Amongst the multitude of human emotions fear is one of the most common and powerful. From babyhood to our last day - fear is our constant companion. We could not survive without this protector. But fear is also our prison, our distortion of reality, a trigger for our aggression, a killer of trust, love and friendship.

Grief and loss are organic aspects of human life. Everything we have as living beings in time and space and biological life, we are bound to lose at some point. Loss and grief are incorporated into our deepest nature together with the promise of self renewal. We are all potentially equipped for dealing with it well - as a potential. So many other natural capacities we possessed instinctively and traditionally in older times, but nowadays we have lost to a large extent the inherent cultural capacity to grieve. This means we now have to consciously create a process to experience, digest, recover and grow from the experience of grief.

Every drastic personal life transition is potentially a crisis requiring a new dimension of us to manifest. If we manage to mobilise a new resource, then a step in our development takes place. If we fail to do it, diminishing damage takes place.

This is a message of hope for the New Year: human traumas can be healed from the inside of the soul, by oneself, and the healing process itself can become a new step in one’s personal and spiritual development, strength, resilience and maturity.

Stress is normal. It is our basic equipment for survival in alarming situations. The whole body goes into an emergency position to face perceived danger. But when being in that state of alarm consistently and permanently – the stress mechanism starts to destroy the very organism it designed to protect. And then stress becomes a destroyer, the major contributor to chronic diseases, organ destruction and premature death. And, unfortunately, that is also normal.

No one likes crisis. It is painful, it is damaging, it creates loss, it creates loneliness, it destroys life as we know it before we know what the next step is, it ends dreams, it shatters self image, it is the very opposite, of safety, safety-zone, security, comfort. We devote a lot of our time and energy to prevent the possibility of crisis and maximise comfort and security - the whole of western-oriented economy and social structure is devoted to it.

It does not take a very sharp eye to realise that we live continuously on many dimensions at the same time. Against the background of the dominant materialistic worldview in our academic and public life - for many people one human lifetime is only a chapter of a much bigger cycle of time, story and biography. Some believe in the possibility of reincarnation, some scoff at it as an old eastern religion and western hippies fairy tale. But there is another category of people regarding the possibility of repeated earthly lives: those who experience their previous lives with the same clarity and strength of reality with which they experience any other memory. For them past life is not a matter of belief but of direct personal experience.

The struggle for freedom has many fronts. From times immemorial human being have been fighting for freedom from outer suppression, from domination from others, from slavery, from discrimination, from being ruled by other classes, from inferior rights, from segregation, from the domination of the new world from its European colonial masters, from the domination of women by men, freedom from poverty, from ignorance, from hunger. This struggle continues today in many places and we do not see an end in sight: Hong Kong against Mainland China, Rohingya people against the Myanmar government, Amazonian people against the Brazilian government, the Kurdish people against the government of four countries, economic migrants everywhere against border restrictions.

WE CAN ENHANCE OUR IMMUNITY - I wish to contribute a note of hope, encouragement and personal empowerment Into the general discourse today in the face of the panic, chaos, paralysis, powerlessness and growing state controls, caused by the spreading of the coronavirus pandemic: each one of us can make oneself more resilient in the face of this danger by directly enhancing the power of one’s own immunity.

Some fundamental aspects of personal self-image and attitudes to relationship that are formed in adolescence stay the same for life. They become incorporated into one’s operational personality and they are very resistant to change. The symptoms that express them can be very disturbing, anti-social and destructive, limiting the full expression of people’s innate potential for fulfilling personal, relationship and professional life.