“Ladies and Gentlemen, Happy New Year and Welcome to the Main Event!  This is the moment you have all been waiting for, the time and place where YOUR life actually IS.  Join us now for the bungle in the jungle, the stage in the cage, the fling in the ring, the soup in your crackpot and the pea in your ipod!”

You wink at the referee, feeling confident you can end this whole matter quickly.  After all, you have some all-time greats in your corner crew, two of the very best in the business: SilentObserver and LifeItself!

“In this corner, wearing clear trunks and jade pasties, weighing in at 3.141592653589793 breaths: YourEverlastingSoul!  YourEverlastingSoul is sponsored by EverLasting and EverLasting Light, a subsidiary of NeverBorn.  No beginning, world without end, this Amen is for you!”

As YourEverlastingSoul, you confidently raise both arms to thunderous applause echoing back to you from distant rafters.  Your ears ring as the hidden announcer’s voice booms anew…

“In the other corner, weighing in at 8 megapixels and wearing 33 external hard drives for the ever-increasing storage capacity: YourStory!  YourStory is brought to you by the “U” in ‘I’m F@%ked.’”

YourStory raises upright.  Pandemonium erupts.  Old insults fly.  You study your opponent out of the corner of your eye.  As your EverLasting (or EverLasting Light) Soul, you’ve long figured that when it came right down to the actual fight, YourStory would drop in the first five seconds under the weight of its own overloaded databanks stuffed full to bursting with fabricated memories and false perceptions.

“This Bombastic Bout is being broadcast by Turiya throughout the fourth state of consciousness and is refereed by your sleeping frontal lobe, which desperately hopes the fight will end early because a favorite TV show is on in 15 minutes.”

A high squeal from the audience breaks through your reverie of a premature victory…  Your First Kiss from the second grade waves at you from ringside, sitting next to the Visigoth warrior you killed in the Fifth Century.  Everywhere you look, there are familiar faces.  Your friends and enemies from the past 26,000 centuries have gathered for the big bout and are busily doing the wave all the way up to the rafters and back down to the center ring while chanting ‘Hey Hey-Aay, Goodbye!’.  You blow them all a kiss and catch sight of your holiday waistline.  A bout of self-regret erupts, filled with wishings that you hadn’t eaten so much peanut brittle.  You ask your frontal lobe if you look fat in your invisible boxing trunks but the referee just yawns and looks bored.

The crowd hisses and boos as YourStory stands to its full height, raising both middle fingers high in the air in response to the crowd’s jeering.  The referee calls the two of you to the center of the ring and as you walk YourStory looms larger with every thunderous step.  YourStory must be well over nine feet tall and has filled out a full Terabyte just standing there in the last three seconds.  Suddenly it’s awfully warm in the ring.  Flop sweat begins pouring down the valley of your sternum in a river that soaks the waistband of your invisible trunks.  You remember the fines for broadcast nudity and worry how your pasties will ever stay in place.

The referee, Your Frontal Lobe, synapses out instructions: “Please now if it’s your will, let’s step together to the center of the ring.  We want a dirty fight here, no holds barred battling.  Biting is mandatory, as is crotch pinching, toe crunching and elbow shivving.  Not only is all fair in this lovely war, the only way to lose is by following the rules.  Let He who is without pain throw the first punch!  Now touch gloves, go back to your corners and come out a-swinging!”

YourStory raises gloved paws high in pre-fight glee.  The air smells like ozone.  Hard drives jangle.  Kilobytes sprinkle their radioactive dandelion fuzz all around you as the gloves slam mercilessly down into your offered palms.  Your head spins wildly with the force of the initial blow.  You had thought this was gonna be a cake walk in the park when the duality agents from Leela Inc. were promoting the contest in all your past lifetimes.  But herenow, your story looks pretty darn big from where you stand.  A titanic titanium mountain of memories and mutating expectations ready to avalanche you into obliviousness.

