Dear friends and acquaintances of Kontemplation
 
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 
Having said that, we hope you will understand the intention when we provide a little Christmas first aid in this newsletter: one meditation for balancing emotional intensity.
Because it's storming around us – in more ways than one.

We enjoy the warmth of Christmas. The holidays. The experience of a large part of the world stopping for a moment and taking a breath. The days that from now on will be longer.
And we think we feel the spiritual current that underlies Christmas: the possibility for wakefulness and love to be present – even in the most modest surroundings.
But there are also the storms. The external, tragic ones. The storms of conflict, the storms that global inequality raises. 
And there's the internal meteorology. Even though it's Christmas, there's no guarantee of good weather inside. This is also a time of pressure. Pressure to be part of a community.
Although Christmas is ideally a time of heart-warming possibilities, it is also often intensely demanding.
 
It is to these requirements that we have put forward a meditation that meets emotional intensity. The practice library.
We believe that you can both enjoy the light and take the darkness into account. Both stick your head outside – and brace yourself against the storm.

We wish you a Merry Christmas from us at Kontemplation. 
We are marking the New Year with our online community event The turn of the year – a contemplative approach. 
And we look forward to seeing you coming out to New Year's retreat at Øster Løkke by the North Sea.
 
You will hear from us again in a moment. During the Christmas break – or Romjulen, as it is called in Norwegian – we will send out our annual invitation to January Practice – an invitation to begin the first month of the new year with a daily practice of presence.
 
Merry Christmas from 

Hanneli, Peter, Martin, Jeanette and the entire Kontemplation team