Insights for January 2026

Awakening:

“Does this decision enhance my freedom?” Margaret Gervais

“Keep showing up for your own life.”  Victoria Erickson

“Stop being a sponge and be an oracle.” Carl Jung

“Stand still in the sacred conflagration of inquiry and let it open you to the seat of all wisdom born of spirit. Only Truth will survive; all else will perish.” Adyashanti

“If you are having trouble making a decision, is it ego and or soulful? Which are you feeding?” Margaret Gervais

“For indecision, hold two truths in waiting, and a deeper, third truth will arise.” Author not noted

“I know that you know.” Margaret Gervais

“A part of us always knows what we need to hear and can always tell us where we need to go. The great challenge of life is not to silence that voice with fear or with hope, with indifference or compulsion or the tyranny of should.” Maria Popovick (margialigan)

What is your awakening?

I am awakening to truth

I am awakening to reality

I am awakening to freedom

To peace and harmony

To justice in my soul

To stability in my soul

To my solitude

To my resilience

To my freedom

To strengthening my soul

To heart and soul

To heart

To resilience

To truth

To pain and grief

To fun

To sun

To groundedness

To my role/roles

To me

To justice

To truth

To resilience

To the resilience of others

To agreements

To not agreements

To wrapping it up 

To moving on

To aging

To love

To me

Peace and harmony

Alignment

Saying no

Not going

Not being

Separation

Rest

Being

Silence

“What are you awakening to?” Margaret Gervais

“Can you hold possibilities in an open and fluid, don’t-know mind?” Margaret Gervais

“The battle is between confusion and wisdom.” Judy Lief

“Inquiry/investigation is a potent doorway into insight.” Margaret Gervais

“Wisdom is always an option - but we generally choose confusion.” Judy Lief

“Everything is as it is.” Margaret Gervais

“Opt out of delusion; tune into truth.” Elissa Altman

Change is just change.” Margaret Gervais

“Just do. Just be.” Margaret Gervais

“I want to live with intention and intuition as my guides. I want to be aware, open, evolved, true, and free.” Margaret Gervais

“We learn that it's not by clinging to security that we awaken but by resting in uncertainty. It’s from an honest connection to change and uncertainty that true strength takes root. You can begin to connect with bardo [what we experience in the period between death and rebirth] experience in ordinary life by paying attention to the many simple changes that take place all the time. You can pay greater attention to daily transitions between now and then, this and that.” Judy Lief

“Generally, my intentions are pure. It is my intention that my intentions be pure.” Margaret Gervais 

“When you come back to your true nature, which is the nothingness, and you stop looking at the nothingness from your mind, you realize you are the nothingness that is existence itself.” Adyashanti 2003 

“Notice how ego falls out of your life as you evolve.” Margaret Gervais

“This year felt like being split open emotionally, fully aware of every cut and every truth revealed. There was no escaping it, no sleeping through the discomfort. But in staying awake, I learned what needed to be removed, what needed to heal, and what could no longer stay. Painful, yes. Transformative, absolutely.” Vex king

“The modern world screams for your attention, but wisdom whispers for your discernment.” @mgasaemgasaemanuel91 Weblablog 

“When we sit still, we make peace with time.” Jenna Aitken Smith

"Consider soulmates to also be in the form of friends and animals, the wind, the tides, the plants, pieces of art, and the moon. Great love lives everywhere." Victoria Erickson

“But one day you wake up in your own voice and you realize the circus was never your calling.

Freedom was.

As we enter December, the last page of the year, I invite you to pause.

Not to make resolutions.

But to unmake illusions.

Because what if this year wasn't about what you learned but about what you finally had the courage to unlearn?

 But transformation doesn't happen by piling on more.

It happens by peeling away what's false.

To know yourself is not to collect more data.

It's to dismantle what blocks your view.

To empty first,

so that what is true can finally fill you.

Fill what is empty.

Empty what is full.

That's the ancient paradox of real growth.”

What am I ready to unlearn?

