What is lovely never dies,
But passes into other loveliness,
Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
~ T.B. Aldrich – A Shadow of the Night
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
~ Semisonic – Closing Time
I’ve always been a sucker for new year’s resolutions. The promise of renewal and starting fresh enchants me. Granted, I barely recall a resolution of significance I’ve made in year’s past. They were usually short and sweet: read the newspaper more, or stop eating Twizzlers. Mine were beautifully concrete and simple to adopt.
Renewal at the end of yoga class in the form of savasana (corpse pose) was a whole different story. Apparently I’ve never been a fan of what inevitably comes before re-birth: death. In the early days I would crawl out of my skin in corpse pose, due to my difficulty being still combined with my dis-ease of mortality. I would literally run for the door in those moments. I had deluded justifications at the time – “gotta get back to work…gotta hop in the shower….gotta make it to my dinner plans…gotta beat the rush hour traffic.” Time and time again I heard from my yoga teachers that corpse pose is the opportunity to reap the benefits of the yoga practice. This only added further dissonance and guilt within me. I now think of the energy I put towards distracting from the very thing we can be certain of in this lifetime: goodbyes.
I’m not the only one uncomfortable with corpse pose. Who wants to think about death, let alone practice it after feeling so alive and vital from a yoga class? Yet we know death happens every day in various forms. Relationships come and go. Friends relocate. Clients walk out the door of my office never to be heard from again. Several of my dearest friends have watched a parent die from cancer. I’ve watched my own mother succumb to dementia for the past decade, an intellectual death in the very least. She embodies the image of a person I recognize, but the interactions can feel like that of a stranger. Like my savasana practice, I would run for the door of my mother’s home, particularly during the confusing early years of her illness. I was eager to escape the discomfort of her declining condition. Just about anything else seemed better than having the same conversation repeatedly while staring loss in the face.
When I first moved back to Minnesota a couple years ago, I cleaned out a bedroom in my childhood home where my mother’s caretaker was planning to sleep. We were transitioning her to 24-hour care. My mother is an appreciator of writing and poetry and has boxes of old articles. While sorting through one of the many boxes of her clippings I came across a poem by Lucille Clifton which my mother had copied in pencil, smudged and barely legible, called I Am Running into a New Year:
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers
like all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
I can see what my mother loved about this poem. The last two lines always linger within me. I hope to forgive myself for those times I ran away from her because the illness felt too painful. I hope to make the most of the time that remains with my mother alive on this earth.
My oldest friend, in the midst of losing her father to cancer, made a poignant statement at lunch yesterday, “family resolutions don’t happen when a person is on their death bed.” She reminded me the time is now. To that end, this year’s resolution will not be so concrete and simple. I will send my sankalpa (sanskrtit for purpose and intention) to stay with the discomfort of goodbyes, and not run for the door in the face of loss. I will surrender on my back, assimilate the lessons from the class, and drop my heavy head with its monkey mind. Inhale gratitude for the presence of those in my life, exhale grief for our collective loss. I will embody the rhythm of all that comes and goes.
I will not wait to tell the people in my life just how much I love them.
So whatever your lingo of choice — goals, intentions, promises, hopes, sankalpa, or if you’re the person who vehemently refuses to make any resolutions in the new year — I suggest you let old ways of thinking die. Look at impermanence in the face and embody it with the softness of a corpse pose. Observe the ways in your life that you run from the inevitable, the ways you avoid loss. Notice too the ways you seek death and stagnation by avoiding your own livelihood. Look in your own eyes, look in your beloved’s eyes, and tell them just how much you adore them. 
{P.S. I’ve come a long way considering I can now indulge, sleep - and even snore at times - in savasana.}
