Dear First name, While New Year’s resolutions get a bad rap and seem more or less doomed for failure, mantras have been a different story for me. Implementing year long mantras has brought radical transformation to my life without ever making that transformation into a goal, or adding pressure. A mantra is much like a spell or incantation. Through repetition and physical embodiment, it absorbs into the body’s rhythm and changes your way of perception, slowly trickling into how you experience your reality and the world around you. This reveals previously overlooked possibilities and richness in one’s life. I realize how closely my tone resembles an infomercial or home shopping network effort, but that’s only because I've drunk my own Kool-Aid, and the Kool-Aid was damn refreshing, even though for most of my life I’ve looked down with disdain on Kool-Aid and its brightly block colored consumers. So let us continue. |
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Say you’re sold, but need help getting started? I always begin with asking myself how I want to feel. Then I construct a simple phrase to invite the feeling. Then I whisper whimsically and semi-creepily to myself, “Let’s just see what the cuss happens….” and I’m off to see the wizard. |
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A few of my favorite yantras from previous years: |
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1. “Every moment sacred.” This eventually turned so much tiresome ordinary dailiness into miraculous unfolding. I learned I had been blind to so much of my life’s beauty simply because I’d wasted time waiting for the moment to prove its meaning to me, rather than assuming the meaning was already there, waiting to be noticed. |
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2. “Live with ease.” This brought awareness to how often my mind was making everything hard when the task at hand wasn’t actually all that physically challenging or terrible. The overall effect? Leveling my anxiety so dramatically that my capacity for action doubled and so did my income. |
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But perhaps my favorite, the real golden ticket of my life has been this one: 3. “The light says I love you.” |
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While your thumb might be twitching to close the browser and scroll through Tik Tok, I recommend getting comfy and digging in to the further explanation this one requires: I’m lucky enough to have lived through more than one spectacular heartbreak in this lifetime. The kind that burn up your sense of self so thoroughly one must figure out how to become a phoenix and rise from the ashes, or else. In the aftermath of one such heartbreak, I learned a lot about loneliness. Six months after the split, I told a therapist that being alone was really hard. She laughed in my face and told me I didn’t even know what being alone was yet. While I eventually stopped seeing said therapist, as I type this nearly five years and a million lessons into singledom later, it pains me to admit she was sorta right. |
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However, during those early days of lonesomeness, I was confronted with the task of sourcing love from something other than a romantic partnership. I returned, as I so often have throughout my life and career as a natural light photographer, to my relationship to light. When I first became a photographer, falling in love with light was a more passionate experience than any I’d had with another human up to then. All day, every day, I couldn’t take my eyes off of light. I stayed up late every night reading all I could online to learn about how light worked. When I put a ring on it—or in other words, when I committed to prioritizing light above all else in my photography, my work underwent a rapid upleveling in terms of beauty and style. As I considered all of this in my post break-up loneliness, it donned on me that light had been a faithful friend and lover as long as I could remember. I recalled just how many times throughout prior heartbreaks the light had held me, delighted me, and ushered me into more gentle understanding of others and the world around me. It suddenly felt dishonest to claim I was alone when I’d had this radiant companion with me all along. But while I could recognize the gift of this steady connection with my intellect, I still found it difficult to always feel light. Or to let that light land on me as an expression of love as real as any other. When I say feel light, I mean truly and wholly letting light wrap around me, holding me in its warmth and promise. Surrendering to light’s embrace and allowing it to kiss the heavy darkness I was carrying took real effort. |
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In 2019, I started a practice. With an exhilarating, yet intimidating travel schedule of photoshoots ahead of me- full of flights and cheap hotel rooms, and no lover to share meals or beds with— I actively began documenting all of the moments I felt the light show up yet again during the exact moment of of despair I thought I could not possibly endure. I shared these images with the hashtag #thelightsaysiloveyou. Truth be told, I felt a little cheesy about doing it, but a soul-survival instinct whispered to me that learning to receive love beyond a partnership was vital. The urge to do so without shame grew stronger than my embarrassment. I surrendered to the light and my own sometimes unsettling sincerity. |
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A letter that I received last week made me so glad I did: “When I was at my most self-destructive and my heart was at its darkest, you somehow reached through with your beacon of light and spoke this most beautiful message: “The light says I love you.” And you said it over and over again until I believed you. Until I believed you meant that for me. And then I began noticing and appreciating. And I would put down my heavy thoughts for moments of the day to let the light in. You made me curious and I began making it a practice.” I will never cease being amazed by how from loneliness, from one’s own dark, the effort towards light can illuminate another’s darkness. It's the reason I’ll never stop. I never really give up my mantras. I just keep adding new ones to the rotation. This year, I’d like to feel free. The kind of free that can only come from within. I’ve learned enough by now to know I’m already what I desire. It's a matter of my own perception. So my mantra for 2023 is: “I am free.” What do you want to feel in 2023? If you decide on your mantra, will you write back real quick and share with me? I’d love to share in my next newsletter. Xx, Yan |
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