How to Enjoy the Holidays When You’re Not Well
Christmas has moved to a dramatically different kind of holiday than its beginnings: it could now be more accurately called “Stressmas.” It has truly become a time of stress: having to get the right presents for the right people; getting enough presents; how much money to spend or not to spend; expecting certain gifts from specific people, who and how many to invite to celebrations. Our attachment to people’s reactions to our gifts and our reactions to others’ gifts reminds us of what the Buddha said, “Attachment is the cause of all our suffering.” To celebrate the birth of Jesus—one who taught unconditional love, perpetual forgiveness, and said, “I came that your joy might be full!”—perhaps we need to rethink the whole picture; otherwise, we are not celebrating unconditional love but instead creating stress. And since stress causes 80% or more of our physical symptoms, this could be seen as a season we have celebrated in a way that brings illnesses or intensifies the ones we are already manifesting. It is the “ego mind” that has taken over—that internal voice which promises love, safety, peace, and joy, but always gets us to think or do that which produces the opposite.
Why not start by consciously deciding that we want to promote love, joy, and peace instead of stress and sickness during this season. Can we risk letting spiritual values—happiness, peace, and love—dominate rather than pressure, “have to’s,” guilt, and therefore, stress and possible sickness? Do we really want material objects and corporate profits to dominate our holidays and our lives? We might even tell our family and friends about our decision to make these changes. And, if we are already sick, why make it worse by creating more stress? And if we are healthy, why create stress to make ourselves sick and unhappy? We must remember that sickness is a choice; though, we often make it more unconscious by blaming it on something external. Now is the time to begin to make it conscious.
Some tools for keeping love, peace, and joy—and, therefore, health—more of a priority this holiday season:
- Give priority to meditating at the beginning and end of each day. You might even keep repeating to yourself this mantra: “I choose joy, love, and peace instead of stress today.” Breathe deeply and say the mantra 30 or 40 times.
- Whenever you find yourself feeling pressure, start breathing deeply, fully emptying your lungs and then breathe in fully, filling the belly, and then adding a little more into the chest. Keep repeating throughout the day, so that you do not play out the American saying: “I didn’t have time to breathe.”
- Make sure that each gift you buy or give only comes from the heart—no “shoulds” or “have to’s.”
- Do the thymus heart rub when you start to feel anxious, pressured, or guilty. Place your hand flatly over the upper chest. Begin to rub gently and soothingly in a circle, to the right, looking on from the outside. Then, as you continue rubbing, say, “I deeply love and accept myself even though I have started to feel stressed (pressured, guilty, etc.). I deeply love and accept myself because I am so glad I caught these negative thoughts. And I deeply love and accept myself as I choose to let these thoughts go.” Repeat this throughout the day every time you catch yourself thinking a thought that takes away your joy, peace, or love.
You might also say, “I make this a holiday of love, peace, health, and joy,” remembering that it is your thoughts that cause your pain or joy. “And I am in control of them.”
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from Your Power to Heal: Resolving Psychological Barriers to Your Physical Health by Henry Grayson.
Henry Grayson, PhD, has been lecturing, teaching, and providing professional training for more than 30 years. He is the founder of the Synergetic Therapy Institute, co-chairman of the PTSD division of the Stand for The Troops Foundation, and author of Your Power to Heal: Resolving Psychological Barriers to Your Physical Health. For more information, visit henrygrayson.com.
Becoming a Person
When I first met my partner Julie, almost thirteen years ago, I remember telling her that my greatest fear in life was that I would turn out to be “mediocre”. She looked at me and said, “there is only one thing that is mediocre about you and that is the way you’re dressed. But we can fix that. Just give me your credit card.” And Julie has done a great job of improving my wardrobe over the past ten plus years. But my point is that I had a dreadful fear of mediocrity, of somehow being like other people, being average and unremarkable; I felt like I would do anything to stand out and be different.
