Ring in the New Year – Fully!

2 min –

The peal of church bells or the successive reverberations of a great temple bell: such are the traditional rings that have announced the New Year for countless generations. And why a bell? Because we figured out a long time ago that you could turn a little signal into a big one – worthy of heralding a big event – by shaping metal into a circle and striking it. Early on, we didn’t know the science, but we do now: energy travels in waves and, when you fashion a container where the waves can add up, you get an amplifying form of resonance. Yet the ring is destroyed if the bell develops even the tiniest crack and is muffled by anything stuffed into it.

These same principles apply to you and me. Resonance is a universal principle underlying how energy becomes matter and how all energy and matter change form. We don’t normally think of our mind and body as a resonating instrument, and yet it most assuredly is. An obvious example of our resonance is our voice. Our vocal chords are but two tiny little slips of spaghetti, no more than an inch long, whose vibrations are amplified by the soundbox of our body. Make your body tight and you’ll hear tension in your voice. Relax your body and smile, and your voice will sound different, more cheerful.

Sound and voice are but one narrow range of energies with which we resonate. All of our senses operate similarly, creating patterns in our nervous system that inform everything, from the pace of our walk to the coherence of our thoughts. The ring of our bell isn’t just heard in our voice, but in everything we do and every difference we make. But like a bell, we can’t ring fully if we’re stuffed with tension or there are cracks in our system. Given the tension, trauma, illness, suffering and gut punches of life, chances are that’s the kind of body we’re working with. Practices that integrate, tune and tame the mind and body bring us back to our whole, resonant self, so that we can ring our true note. Cultivating and applying such practices to a difference you want to make is the very opportunity available to you in Resonate.

Resonance is a fact of physics, and how you and I resonate right now depends on our present condition. But if we dedicate some present moments to clearing out the stuffing and healing the cracks in our mind-body bell, we’ll be able to ring in the New Year fully, making exactly the difference that is ours to make.