\indent we will consider two recent open problems stating that certain statistics on various sets of combinatorial objects are equidistributed. the first, posed by anders claesson and svante linusson, relates nestings in matchings of $2n$ points on a line to occurrences of a certain pattern in permutations in $s_n$. the second, posed by miles jones and jeffrey remmel, relates occurrences of a large class of consecutive permutation patterns to occurrences of the same pattern in the cycles of permutations. we will prove an extension of the garsia-milne involution principle and use it to solve both problems.