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My brother came down from Canada late Friday night with three young children in tow. After loading their suitcases, my two nieces and nephew slid into the back seat and the commentary started immediately.

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“This car is SUPER messy,” noted my six-year-old niece.
“Totally,” I replied. “I’ve been doing a big art project for the past two months and haven’t had any time to clean it.”
“I think the only person with a messier car than this is my Dad,” observed Zadie (with all the wisdom her twelve years allowed her).​
“The good news,” I replied, “is that it’s not a competition. We can ALL be winners.”

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Messiness — just like happiness and misery — is not worn like a badge of exclusivity. It’s unique to everyone, bearing individual traits and expressions born of personal context. The suffering of another doesn’t negate your right to be sad any more than your neighbor’s joy revokes your ability to feel elation. My mess might be different from Zadie’s dad’s, but we can be equally successful at trashing the back seats of our cars.

This Christmas just… wasn’t.

After two months of nonstop work creating the Iluminado Art Installation, followed by the rapid-fire selling of Fancy Pants and an impromptu trunk show capped off by the Monterey Museum of Art’s Solstice Party (closing the December chapter of our exhibit), I was more drained than I have ever been. Maintaining my teaching schedule and commitment to healing my clients while holding these additional creative responsibilities tore holes in the compartmentalization I rely on to stay focused. The emotional toll left my psyche feeling… thin. The professional resilience that usually keeps me steady felt as eroded as a spiderweb after a winter storm.

Speaking of storms — Tuesday night (the 23rd), just after I had finished the last of my work and begun assembling Christmas presents for wrapping, a tree fell on a power line outside our home.

Carmel is a small town with many trees, and when the winds and rain pick up in December a phenomenon occurs we like to call “Pine Tree Roulette.” Our home lost power at 11pm that night. The following day another tree cut off power not only to all of Carmel, but all the way down to Big Sur.

You probably noticed the absence of a Christmas video this year.

I’m sorry to have let you down, but there was no way we could record Montoya family shenanigans in the dark — with a windblown yard full of the corpses of potted plants and more pinecones on the ground than ticker tape after a New York parade. And even if there had been enough power, I doubt I would’ve had the reserves for the all-night editing session that usually fills my Christmas Eve.

So we took the hall pass. We brought the kids to the in-laws, hunkered down in the dark, and wrapped gifts by a single light plugged into the generator. Christmas morning consisted of a cold shower and one precious cup of hot tea. Instead of hosting, we packed everything up and drove to the grandparents, adding our offerings under their tree. And to cap it off, the only gifts my husband and I received were the ones we bought for each other.

Hurt, combined with exhaustion, is one hell of a cocktail. Add three days without power and you have a hangover that would leave the best of us on the bathroom floor.

In typical Domini fashion, I went home and rage-cleaned. A few cubic feet of fabric went into the dumpster — along with several heaps of disappointment. After clearing space for my thoughts, I invited a friend (also without power) over to work out. We sweated through the waning daylight, then braved the storm to end the night in a movie theater with a bunch of strangers watching Avatar.

(Spoiler alert: blue aliens vs humans, the good guys win again, and we lose one hero character in a 3.5-hour CGI battle. Do yourself a favor and watch it at home.)

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Changing your mind state requires a multi-pronged attack: your body chemistry (movement), your environment (rage-cleaning works), and your thoughts. I was two-thirds of the way there. The last third required finding the good.

And there was a lot of it.

• The 92-year-old client recovering from hip surgery who texted me after our last session to say his left leg hasn’t felt this good since before the accident.
• The rave reviews about Iluminado — apparently the MMA’s most popular exhibit ever.
• Helping a former triathlete walk again after a debilitating spinal injury.
• Your IG stories when Fancy Pants arrived and made you feel so good you had to share.

But my favorite was this:

For the past three months I’ve been working late on Mondays with a special team in Asia. The man we’re working with suffered a series of strokes. His extraordinary wife bought a Galileo on her daughter’s recommendation (who follows me online), and we’ve been working together to help him stand, balance, and walk again.

They are creative, responsive, relentlessly positive — learning to feel rather than force. At the end of our last session, while her husband repeated the new exercise enthusiastically, she told me I was her best Christmas present.

I can’t imagine a better one.

Gifts are great. Electricity is better. But what brings joy is what we give. And when it’s received, that joy multiplies.

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So this week I’m sharing a short excerpt from a Galileo class inspired by this work — adapted so you can do it with just a chair, a weight, and a couple yoga blocks.

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Let it ground you. Let it wake you up. Let it grow.

As for the New Year — I’m not big on resolutions.

We are not broken projects.

We’re gorgeous, imperfect systems with loose ends trailing like rainbow fringe behind us.

But I am going to try three things in January:

1. Hydrate more
2. Nap more
3. Maybe clean that car

If you’d like to join me, you know where your tap is, I recommend this nap meditation for awesome rest even if you can’t turn your brain off , and if you can’t get the energy to clean your mobile locker, you can always pay someone else to do it..

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Here’s to a not-yet-written 2026.

With love,
Domini Anne

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