Memorize short spiritual poems. If poetry is new to you, a good place to start is Rumi, and here is a very good book . Leave the phone out of the bathroom, print out a poem in 20 point bold Helvetica, and tape it on the wall cross from the toilet. This gives you focused time each day to memorize. (Poetry also s great for the bowels becasue it slows you down.)

• Of course, spend much more time outside, especially in open spaces or green spaces. Bless the earth and thank her for giving you the opportunity to be in a body. Bless all the other bodies you see around you. 

• Invite some people to a game night at your house or a suitable public space.

• Enter into the Buddhist perspective that you have already lived billions, yes billions, of lifetimes, and that means that every person you meet or see has been your mother in another lifetime. 

• Remember that you’re going to die someday, and the great gift is that you don’t know when. You may die before you reach the end of this sentence. Or maybe next week, or in 40 years. What a gift, this uncertainty! Meditating on this reality helps to focus your decisions. 

• Before drinking water, bless it. 

• Bless your partner regularly, and your children, and your friends, and, silently, strangers, and those who you despise. To bless means to ask for expansion and intimacy with creation. (Don’t send “healing” to people without their express permission. In blessing we ask Spirit to do the work.) Be careful of becoming spiritually arrogant. Blessing doesn’t make you holy or superior, it just helps glue life together. 

• Remember that the purveyors of the small universe want you to feel chaotic, depressed, and powerless, and when they do, they win. Be a rebel: allow yourself to feel joy. (Harder than it seems. Ask yourself what real joy is to you, and how you tell the difference between joy and distraction.) 

• Be kind to strangers. When they return kindness, add it into your “the world is good” list. When they are unkind, open your heart and pray that love comes to them. 

• Place your attention on “My Divine Yes.” In the biblical tradition of the prophets, there is what’s called the “divine no,” and “the divine yes.” The divine yes is what glues life together. The divine no is what tears it apart. What is the highest, most noble human attribute – the core gift from Spirit that you believe is the most fundamental to promoting life? Inside that is your divine yes. We all emerge from the wavy sea of pre-creation. The deep current of that great sea is the ungraspable energy of “wanting to become” – what the philosopher Spinoza called conatus (effort or endeavor) and what the Celtic shamans call yearning. I name that core yearning: love, the love of life for life itself. It is this love that coaxes us into existence, into form, that binds all things together, and that bestows upon you that not-quite-touchable yearning you feel in your depths. All politics, culture wars, economies, empires, even planets and galaxies will pass away, but the glue of life, the yearning of life for life itself, persists through it all. Find your divine yes, and work it, bring it into the world somehow. 

May you be blessed by the mother of life

May you remember that she is always here to cleanse you and call new life into you 

May you remember that darkness doesn’t last 

And that love is stronger than fear 

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

And to others. 

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where

there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.

May you be uplifted, rekindled, brightened, and warmed by Love in the coming year.