What’s the “weather pattern” inside me right now? How does it change over the course of the day?

Open your journal for this course by laying out all that’s happened to you in this time, all you’re carrying still. Add to it across the week. Take this in. Honor it.

The invitation here is not to deny the enormity of what we’re struggling with in large ways and small. Some things hurt so much that we can’t see beyond them. That is real and true, and that needs grieving and mourning and lamentation and time. The invitation here is to see and name and honor what you’ve been living through, what you are living through still, and to use some simple practices and techniques to come into a different relationship with what is.

It’s a strange and mysterious spiritual truth that, when we take in what is hard, take in the reality in all its complexity, it actually helps us be more present to that hardness — be more present to ourselves, generously and gently. It helps us make that move that Sharon talked about: holding the dark and the light of life together, at once. Bringing them into some kind of relationship with each other. This is a move not just toward becoming mindful, but becoming whole — with all the complexity of ourselves — as we meet a world that longs for wholeness even as it shows pain and fear through fracture.

What shifts when I’m able to use my senses to intercept safety and pleasantness?

In the course of this week, try out the different short exercises and strategies Dr. Runyan leads us through. Experience what works for you, and what that makes possible. Journal about it.

It’s so helpful to remember that our bodies are doing their best to take care of us and that there’s brilliance in them, there’s intelligence in that, even if it’s out of control.

The invitation on the flipside of that knowledge is taking in that we have more power than we realize to actively reorient that intelligence and tap into those same powers. Through the senses, the body, we can incline the mind.

We can look at our political life, at our societal fracture, and also see that as a manifestation of what’s happened in our nervous systems all around.

This new way of seeing engenders compassion in every direction.

What is joy for me? (Don’t overlook what is “common.”)

Seize opportunities in the course of your day to notice, and protect, the common, particular joys that sustain you — to say, “Oh, there it is.” And journal about what happens.

It’s hard not to be inspired by Drew Lanham. It seems he’s in such a constant state of discovery, no matter how much he knows and learns. He so fully enters that backyard world of birds that gives him joy — the sound of it, the intricacy of it.

You might treat this session as an invitation to take in the natural world in the days to come — to see it very actively as a contemplative space, and being present to it as a life-giving practice.

But the underlying invitation here is to ponder what that joy is for you that the world cannot touch, cannot take away. Contemplate that and dwell with it and work with that awareness. Treasure it. Turn it into a practice that you protect and “hoard” as Drew says — finding those moments daily. And look for those moments in what is common, examining how seeing them as “common” may diminish their deep, abiding significance and nourishment.

What memories and emotions does this metaphor of “wintering” surface in me?

In your journaling, take “wintering” as a lens for looking back at that list of everything that’s happened to you this year.

The invitation here is in some sense cosmic, and it is cellular: to set our sense of ourselves in a more spacious understanding of time, which is, in fact, the true nature of time; in a more spacious understanding of vitality — the true nature of vitality, the way the world actually works. Which is always seasonal and cyclical. Our world of work and industry and organization is structured in a clockwork way; but that’s not how time works, and it’s not how change happens.

Katherine’s statement that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life also invites us back, with relief, to the ground of reality — that reality that we are here to befriend. To understand unhappiness as a place, a state of being along the spectrum of vitality, helps.

In this world we inhabit now, there are so many people unable to stop, to rest, recover — to winter. And this may be about the work they do or the fact that they are parents or the matter of survival. Depression, which is something distinct from this simple thing in life called unhappiness, is also a very dangerous place in our world.

So we hold all of that together in awareness alongside this wisdom teaching, and it becomes all the more an invitation to be honest, to create space for ourselves to be honest, for others to be honest with us about their lives. In another place, Katherine May writes that “whenever you start talking to people about your own winterings, they start telling you about theirs. And you realize what huge community there could be, if we talked about this in a different way.”

Does it come naturally, for me, to offer kindness to myself?

Summon this mantra, as often as necessary: “Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then, we’ll figure out what to do.” Journal about what that works in you, and how happily — or awkwardly — it lands.

What we have in Sylvia Boorstein is someone who has actively shaped her presence in the world across her lifetime, welcoming in her frailties and glitches, toward creating a wise and graceful whole. And there is a discipline of kindness tucked inside how she finds it in herself to be able to engage contemplative tradition in the first place, with the people she’s closest to in her life and with strangers, with the people she bumps up against all day long — just as a human loose in the world.

We walk around in the most simple, ordinary of circumstances with the power to break someone else’s day, or to make someone else’s day with kindness. And, like all spiritual wisdom, we must offer that kindness to ourselves, too, if we truly, innately, and in a fully embodied way can offer it to others. This can become the way we are in the world, even if everything in our formation or what’s happening to us would suggest that we would be different.

So the invitation here is to practice kindness — kindness as a spiritual way of being, especially when the most natural move would be something different. We can begin flexing a muscle of stopping, of “recalculating.” And as you work on this, at all times let this intention of kindness to others root in a deep practice of kindness toward yourself. That’s the only way this can become truly instinctive and defining of you, and for everyone around you.

What is prayer? Answer the question through the story of your life.

As you move through this week, and in your journaling, say “hello” to the day, to experiences, to memories, to grief, to hope, in a spirit of curiosity and tenderness and honesty.

The invitation here is to explore the contemplative practice that is prayer, this deep spiritual and human impulse and ritual. Maybe for you this is a familiar, lifelong practice. Even if it is, give yourself a time of discovery. And as a beginning, a starting point, ponder in your journal: answer the question of what prayer is through the story of your life. What is the mother tongue and the spiritual homeland of prayer as you know it, as you’ve experienced it, if it is part of your experience, part of your culture that formed you?

Part of the impulse to pray often has to do with need, and is sometimes very present in moments of crisis, urgency, and immediacy. This is honored in prayer in a distinctive way. And the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human.

This is also about awakening spiritual imagination. Not making things up, but really cultivating this intellectual, intuitive, creative, ritual orientation towards the formation in ourselves of courage and generosity and love, this inner/outer move that is always interwoven in spiritual life that is meaningful and worth pursuing.