Recently, I have begun experimenting with dropping all need for specialness. I can see that there is a small child in me that wanted love and attention in a crowded environment (four older siblings) and that a large part of my motivation was not a spiritual need to express my unique being (which is how I had explained this unrelenting drive to express myself uniquely) but a psychological need to earn love. What if I am perfectly love-able and I am not doing anything particularly extraordinary? What if I am going to the laundrymat (we are renovating our home and our washer and dryer have been offline for several months), and I am as ordinary as ordinary gets, and I have no need to stand out in any way? (As an important aside, it is always so interesting to me when I uncover something that has psychological roots, like this need to be extraordinary in order to receive love, and to notice how I have been operating under a spiritual justification, in this case that I have been focused on expressing human uniqueness).
So I have been experimenting with enjoying the ordinary, not solving any big Sounds True problems or making “big deals” or creating a big splash of any kind. And I am noticing that I am happier than I have ever been. I am relaxing into being one of six plus billion people and simply being “one of us.” I don’t have anything to prove or anything to earn. Instead, it is about being present to what is needed and asked in the moment without a big agenda. I feel like a person instead of a striving determined-to-be-extraordinary achiever. And what I am noticing is that the glistening of the trees is brighter, the fur on Jasmine’s back (Jasmine is our 16-year old cocker spaniel) is even softer, and that I really enjoy going to the laundry mat!
Write. Reflect. Dream: Recommended Reads
Content to Soothe the Soul of Your Inner Writer
From yoga luminary and artist Elena Brower, Practice You, is a sacred text of your own design.
Practice You is a map to your highest self; a field guide of your own creation. The pages of this Journal are full of potent prompts and inviting spaces, awaiting your contemplation and discoveries.
Within these pages you will find a series of Explorations, one for each of nine aspects of being. Each exploration offers instructions and inquiries to help you design new attitudes, fresh perspectives, and stay on track with your intentions.
Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer & Living an Awakened Life by Albert Flynn DeSilver
Stories, dynamic meditations, and innovative writing exercises to spark creativity and spiritual awakening.
The best writers say their work comes from a source beyond the thinking mind. But how do we access that source? “We must first look inside ourselves and be willing to touch that raw emotional core at the heart of a deeper creativity,” Writes Albert Flynn DeSilver. In Writing as a Path to Awakening, this renowned poet, writer, and teacher shows you how to use meditation to cultivate true depth in your writing—so your words reveal layers of profound emotional insight and revelation that inspire and move your readers.
The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte
Your bucket list. Quarterly objectives. Strategic plans. Big dreams. Goals. Lots of goals and plans to achieve those goals—no matter what. Except …
You’re not chasing the goal itself, you’re actually chasing the feeling that you hope achieving that goal will give you.
Which means we have the procedures of achievement upside down. We go after the stuff we want to have, get, or accomplish, and we hope that we’ll be fulfilled when we get there. It’s backwards. And it’s burning us out.
With The Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte brings you a holistic life-planning tool that will revolutionize the way you go after what you want in life. Unapologetically passionate and with plenty of warm wit, LaPorte turns the concept of ambition inside out and offers an inspired, refreshingly practical workbook for using the Desire Map process:
Art of Attention by Elena Brower and Erica Jago
Yoga begins with physical well-being. But it can also transport us—through meditation, self-awareness, and movement—into a lifelong exploration of presence, elegance, and deeper life purpose. With Art of Attention, Elena Brower and Erica Jago show us the way. Distilled from their acclaimed workshops and training programs, this multifaceted book can be used as:
• A step-by-step workshop for merging movement-based mindfulness with traditional yoga
• A “tool kit” of asanas, meditations, self-inquiry questions, and healing practices for creating your own daily spiritual practice
• An uplifting source of visual beauty and wisdom teachings for inner reflection and elevation
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
Experience a modern classic on writing as you’ve never heard it before. With nearly one million copies of Writing Down the Bones in print, Natalie Goldberg has helped change the way writing is practiced in homes, schools, and workshops across America. Through her heartfelt personal reflections and her ingenious Zen-based exercises, Goldberg makes writing available to you as a tool for personal expression, self-exploration, and healing.
Goldberg offers new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. Join her as she looks back on her life, sharing the story of how her meditation studies with Zen master Katagiri Roshi inspired her to develop practices for “writing down the bones”: the essential, awakened speech of the mind. Here is a treasury of tested ideas, suggestions, and exercises that help new writers get started, and seasoned writers keep going.
The Writing Life by Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg
In The Writing Life, Cameron and Goldberg join forces for the first time in this revealing dialogue that speaks to our common search for an everyday spirituality.
