Looking back:
how I’ve started reviewing my life and practice
I’m a changed woman! I never used to look back, only forward. My main distraction in meditation is planning, planning and designing. It’s super enjoyable, but it’s still a distraction. Recently I’ve been making a real effort to review things.
By the end of this year I’ll have twelve monthly reviews to read through. The longest is around 1,600 words and the shortest is 89; I kind of bailed in the middle of summer busyness. But most months there’s something substantial.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
So you may be wondering:
What’s included in the reviews?
Here’s how I structured them this year, next year I’m planning on doing it a little differently. Below is a tiny selection of things I jotted down under each heading, just to give you an idea.
What went well?
January: By request, I started doing a little “coaching.” I don’t call it coaching; it’s more like a creative conversation with a Dharmic perspective. It went well, and I’m now working with a couple more people.
June: A tawny owl landed on the balcony and sat looking in at us in our bed. Magic.
August: I started a special kind of journaling, the idea being to connect with subconscious feelings, the kind that feel unacceptable, like rage, shame, and fear. You write about them in a completely uncensored, even unreasonable, way (the adult has left the building), and then you destroy what you’ve written.
What could have been better?
January: Put on weight over Christmas. So easy to gain, so hard to lose.
March: Noticing how I feel a bit disconnected on Zoom, and then overcompensate by being extra friendly and enthusiastic, and look like a lunatic.
July: Realized that some things about our year plan didn’t really work. Setting up for retreats, then to do Airbnb and back again every couple of weeks. Too much carrying furniture back and forth.
What’s the next creative move?
March: Build a ‘capsule’ wardrobe for spring where everything goes with everything else, to make dressing simpler and more enjoyable.
July: Plan 2027 in themed blocks, ‘retreats’, ‘Airbnb’, ‘online projects’, so that the house can be set up for each.
October: Use my digital weekly and monthly reviews to index my physical journals, giving each a name and number.
Ideas to take forward
Paint the ladder red. Paint the workshop / garage door red.
Make a shrine based around the Buddha’s footprints, with the Dharmacakras. So human and real. So clear what he left us.
Make a wishing tree of the peach tree, like Yoko Ono’s.
Do winter retreats: turn the garden house into a shrine room and add extra sofas to the lounge.
Send out ten questions once a month to different Buddhists, inspired by typewriter interviews.
Discover anything good?
Laurie Anderson: Change the article. Instead of saying “I’m driving my car down the road,” try “I’m driving a car down a road.” The mystery of life opens up.
June, Oliver Burkeman, “The end isn’t nigh”: “Because the point I want to try to drive home is very much not that life is safer and more secure than the heralds of the apocalypse would have us believe. It’s the opposite: that human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others. Yet there’s a stunning bit of good news hiding in all this grim inevitability, because if radical insecurity is just how life is, then by definition, you’re already coping with it.”
Tracey Emin taking herself and art very seriously: watch here.
What are you thinking about?
January, praying: What’s the difference between praying and meditating? Can you pray without praying to someone? (I concluded yes.)
A dream about Laurie Anderson: She was holding a baby and climbing on the edge of a bridge. Don’t drop the baby! The baby was creativity. But creativity is dangerous. Later her eyes and ears had been burned out, which wasn’t as horrific as it sounds; it just meant she had to rely on her internal sense of things.
“Nothing in the entire universe is hidden.” —Dogen
I have a tendency to spread myself too thinly, part of me wants to pile on projects like gear on a Buckaroo donkey, another part of me is fed up with having too much on my plate.
On my radar
January: I read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, and I did! (Temporarily.)
February: Finches in the garden: goldfinch, hawfinch, bullfinch, and chaffinch.
May: Making syrup from lemon rinds.
July: Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno films.
August: The Homing Podcast. Loved the Dan Pearson and Takero Shimazaki episodes
October: Japanese ambient music.
How do you write them?
They’re not set in stone; I see what works and what doesn’t.
I have a weekly review template with a series of prompts (see the image below). It’s a catch-all for life, work, and practice, and I fill it in during the week, whenever I discover something good. Some things come from my paper journal, or I might index the journal in the weekly review, for example “Dream about Laurie Anderson, p. 76.”
At the end of each week, I move some items to other places, such as a to-do list, my notes system, a newsletter ideas list, or other projects.
At the end of the month, I read through the four or five weekly reviews and decide what to do with each remaining item. Those that still feel alive and interesting are transferred to the monthly review, and anything else (which is a lot) is deleted along with the weekly review.
What happens at the end of the year?
I don’t know what the next step is! Having twelve monthly reviews at the end of the year is a first for me. I will read through them all during the online year-end retreat, The Winter Bardo (you are invited!). Some ideas will have been acted on, some may no longer feel relevant, and there might be some I’m really happy to be reminded of.
Will I turn them into a document? Maybe. I wonder what form that could take. It would be nice to archive the highlights in some way, perhaps with a small collection of photos from the year. Any ideas? I’d love to hear them.
I’m also planning to spend some time on that retreat deciding what I’d like to document next year. I’d like it to be more analog and visual, but I’m also wedded to the digital world and the ability to link ideas and search for connections. Nerdy? Yep.
It’s not too late to review your year. We all leave a trail behind us, diaries, photos, messages. Take time this year-end to review and reflect on your life -
THE WINTER BARDO
ONLINE RETREAT
29 Dec 2026 - 02 Jan 2027
5 days to review and reset your life for the coming year
Every year, in that bardo-like week between Christmas and New Year, part of me wants to be on retreat and part of me wants to look back over the year and start dreaming about the next. This year we’re combining both, mixing meditation and Dharma reflection with an honest look at the year behind us and the year to come, drawing on creative thinking from Oliver Burkeman, Alain de Botton, Mason Currey, and others, and exploring it all through journaling, collage, letter-writing, and meditation and ritual. We’d love you to join us.