What am I done

pretending to know?” Chandresh Bhardwaj

Buddhism/Vipassana Meditation:

“The buddha’s focus wasn’t on fixing individual pathology, but on recognizing transpersonal truths; that craving leads to suffering, that we suffer because of ignorance about reality’s nature, and liberation comes through insight, not self-improvement.” Josh Korda

“Meditate on ‘no otherness’.” Margaret Gervais

“Vipassanā is an enlightenment muscle that builds and strengthens wisdom.” Margaret Gervais

“When we get in touch with awareness, or consciousness, what are we actually getting in touch with? Like space, it is not a thing. We cannot find it or point to it, grasp it or hold it.

And yet it exists. It is not tangible like the elements of earth, water, or fire; it is more subtle, like the space element. And still, it is part of every moment of our experience. It is the ground, background, and foundation upon which all the other aggregates arise. It operates within all the other elements and arises together with them. 

But when the Buddha spoke of consciousness as an element (viññāṇadhātu), he pointed to something more vast. Here, consciousness is not just part of a human being; it is part of the fabric of the cosmos itself—one of the six great elements: earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness. It is the open, knowing quality that is present wherever life is present.

In practice, we can touch this dimension directly. As we rest in awareness, we begin to sense that consciousness is not confined to the body or the mind—it is wide and open, like the sky, holding everything that arises within it. Remembering this helps us meet both the joys and the sorrows of our work with steadiness and compassion, knowing that all experience moves within a vast field of knowing that is never harmed by what it holds.” Kaira Jewel Lingo

Astrology:

“Truth can heal you, if you are brave enough to endure it.

That is why the universe gave you Mars and Pluto.” Steven Forrest, The Book of Water

Please note I will be sending a separate Newsletter with my thoughts on the astrology of 2026.

Healing:

“Do you want perfection or peace?” Margaret Gervais

“Prioritizing inner-peace means diligently and consistently overriding the ego's desire to prove itself superior.” Timber Hawkeye

“Do an inquiry with each chakra, 1 through 7.” Margaret Gervais

“Trust what is happening in your body. It is talking to you. It is sending information and messages to you.” Margaret Gervais 

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile past and present. I breathe in the present, pause, breathe out the past. Do this 10x or more to bring yourself to a more centered place.” Margaret Gervais

Grief:

“Every ending is just

Your life asking:

What now?” Alessandra Olanow

“…right now in this life we're in between our birth and our death, and after our death we'll be between this life and our birth into the next. This sense of in-between-ness can apply to many experiences, such as between asleep and awake, or between one thought and the next. In fact, we're always in an in-between state, since in each moment we're in the uncertain ground between the past and the future. If you pay attention to these many in-between states, you can gradually familiarize yourself with the accompanying feeling of groundlessness, which can be a doorway to liberation.” Judy Lief

“Make friends with death.” Judy Lief

“Death and life are interconnected. Every cell of our body is continually in the process of dying and being born. The true nature of reality is beyond conventional ideas of birth and death. But this is not a denial of physical birth or death, the historical dimension of our lives. Instead, this is the realization that there's no permanent, unchanging self that is born and dies.

There is an ultimate dimension of self.” Valerie Brown

‍”As a river rushes to the sea,


As the sun and moon glide across the mountains of the west,


As days and nights, hours and moments flee, 


Life flows away, inexorably.” ‍PADMASAMBHAVA (8th century)

Death of this body

Remember,

There is day, and

There is night. 

There are seasons. 

Spring, summer,

fall and winter. 

There is the

time and space

before daylight,

and after nighttime. 

There is the space

in between

before spring and

after spring. 

As with each day

and each season,

before and after,

travel all transitions

from one

to the next

with freedom,

fluidity, 

no attachment, and grace.”

Margaret Gervais

Engaged Buddhism:

“If you are teaching a wisdom tradition whose foundation is ethics, you are claiming to be a teacher of morality. Silence in the face of genocide breaks that vow.” Vince Fakhoury Horn

What I am reading:

Sacred Psychiatry, Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, M.D. 

https://www.powells.com/book/sacred-psychiatry-bridging-the-personal-and-transpersonal-to-transform-health-and-consciousness-9781632999207?condition=New

What I am reading next:

Becoming Yourself, by Shunryu Suzuki

https://www.powells.com/book/becoming-yourself-9780593855249?condition=New