Sometimes we choose our mantras, sometimes they choose us, and sometimes our mantras are thrust upon us! I am in the habit of choosing a mantra for the year ahead. I work on my personal year which starts on my birthday so it is not aligned to the calendar year or even the earth-year which starts (in the north) on the winter solstice.
This year, as is now my wont, I chose my mantra or it chose me, I’m never sure exactly how that bit works, and then I found a piece of jewellery to have it inscribed upon so that I can wear it often.
That’s my way of keeping the mantra alive through the year – because let’s be honest, we forget to be mindful and there are many negative triggers. I like to have at least one positive trigger that is both ‘wordy’ (because I am) and ‘tactile’ (ditto)…so anything small that I can wear or carry with me is good for me. Something I can associate the mantra with, even if its not literally engraved or embroidered upon it.
One of my mantra bracelets is purely beads: tigers eye for courage, quartz for clarity, carnelian for creativity and a few anthracite to dispel the negatives.
The oldest talisman (for want of a better word) is a rainbow bundle of ribbons: red for passion, orange for frivolity, yellow for joy, green for health, blue for freedom, indigo for peace, and violet for…well, I’m never sure…sometimes violet is for love, sometimes it’s for wisdom. Passion-frivolity-joy, health-freedom-peace, wisdom / love. I made that one at the dawn of the century and have carried it around the world with me. It lives pinned to my vision board when I’m home.
That’s one reason that I like to embed my year-mantra into an object, a wearable or portable object: I can return to it in future years. A mantra, I believe, arrives for a reason and its first season may be short or long, but that season will end, as all seasons do. There comes a time when something ‘new’ or newly-slanted will serve us better. Even so, there are times when we need to be reminded of what came before. What we thought we’d learned might start to elude us again. Picking up a past mantra, re-centering it, re-focussing upon it…that too is part of the process.
I quite deliberately seek a new mantra for each new year, simply because I choose to ritualise the idea of a new beginning: not wiping the slate clean and starting over, but a pause, direction-check, re-set, re-start. This checking in with myself and my route over the preceding 12 months and direction for the next 12 has become an important part of how I manage my life. Some themes / aspirations / pathways last a long time, years, decades even. Others burn out very quickly. Change, I have found, when it comes, comes suddenly, abruptly, shockingly. I’m beginning to understand that that is only because we’re not noticing the impetus building (more on that next week). Even so, I find it helpful to spend a little time consciously thinking about what I want from the next year, or what I think the next year wants of me.
I have only recently come to realise that what I am doing in this exercise is asking a question and listening for the answer.
So: I choose my mantra for the year. Or it chooses me.
Then sometimes I find during a year that I seem to have acquired another one, not of my choosing, not offered in answer to my search. Such a one is thrust upon me by something external.
There is a difference here between a mantra that chooses me, and one that is thrust upon me.
The former arrives when I’ve been seeking. It is a response to a question, albeit sometimes a question I may not have been aware of asking. It immediately feels right. There is no question but that it fits.
The latter has a different energy. It barges in. It is often uncomfortable when it first appears, but it won’t go away. I don’t choose to adopt it. I simply find myself repeating it. I find myself acknowledging the necessity of it. And the universe prompts me in reinforcing it by gifting me joy when I live by it.
My chosen mantra for this year (as I have already written) is Return to mountain.
The unchosen one is No promises. No expectations.
It was first used in a very specific context, but it has refused to stay in that box. It echoes through everything that is going on for me right now. There are no promises and I am making none. I am being asked to have no expectations, which is the essence of trust that somehow it will all be ok: no, more than that: that it is all ok, just as it is. Even when just as it is might be hard, uncomfortable, painful. A lot of our pain is because of, or exaggerated by, our want, desire, expectation that it be different. No expectations won’t protect us from any of the horribleness: life can be hard, uncomfortable, painful, but I’m thinking that maybe what it can do, is help it not be any worse than it needs to be. It can remove the final straw and help the camel stay standing.
Expectation is the burden we place on the future, that it will turn out precisely how we want it to. Breaking news: it won’t!
It won’t because our imaginations are flawed and limited. It won’t because not only do we not imagine all of the potential barriers we may have to face, but equally we don’t imagine all the miraculous ways we may have of getting over, under, round or through them.
It won’t because we only have one or two views of the potential magical outcome, when there are thousands of them. There is never only one solution; there is never only one version of a happy ending.
Expectation is only one step away from attachment. Expecting a given outcome produces an attachment to it. The attachment may be positive (on a spectrum from fantasy through hope to need) or it may be negative (anxiety – worry – dread). These are limiting mindsets. They keep us entrenched on a track that might not be the right one. Getting derailed isn’t the only option to staying on track, we can switch the points, we can stop the train entirely, get off and hike off over the fields.
When we are brave enough, bold enough, not matter how scared we are as well, to cut our expectations we face the brutal truth that the future is wide open. It is a freezing frost expanse of possibility. It is a desert of strange creatures and vibrant plants that will bloom in unexpected rain. It is mountain streams and warm blue oceans. It is caverns and canyons and cities and cabins in the woods. It is music and silence. It is…nothing and everything.
Return to mountain remains my chosen mantra for the year. It is all about coming home, returning sanctuary, knowing how and when to spiritually, emotionally, physically retreat into the hermit cave. It is also all about my very literal need to return to the high places and the hope that such a jaunt may be possible this year, to return to wandering out into the wild and getting lost and stretched and challenged.
No promises, no expectations remains, just because it does. It is expressed in an unwritten card that sits on my desk – expressed in the card and in the lack of words within it, words that were nevertheless spoken. It is expressed in an unexpected frost walk, that took me further and muddier than I’ve been for quite a while, alone and cold and awestruck by the beauty of this planet…even when I’m not in the high places that call to me. It is the freedom I get, to be who I am, by granting the future that same freedom to be what it will be. It is the ever-present reminder that there is always another angle from which to look at things, and often shifting the perspective can shift the reality.
The more I think about it, the more I see how closely the two forms of words relate to each other, that maybe the first can only work if I also embrace the second.