Somehow you stumble back to your corner where your crew snaps to action.  QuietObserver massages your shoulders as LifeItself hands you a smelling salt to sharpen your senses.  You crack the capsule, pour out the salt and breathe in the crack.  Your heart beats like a kettle drum in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  A baby steps through the ropes and walks around the ring smoking a cigar while wearing a diaper, a top hat and a sash emblazoned with the current year, all the while carrying an overhead sign that reads “ROUND ONE”.  For the first time you can actually hear REAL trouble coming, like the sound of an approaching train’s warning blast entering the far end of a long and winding tunnel.  At this point you try to bolt out of the ring and go back where you came from but LifeItself pops your mouth-guard in place and slaps you on the back hard enough to force all the air out of your lungs, conveniently depositing you smack-dab in the center of the ring.

The train horn wail inside your head ripens into the “BONG!” of the opening round bell and it is surely the sound of DOOM, the thunderous belly-laugh of Nostradamus having tea with ancient Mayan Priests, everyone chewing cacao leaves while pointing to the start of the third millennium.  It is the monstrous ringing of Hell’s Bells, a spiraling a direct current up the down-turned triangle at the base of your Susumna.

Oh yes.  It’s On.

But first a word from your sponsor, your observer, your Sanjaya, your witness who needs no protection program.  Let’s listen in, shall we?

Insert your theme song here.  Remember various things you have thought, said, considered and done last year that you tell nobody about.  Add in all your ego repair work.  Introduce yourself to the New Year like you are on a first date and show ‘em your good side.  Dredge up the past, throw it at the wall of the future and see if anything sticks.  Point to it and say, “That’s me?”  Then ask yourself the following questions out loud:

How do I worship fear?    What do I really want?    How am I not myself?

As we now rejoin your scheduled PROGRAMMING already in progress, YourStory is raining wicked combinations of justification and judgment below the belt, causing Your EverLastingSoul unending distraction.  A knee of arrogance strikes your ribs followed by a darting jab of self pity.  Here comes that choke-hold of an alibi for not meditating followed by a one-two combination of excuses for working too much and not going to bed early, all of it landing so easily that you are nearly convinced that YourStory’s sound and fury are actually Truth itself.  The heel of craving real turkey flesh and gravy this past Thanksgiving strikes your gastronomical vegetarian gut with unerring accuracy, causing you to double over in a hypocritical oath.

Remembering that you are Lighter than a firefly, you decide to float away.  YourStory Grabs your ankle and slams you back to the ground.  You choose to defend yourself by becoming a floor-chameleon and hiding in plain sight.  But YourStory will have none of it, it’s a new year and its show-time, and with a ballet-like spin of Gigabytes and flashing lights it lands a vicious hook that rattles your teeth and skids you into the ropes with the KO realization that you aren’t living up to your full potential at the start of this (Happy happy Happy!) New Year.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  The ringside instant replay screen shows you as a silent film star crying your eyes out in black and white, dabbing softly at your lids so as not to smudge the carefully applied makeup.  You pull yourself up and the ropes burn into your back as YourStory lands a final jaw-morphing blow and now you no longer know where you end and the fist of YourStory begins.  The light flickers inside your head as if announcing last call at a biker bar and suddenly you discover that your latest fighting strategy is to curl into a fetal position and rock yourself on the floor of self pity as YourStory raises its arms and dances in victorious glee.

ONE, TWO, THREE… Your frontal lobe counts with enthusiasm, already picking up the TV remote control.

And then time slows like molasses syrup pouring from a jar left out overnight at the top of Mount Everest where it’s not the ascent, but the descent that is actually more fatal.  And here you have descended big time.  Here you are lying in a womb-like coma, your lips moving in petite-mal tremors while YourStory dances on top of your fast-approaching grave.  “I’m running the show this year!” YourStory shouts at you, “So Stay the %#@* Down!” 

(You.  Are….)  A voice from so far away it’s within you, whipsers inside your ear.

Your witness, the Still Quiet Observer, is shouting something to you but you can’t hear through the deafening ring of silence.  Instead of shouting out “Speak Up”, you start singing Auld Lang Syne softer than the sound of the blood pulsing in your temples.  How many resolutions, your witness asks?  How many lifetimes?  How many pasties have been lost while fighting with this fundamental Lie?

FOOUUUUR… FFFFIIIIIIVVVVVE… SSSSSSSIXXXXX…

(You.  Are.  Not…)  Not what?  Not real?  Not a vegetarian?  Not conscious?  Not alive?

