We're in the 12 days of Christmas, the period that begins on the winter solstice and ends right around the 1st of January. In the northern hemisphere, the days start to get a little bit longer, giving room for our subtler feelings to surface, our subterranean longings to be heard. Just as it's unnoticeable that the days are actually lengthening in the dark and damp, it's easy to miss what might be stirring in the soul.

After all, the build-up of tension is so great, emotions sometimes so strong, for The Day -- December 25th -- that the week after tends to feel like an anti-climax, a crash, an awkward lull, or a zone of spaciness until New Year's. The Santa jihadis don't help. You know, the ones enforcing the myth of Santa Claus until their children are practically pubescent, shushing anyone who suggest otherwise and setting life-long patterns for this wave, the rise and fall of emotions on Christmas Day.

But the true Yuletide Warriors know that Christmas is so much more than this, so much longer than just one day. The period after is particularly ripe for inspiration, for something to kick-start our interests into action. It's almost like we have to sink into that pure party spirit for our soul to say enough! and for the individual to gain a little more clarity about where it wants to direct its energies, its passions, its interests; what it would like to study, see, and occupy itself with.

You see this manifest in our world and society with those New Year's resolutions and goals and plans, all so hard-wired and heady and old-world Human. But just simply listening to what emerges in these 12 days can give some guidance to the next 12 months. It might be as simple as getting clarity about buying a table to make art or booking a cooking course or buying a camera. Anything that helps give guidance to where and how to tend our creative fire.

So many people are chasing love and gain a sense of identity by who loves them or who they love. You see this with mothers, children, lovers, wives, husbands, and even those who follow a guru (see 'Free Breath', 11/14/2014). So many people feel incomplete when they don't have that significant other in their life, but this often just masks how uncomfortable an individual can feel as-is, on its own, without a label or an identity that it can fix itself to or latch onto.

Latching in love is so common because it provides a sense of direction, too: two merged in one, a break-down in boundaries, an intimacy so deep that makes you want to shackle to The Other, 'to lock in your love', to latch - as that eponymous song so glorifies. The two then move along in a tightly-knitted groove or trajectory in Life until the relationship runs the risk of becoming unequal, out of balance, dysfunctional. The 'Devil' card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck shows this latching in love so clearly with the two lovers now literally tethered together, chains around their necks.

One person inevitably wants to scream for liberation - I've seen this with children of (s)mothers, lovers, spouses - while the other becomes a love-chaser, over-identifying with its object of love. Its whole identification centering on The Other. The Other becomes unwittingly the fulcrum for how the love-chaser's day goes, where it goes, what it does, how it runs its life, how it feels, literally whether it's happy or sad. The relationship can become like a prison, built with scared minds, minds telling you you need direction in the first place, minds uncomfortable with an uncertain  direction or identity. Love won't fix any of this forever and part of this yoga and breath work is training ourselves not to listen to the many insecure, scared voices inside. Love without expectation is liberation. You can look in the mirror and see Everything. Right there.