Review your year with compassion: message from Robert and Clara

In their end of year message, Robert Marx and Clara Strauss (co-leads of the Sussex Mindfulness Centre) invite you to review your year with compassion.
As we come towards the end of the year, it can be helpful to take some time to reflect on the year that has passed. It can be tempting to judge the things we have done or said, or not done or said. We may find we evaluate them against expectations we have, or others might have of us. Did we achieve this or that? Did we reach this or that goal?
It can be motivating to do this if we and others feel pleased with what has happened, but often this can also engage our self-critical voices and leave us getting caught up with thinking “I must try harder”; or, we might congratulate ourselves for things we have done without always seeing how much our successes are due to a good dose of luck, and rely on a vast interconnecting network of other people, without whom we would not even be able to leave our front door. And behind such lists of actions may be a dangerous privileging of productivity as a metric of worth.
What if underneath our ledgers of activity, our worth had nothing to do with what we had done, or not done? What if every part of us, every one of us, were lovable and precious just as we already are? And if that feels like a stretch, what if we allowed ourselves to imagine that it were so, and acted as if it were so, when we greet ourselves in morning and when we go about our days? When we greet our friends and families, and our neighbours, our colleagues, those who serve us at the supermarket tills, and the thousands who will be homeless this Christmas, and the billions of other animals we share the planet with, and those we think of as ‘us’ and those we think of as ‘not us’.
As Mary Oliver says,
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Thank you for being part of our own small community over this last year. We look forward to connecting with you again in the coming year.
Warm wishes,
Clara and Robert
Co-Leads Sussex Mindfulness Centre