Join these two creative giants as they explode cherished misconceptions about who should write, and why they should do it, opening the door to the writer’s world for everybody, not just a chosen few. Goldberg and Cameron take us inside their personal lives as committed writers and spiritual seekers, and explore the following questions: How can writing best be practiced? What is the difference between therapeutic writing and writing for publication? How do we conquer the twin dragons of mood and time? Is it dangerous or inspirational to dabble in different arts such as music, painting, and writing? How is addiction related to the writer’s life?
Edgy, surprising, and useful for its hard-won advice, The Writing Life is an invitation to a life-transforming act that requires no more than a pen, some paper, and the will to get started.
The Mystery of Thanksgiving
We are quite sure that tomorrow will come, that the most sacred breath will be there, that grace will take shape as the sun falling into the ocean, as the moon in the sky, and as the crystals in the newly fallen snow. That the particles of love will continue to configure as the precious deer that we run into on our morning walk. It is so easy to take for granted that we will be given one more opportunity to touch and hold another, and fill them with our love.
But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so precarious, so extraordinary – that something is happening that is so very precious, rare, and outrageous – and that it will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us give thanks on this new day by doing whatever we can to help others, by being willing to burn for love, never apologizing for our uniqueness, sensitivity, and vulnerability.
At the end of this life – which is sure to come much, much sooner than we’d like – it is quite unlikely we’ll be asking if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, if we completed some mythical spiritual journey, perfected ourselves, played it safe, or achieved all of our goals. Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?
Did I pause each day to behold the movement of grace as it has unfolded in each and every radiant here and now moment? Did I look with awe into the miracle sunset and the glory of the stars and give my raw beating heart to this world? Did I risk everything to know the preciousness of what is truly happening here? Was I willing to feel more, care so deeply, let everyone matter, and be utterly devastated at even the possibility of one more sunrise? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love?
Did I spend my time here in this star of love wisely, with my heart open and available, knowing it could be broken in any moment? Did I dance with the beloved around the moon, wander with her into the desert and into the darkness, play with her in the depths of the oceans, and give everything for just one glimpse of the mysteries of separation and union?
I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever thanksgiving days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.
Photographer unknown
May love be resurrected in your heart today…
May love be resurrected in your heart today, and may it wash through each and every cell of your most sacred body, dripping out through your words, your presence, the way you listen, your willingness to care and get gooey messy and sticky in love, and through the way you touch and hold another. May love make use of your eyes to see, your ears to hear, your words to speak sweetness, your body to hold and touch; and may that love that keeps the stars from falling out of the sky guide you and show you the way home.
May it be revealed to you that this love is not something that you will find one day, something that will come to you, or something that you will finally reach as part of your quest. Love is not and never was separate from what you are, but is what this precious body is made of. It is the substance of every cell of your heart, every synapse in your outrageously miraculous brain, every strand of every light particle of your miracle-DNA, and of every petal of every flower in this and all universes.
Wishing all of my sisters and brothers the most precious Easter, and may each one of you – whether gay, straight, transgendered, or utterly undefineable as we all truly are – allow love to have you, finally, once and for all, as we are told Christ did… to take this body, this entire sensory organism, and to make use of it to scatter its secret essence in the four directions.
The gift of pure rest
Please give yourself the gift of rest from trying so hard to ‘change,’ ‘heal,’ ‘transform,’ and ‘awaken.’ It can be so exhausting to chronically abandon the here and now in the name of great project of the improvement of ‘me.’ Take some time on this new day to set aside the frenetic scramble to be other than what you are.
Love yourself enough to set aside your questions and demand for understanding, even for a moment, and sink into your sacred body and senses, connect with the natural world, and with the aliveness within. Open your heart to the shimmering forms around you, blooming in front of your very own eyes and inviting you into union with natural radiant presence. Dare to consider that nothing is missing and nothing has gone wrong.
Allow today to be a day of solace from the weary journey, from finding ‘answers’ to questions, and from changing yourself from one thing into another. Whatever state of consciousness is arising now is the perfect place to start—to meet yourself, others, and the sacred world as if for the first time. You need not go anywhere else or become anyone else to know this. For love is forming as your body and your senses and your experience right here and right now.
