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Wintertime Goals

Last year, my piece about wintertime goals was focused primarily on sports- and health-related objectives while keeping my focus on the need to stay in touch with the energy of the season. I aimed to stay healthy and uninjured. I pledged to ski with less stress and more flow.

With respect to my sports endeavors, I’ll declare similar goals this year. Staying healthy and uninjured, and the consciousness of the body’s needs that that requires, is a good goal. I struggled enough with injury in 2016, particularly that torn hamstring back in May, that I don’t want to suffer similar in 2017.

If you’ve been following TTW since the election, you’ve seen that our focus has expanded since then. The depth of anguish over the past two months has convinced us we need to actively connect our practices to the bigger picture in our lives. With that in mind, what might my goals look like for winter of 2017?

As I write this in mid-December, I haven’t yet taught a lesson this season. By the time it’s published I will have taught many. My students tend to be from all over the country. If last season is any indication, politics will not be spoken of much during our chairlift conversations, but I will probably get some idea that what people are going through is different from last year.

I want to be able to hold this space for my students. I want to find a way to broach or at least acknowledge that things are pretty challenging in our world right now. That the election seems to have thrown a lot of people off, irrespective of their particular political bent. I want to learn to speak more comfortably about the energetic aspects of what’s going on, and to tune people in to ways of dealing with it. I’ll be standing on a mountain as I do so, so I’ve got a pretty solid chunk of ground to teach grounding.

I also want to explore how to make things easier. A goal needs to be measurable if you want it to be an effective guide to behavior, and right now I don’t know how you measure *easier*. When I experience it, I certainly know it. In skiing, in snowboarding, in tennis and golf and soccer (when the weather rolls back around to allow those activities), I want to do what I do *easier* than I have done.

An exploration of cultivating ease will be something I will practice, and something I will to bring to my students this winter. People need it. We’re pretty addicted in our culture to making things hard. And it’s not serving us.

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