Happy New Year, everyone. May blessings-a-plenty weave themselves through your winter dreaming, and wishing all of us the mindset that allows us to include those 'blessings' that arrive disguised as inconveniences, delays, or deep naps. We understand that there are many challenges in this being human gig, personal, relational, and in the wider world we are part of. And given how most news channels are doing their very best to convince us that life is a disaster movie, l often feel the duty to place a few more feathers on the side of the scale called ‘life is a miracle.’
Strengthening the unbroken
We have never been ones to ignore the suffering in the world. As we have got older, we have come to understand the absolute need to fill our senses, hearts and minds with beauty and what we call the Unbroken as often as possible. Why? In order to have the strength to continue to do our work. If you’re engaged with the wider world and not doing this, overwhelm is never far away.
Far from being a heads in the sand approach to life, we feel it is as a duty to pay attention to the everyday miracles and the extraordinary achievements of our fellow human beings. There are many and if you don't know what I'm talking about, try watching The Thinking Game for a little insight into how brilliant human beings can be.
returning home
We had a wonderful Returning Home workshop over Solstice in which we take the time to remember, acknowledge, learn from and release the old year. The remembering includes a distilled 21-word summary of the year. Here's mine:
Bright Feathers fall away - tears, fury, ash
From Ash, such tender umbilical threads weave
Newborn Determination, knowing, 'NOW is your time.'
As the year changes, we could say it’s nothing more than a number. But these collective moments in time are opportunities for reflections that go deeper than a new year resolution. And we heartily encourage you to take time to reflect.
New Year 2026
1st January 2026 can be metaphorically a blank page with no straight lines. I have a suggestion. How about allowing this turning of the year to be a thinning of the veil? A loosening. A hairline crack in the surface of the known. Through that crack, possibilities can begin to breathe. Like a quiet melody from somewhere ancient, patient and in touch with the turning of the year.
Through that crack we might hear the roots of the great tree of life murmuring through the trunk, dreaming of spring. We might hear seeds rehearsing their futures while receiving the dark nourishment of rest. This is the intelligence of the seasons. Nature knows when to slow down.
winter dreaming
Maybe this is not the season to be caught up in probabilities, forecasts, or five-year plans. Beneath the ground, life is listening. Imagining itself into forms not yet agreed upon. In the dark, the future is not organised, it is imagined amongst a swirling chaos of possibilities. Curiosity is a form of devotion. It keeps us open to noticing guidance in the multitude of ways it can arrive.
A new beginning asks us to stay awake to what wants to arrive. To be brave enough to allow something new. A stranger, perhaps. Wilder, or more tender, more alive than anything we could have sensibly predicted. Beginning again is part of the cycle. A fresh page. An opportunity to interrupt the status quo. A minimal chance for new dreams to slip through the illusion of certainty and shake us into new shapes.
If you don't, who will?
The odds against any of us being here are frankly ridiculous. That you are here, breathing, sensing, capable of love, grief, mischief, regret, laughter and second chances is already evidence of something uncontainable and uncontrollable. Life did not have to include you. And yet, here you are. And as Gabrielle Roth used to say often:
‘if you don’t do your dance, who will?’
This season reminds us that life does not surge forward by force of will alone. Spring isn’t caffeine driven. It emerges from the deep rest of winter. It responds to the call that is inherent to the ever-moving cycles of life.
taking our winter meds
For those of us trained to push, fix, resolve, or improve ourselves ALL the time, winter can be a challenge. It invites us to compost what no longer serves, to let the old stories soften, to allow the questions to remain unanswered for a while. Wisdom, it turns out, does not explode out of nowhere with fanfares of light. It ripens slowly over time.
My practice as the year turns is about keeping company with what is real. About digesting, acknowledging, and learning from what has been. Doing that quiet work in the shadowlands when no-one’s watching. Letting the old year go and sifting out what I wish to bury and what I wish to plant. Feeling the ground beneath my feet. Listening to the unbroken, elemental intelligence of the body. Letting my breath move me into prayer, dance, or simple presence and reminding myself about what matters most.
And love, that unpredictable and crazy wisdom teacher, continues its work. It’s been a busy autumn and taking time to catch up as a couple and as a family has been important and necessary. Love asks us to stay human even when it would be easier to harden, numb out, or retreat into certainty.
So as this new year opens its arms to us, I invite you to join me in resisting the pressure to reinvent yourself as the clock strikes midnight. May we remember that becoming more alive is not a resolution but a lifelong project; one that unfolds through listening, honesty, humour, and a willingness to be changed.
Movement medicine gifts
Movement Medicine exists to support you to keep moving with life, whatever it brings. It is in no way an escape from the world, but a way of meeting it more fully. It’s a practice that reminds us that wisdom lives in the body, heart and mind, not just in the realm of ideas. It reminds us that intelligence moves. That ecstasis and ecstatic prayer is a sweaty business that refuses to bypass a single tear nor turn away from what is real. Movement Medicine is a reminder that healing is not a private hobby but a relational act, woven through community, land, ancestry, and time.
When we move, we remember. We remember that we are more than our strategies and survival habits. We remember that life is dynamic, adaptive, responsive. We remember how to listen with the feet, the backbone, the heart. Movement Medicine does not promise certainty, but it does offer a road to grounded and inspired orientation within the uncertainty of life. It helps us to experience where we are, so we can take the next honest step.
In this New year, Susannah, myself and all the Movement Medicine Teachers we have trained, will keep creating spaces where it is possible to arrive as you are, be as you are and and embody what's moving inside you. Spaces where the body can speak, the soul can stretch, and the mind can loosen its grip on knowing. Spaces where you can practice courage, compassion, and the art of staying present with what is alive, both within you, between us, and in the world. A healing space. An empowering space. A space to stand up, grow up, and deepen your knowledge of how to play your role.
Our invitations for the year ahead will not be about becoming someone else. They will support you in the journey of becoming more at home. More responsive. More capable of love, responsible truth-telling, and creative participation in a world that needs all three in generous measure.
So consider this to be your new year nudge. 😉 To dance when you can. We do get good at what we practice. To rest in the rhythm. To show up imperfectly, to live as if life matters. Because it does. So do you. Our humanity is wild, tender, fierce. We are here against all the odds. So please go ahead, and continue to develop and step into your place in the great, ongoing choreography of being alive.
We will be gathering again soon, in rooms and online, supported by extraordinary music, to be moved, to sweat, to cry and to laugh, and to engage fully in the ongoing work of remembering what matters most. You are welcome.
happy new year
Happy New Year, dear fellow human being. May 2026 be a year of magnificent surprises, resourced, resilient and creative response to what life brings, a year where you enjoy the miracle when you can and do the work you are here to do. Don’t waste your precious time imagining that anyone else can tell you how you should respond to what life brings. Don't be told what you should believe, and how you should engage with the complexities of life. Turning 60 in 2024 and the amount of close friends who died in this past year, year finally purged that idea from my system.
I know why I’m here and what I’m here for. And alongside Susannah, and this very human community of movers, shakers and space holders, we will continue to do what we do best through our work, to go on discovering what love means, and praise each sunrise as if it may be our last. Whilst our hearts beat.........
We look forward to seeing you on the Hub, and on our travels in 2026.
May the miracle continue to unfold. With my love, and lots of it.
Ya'Acov DK. January 1 2026
