Now Is the Time

“Now is the time to know that all you do is sacred.” ~Hafiz

Remember that moment on December 21st, 2012, when you wondered if just maybe the Mayans were right and the tides would suddenly rise to destroy the arrogant human race? And then nothing happened?

I remember how exciting it was to think about the possibility of a new world—one that marked an energetic shift, an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional awakening that was not only personal, but global. I imagined us all waking up, leaving behind the old snake skins of our pasts and becoming the new kinds of humans that could make a better world. As it turns out, 2013 has its own secrets.

The same world views that intuited an energetic shift in 2012 are predicting action for 2013. The Chinese Year of the Water Snake indicates movement, wisdom, vision, and change. With all this newness brewing, it’s as if we’ve lifted our gazes from our navels, opened our eyes, and seen what we are really doing in the world. We are looking around and thinking, “What am I doing here? What is this house I am living in? All this furniture needs to go!”

Whatever decisions we thought about making in 2012 are coming into action now, and we are making a mess of everything. We don’t know entirely what we are doing, we know what we were doing before is no longer working.

In Tantric philosophy, Yes and No are actions that create ripple effects behind them. Every time you say Yes, a No is implied: when I say Yes to marrying you, for example, I’ve just said No to everyone else in the universe I could have married instead. If I say No to teaching a class every Thursday night, I’ve created a ripple of possible Yeses for all the other things I could be doing that night of the week. Every big and small Yes and No is an opportunity for creating your own world.

Most of the time, when we make decisions, we do it out of habit. This is totally reasonable—we can’t sit around anxiously overanalyzing which brand of cereal we should get. It’s so easy to get stuck in a cycle, living our lives on repeat, making the same decisions every day. But it can be incredibly empowering to remember that every Yes and No has the power to change things on small, and possibly very large, scales.

When we practice our yoga, whether it’s asana or meditation or good ol’ quiet contemplation, we can practice mindfulness about the decisions we have made up until this point. We can also choose to step out of the routine of habit-based decisions we make every day and create a brand new Yes or No effect. As Spring makes its slow journey into our lives, we can look at where we’ve been and where we could be going. Now that we can see what was previously invisible, we can take action and do something new and interesting, and perhaps even scary. I believe in us. After all, now is the time.