(YOU.  ARE.  NOT.  YOUR..)

Pure awareness rips through the tunnel of your ears and slams you into a wall of sound face-first.  Vocal chords are morphing into bullhorns in your ear telling you to get up, Get Up!  You can smell the crowd noise in your left maxillary sinus: a stew of perfume, sweat and animal skins mixed with dead turkey flesh (yum yum!)  The light comes back on behind your eyes and is that a quadriceps below your shorts or are you just happy to see yourself?  Slowly you attempt to stand and catch a glimpse of the flat screen at ringside while pulling yourself up rope by rope.  After an advertisement for an airline which you desperately wish you were patronizing at the moment, your own pummeling is being shown in reverse as an instant replay with such clarity that TimeItself stands to watch from the judges’ box at ringside.

SSSeeVVVVVVENNNNNN…

Incredibly, the screen shows no opponent in the ring.

There is no YourStory with a Right and Left of wicked punch fabrications, just a frontal lobe referee counting you out as the crowd does one more wave.  And there you are bouncing up off the floor in reverse and dancing around punching and kicking yourself in the ass like a clown on smack.  Across the bottom of the screen in a text scroll appear the words of Buddha from the Dhammapada: “The greatest victory is victory over ones’ self.”

Somehow you don’t think that kicking your own ass is quite what Buddha had in mind.

EEIGHHHHHT…NNNIIIINNNNNE…

The replay stops and you realize that you are back in the present and NOT FULLY STANDING yet.  You straighten your knees and lift an arm, bellowing “Yo, Adrian” to your spouse from the Civil War eight incarnations ago sitting in the cheap seats.  The referee raises your arm and the groundswell of cheers erupts like the bone-melting crack of an atomic bomb.

Speech!  Speech!  Speech!  the crowd chants in a growing roar and then the voice of YourEverlastingSoul booms from the inside out through the PA in exact synchronicity to your own lips as you bellow out a message to everyone truly present:

“YOU!  ARE!  NOT!  YOUR!  STORY!”

Eardrums pop.  Hearts burst.  Eyeballs shatter.  A lightning burst of insight singes the mat where YourStory had been towering only an instant before, leaving a fast vanishing hail of ones and zeroes.  The crowd erupts (quite literally) in a cacophony of cheers and visceral organs.  Your Frontal Lobe drops the remote control and raises both of your arms in victory.  Reporters scurry into the ring shouting all kinds of questions while flailing their voice recorders, video cameras and Playstation Wii controllers in your general direction.  “What’s your secret?”  “Where did you get them pasties, Champ?”  “How many pounds of peanut brittle did you eat?”  “Can you share your training regimen killer?”

The flashbulbs strobe glittering jade starbursts from your pectorals.  Microphones drift your way as you gesture to the now mostly empty, dripping seats and take a deep breath to answer:

“What did I really want back then?  What do I really want in this life?  This day?  This breath?

And then you, the EverlastingSoul who has trouble pronouncing the #2 entree at the neighborhood Thai restaurant, somehow continue to speak in a thunderously spontaneous impersonation of Krishna addressing Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, pronouncing ancient Sanskrit with unerring aplomb:

sreyan svadharmo vigunah paradharmat svanusthitan/ svadharmo nidhanam sreyaha paradharmodayad api//

As the words emerge from your lips you feel yourself in the deepest presence of truth.  Even though you don’t intellectually know what the Sanskrit means, you can feel an absolute undeniable power vibrate its thunder into your bones.  As the words echo into stillness and a perfect quiet fills the ring, you look to the translation that appears in silent scrolling text beneath your face on the ringside monitor:

“And do thy duty, even if it be humble, rather than another’s, even if theirs seems great.  To do one’s duty is life itself; to live in another’s is death.”  Bhagavad Gita 3:35.

Happy New Year to all EverLasting Souls.  May we evolve by embracing the desire to find out what we truly want in this life!  And may this knowledge lead us all to do our unique work with passion, joy, an irrational rationality and a respectful lack of consideration for our stories!

Jeff Martens is a teacher, writer and co-owner of Inner Vision Yoga.  All suggestions are voluntary and slightly irrational.  Consult Your EternalSoul before you embark on any practice in which you are unfamiliar.