New Year’s and the Same Damn Thing

January 7, 2026

By Lisa Shannon

“What do you offer up at the new year after 40 years of practice?” I asked Bill Spangle, who was leaning against the wall on KCC’s back porch in the New Year’s Eve sunshine, while Lama Eric built the fire to burn our old habits.

“The same damn thing.”

This was good news for me—something of a relief—as I reflected on my 2025 kind-speech intentions. They did not go, err, as planned. Blame politics. Blame a stressful year at work. Blame my mom’s move-in. Mission not accomplished.

So what do we do as we face a New Year, with old habits dying hard despite crisp aspiration?

“Just thinking we can say a little mantra or say a little prayer and that that would suffice for the karmic conditioning of past harmful actions to be magically removed—does that make sense?” questions Lama Eric.

Lama Eric and Lama Kathleen offered New Year’s inspiration in the form of the Four Powers for Purification. These four powers are necessary to disrupt the conditioning from our harmful deeds that keeps us trapped in confusion and suffering. “If we hope for there to be an undermining of the negative conditioning from misdeeds, there must be some shift in relationship to these misdeeds from our side. When we use the support of refuge and bodhichitta, when we see misdeeds as harmful, when we have true intentions to not repeat them, and when we engage in positive actions as a remedy, it is taught that pending karmic effects can be purified.” These four are:

  1. The power of support. Taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and nurturing bodhicitta, the wish to awaken for the benefit beings, grounds and directs our practice.
  1. The power of regret. This simply means acknowledging that an action was harmful. The trick—especially in our self-critical Western culture—is not confusing regret with shame or guilt. Regret is clean and honest: Wow, that caused harm and I don’t want to do that.
  1. The power of resolve. Holding a sincere resolve to not repeat the action. Having a clear and strong intention to change our habit.
  1. The power of the antidote. The antidote is positive deeds, both in terms of our formal meditation practice and general good deeds.

Working this purification four-step—like any dance, learned through repetition— we certainly will disrupt old patterns. Progress, not perfection.

As an expression of these commitments, on New Year’s Eve, retreatants burned notes naming habits they wished to turn away from. And on New Year’s Day, we lit candles of dharmic aspirations for 2026 and beyond. Then in the late morning of the first day of the new year, sixteen people took refuge and entered the Buddhist path.

Here’s to 2026. May bodhicitta continue to arise, grow, and flourish.

Happy New Year!

For a deeper dive into the Four Powers, read more in Words of My Perfect Teacher or The Torch of True Meaning.