Reset the Moment: Four Emergency Meditations for 2026

Quick resets for overwhelm, exhaustion, and other impossible situations – bookmark this page!

Happy New Year friends!

2026.

Wow.

I think it’s going to be beautiful. And … hard. At least, from a care-about-humanity point of view.

Image Credit: maselkoo99/Getty Images

The truth of interconnection means no one is really protected from the big conflicts of our time. From Palestine to the Ukraine, from Sudanese famine and civil war to ICE detention facilities and the sickening rise of authoritarianism. One person’s denial is another’s outrage. The waveforms reverberate.

We’re all in it. We can’t reset the past, any more than we can reset the ageing process.

Fortunately, we can reset the moment.

At any moment.

And this is my New Year’s gift to all of you. I recommend you bookmark this page in your browser right now, because, whatever meditators may want to say about “beginner’s mind,” it also helps to be prepared.

This post contains four mini-meditations – on surrender, irreverence, love (with edge), and remembering – each a different way to reset in those break-in-case-of-emergency moments. When you feel like you can’t go on. When you feel like you don’t know what to do. When you feel like you need something, anything, to interrupt the momentum of whatever it is you’re in, and reset to a better place.

I made this page for a friend who works deep in the US government. Some of her values are equity and social justice and sensitivity to the people struggling the most. Not only can she not do her job, but actively expressing any of these values means she risks losing that job. Her and her colleagues’ actions are under constant surveillance, most of her peers have been forced out, and she lives under tremendous pressure. She can’t even admit she meditates without it seeming to her paranoid bosses like some communist conspiracy. Yet she won’t leave her post, because who else is going to help the millions of vulnerable people who’ve basically been abandoned by their government?

All she can do is her best, and to do her best, she needs to be able to reset in the moment. She needs to be able to reset in the parking garage before work. She needs to be able to reset before meetings. She needs to be able to reset after reading a toxic email. She needs to be able to reset before she walks in her front door and pivots to taking care of her kids – as if that were any easier.

The essence of self-regulation is taking breaks. Some modest way to slow the feedback cycle of stress, and ideally to see things in a slightly different light.

What helps you?

Maybe it’s a round of furious jumping jacks. Or slow, deliberate breathing. Or a quick confessional with a trusted friend. Different practices help different people, and different ones help in different moments.

For this page, I made four, each between three and four minutes long. You can also find links to extended versions below, and of course, plenty of longer meditations in our archive. Here we go!

Complete (Temporary) Surrender

This first is about completely giving up and letting the nervous system come to ground:

Who Gives a Shit?

The second is about thumbing your nose at the seriousness of reality and choosing instead to act like a liberated idiot. Because sometimes life is so ridiculous - and ridiculously hard - that all we can do is laugh:

Love Your Enemies: It Will Drive Them Crazy

I recently heard the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg talk about a book she coauthored called Love Your Enemies: It Will Drive Them Crazy. Her excellent subtitle never made it to press, alas, but it does capture the spirit of this third meditation, which adds a drop of vinegar into the milk of human kindness. *Be warned, in order to break the spell of intimidation that difficult characters may have on us, halfway through I veer into some unhinged endearments, before swinging back to the standard vanilla lovey lovey type sentiments:

Remember Who You Are

The last meditation is about remembering who you are and what you’re about. It’s about connecting to your deep values, your network, your mentors, ancestors. Anyone and anything that helps inspire you to do the right thing, in a way that is – and it’s a big ask – not attached to any specific outcome. Because you can’t control the outcome. In fact, sometimes the things you do and say will make things worse. So none of that, frustratingly, can be the litmus test for a job well done. But the litmus can be the relative integrity of the action itself, in the moment, done for its own sake:

Each meditation is short enough that you can hopefully use as-needed, in the middle of life.

My friends: I could not be more honoured to be in community with you. I’m continually in awe of the work you do, as parents and activists and therapists and doctors and lawyers and nurses and teachers and policy makers and social workers and researchers and writers and grandmothers and fiercely committed humans holding it down for the rest of our mammalian family. We’ll get through the year together, and many more besides. We’ll find joy in it, and joy in each other, and the world will know it.

Peace, strength and love is the way to go.

Jeff

A few quick notes—

• The Do Nothing Project (DNP) is now happening on Substack. The next one is this Sunday, January 4 at 8pm EDT. Link here.

• New to Home Base? We have over 50 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 350 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. All can be part of your daily meditation support.