What's the pulse out there? Many of us opted for a quiet New Year's Eve choosing Mozart and a glass of wine in front of the fireplace over getting drunk, hanging off the rafters, and negotiating a statistically dangerous drive back home in a sort of mad compensatory gesture.

It's really just not that time of year.

I'm a coach, and judging from the mailbag and phone sessions, it's a low energy right now, mentally and emotionally. This is our natural desire for homeostasis, self-correcting after a change. Wanting things externally and internally to get back to normal. One of the rules of physics is "What goes up, must come down." It applies to emotions as well.

Picture a graph. We went way UP over the holidays and now our inner wisdom is taking us way DOWN, so we can restabilize at the midpoint again. This is where our system wants to be because extremes of emotion in either direction cause stress and strain.

If you're feeling "uneasy" about this rather peaceful state, it's likely you got the sort of parental message my client Rebecca did. Whenever she was bored, or idle, her mother gave her a nasty chore to do. She began to connect idle time with punishment.

EQ is all about unhooking connections that don't work. If a peaceful state stresses you out, look at what you're doing to yourself and give yourself a break. That's not good Emotional Hygiene. If pleasure makes you feel guilty, or contentment makes you uneasy, or feeling grateful feels like tempting fate, or someone giving you a gift makes you suspicious or feel obligated, how about taming those feelings and then reconnecting them in a new, better way? That's what EQ is all about.

Accept this energy. Enjoy it. It will change. Put down the whip and let yourself rest. Hibernate like the bears in the woods. It will all be there when you come back, mentally and emotionally, and if you've been good to yourself, you'll have more than enough energy for it. In honor of this energy, I'm not rolling out my programs for 2006 yet. When I went to the store yesterday, it was jarring to see the more efficient retailers had already stripped the Christmas displays down and replaced them with Valentine's. "Not yet," thought I. "I'm not through with Christmas yet. I haven't the energy right now."

The energy will return unless you feed it. Feeling lazy is a part of nature's rhythm. Chastising yourself, or worrying about it, or lashing your partner into a frenzy to compensate is not. Rest, restore, go with the process, not against it, and whatever you do, please don't demand of others that they "snap out of it." Ponder instead this wise Arabian proverb: "He who makes a mistake is still our friend. He who lengthens or shortens a melody is still our friend. But he who violates the rhythm unawares can never be our friend."

About the author:

Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach, http://www.susandunn.cc, mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc . Individual coaching, Internet courses, ebooks, EQ Alive! coach certification program, rated #1, training worldwide. For nutriceuticals, skin care, baby products, cosmetics, anti-aging, acne, go to http://susandunn.myarbonne.com . Email for FR** EQ ezine