Holidays often bring up complex emotions.
Sometimes they are warm, joyous memories of family and friends. Pure bliss. If this is you, I wish you as much of this as you can hold – those memories can be a beautifully sustaining memory on a more challenging day.
For others, holidays are more painful. The first holiday after a trauma or loss can be especially difficult. If you are being triggered be very kind to yourself. It is normal for anniversaries to trigger memories and feelings. Even if some of those are ancient they must still matter to you. You can experiment with this mindfulness approach to continue to process those emotions.
Start by identifying and using language to notice what is going on. You can use the statement “I notice that I am thinking about ……. “ For example I can be a little nostalgic for Christmas when my kids were little. While sometimes those feelings are pure joy, other times they are a little more painful. At those times I can use the formula to identify and isolate my thoughts … “I notice that when I hear Christmas Carols I am thinking about my boys when they were little”.
That can sometimes give enough distance to calm the emotions. If not, expand into the feelings that have been triggered but DO NOT add more words or stories to them … e.g. for me there is a nostalgic achey love around my heart space.
Breathe into it. Breathing into any tight or stressed part of the body will often help it to relax and let go. But note that can only happen when we don’t add more drama or pain to the situation. Think about the little one who falls over and runs screaming to his dad. After a big cry and some petting he is feeling better until looks at his knee and sees the blood and starts wailing again. His knee didn’t actually start to hurt more, what happened was that his thoughts about the pain of a bloody knee made it hurt more.
In Buddhism this is called the second arrow of suffering. The first arrow is the pain that we can’t avoid. It is part of life. The second arrow – the one we shoot ourself with, is optional. Falling down can’t be helped. Creating a story around the pain is.
Loss is part of life, if we are alive we will experience loss at some time, we cannot avoid it. It needs to be fully processed and sometimes that takes an extended amount of time. That is the first arrow. Adding to the story with ‘should of’s’ or ‘if only’ or building it into a bigger drama is the second arrow. Many of us are unconsciously addicted to this second arrow, mindfulness practices such as noticing and breathing will help to identify and release that addiction. Take the time to learn to breath and process the first arrow so the second one doesn’t get you!
Happy holidays!
******** This was written with the intention of helping you to live your best life, if you want to know more about how I can help you Create The Life You Want To Live please get in touch! *******
Copyright 2018 Gay Landeta, Create The Life You Want To Live. All rights reserved.
For 30 days take a picture every day of something that means something to you. It might be your child, a leaf, a building, anything. Print it out – this step is important as our phones and social media are stuffed full of photos we forget almost immediately. Then put it in a beautiful journal and write a few (or lots) of words about why this photo is meaningful to you.
One client recently came back saying that she had a wonderful period using it – and gifted me with one. Wow! Perfect timing to try it out this quarter! I am using it and am really impressed. The psychological processes it uses to induce positivity, motivation and habit change are magic.
Martin Seligmen (a guru in the positive psychology area) considers that our meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond ourself and from developing the best from within ourself. Choosing this type of reflective journalling as a daily practice will really help align yourself with this concept, bringing in more meaning to your everyday and a sense of accomplishment even with day to day tasks.
An eclipse is a time to reset … as the full moon (which signifies our past and all we need to let go) is obscured we get the chance to reset. Then, once the moon reappears, we need to do the work to make that reset concrete.
Of course I know I ‘should’ just accept it, it was a bit of residual full moon craziness and certainly not a reflection of a usual week or the work I do. But as enlightenment is still eons away I went home caught in a negative spiral of frustration and annoyance aimed directly at myself.
Once I had got that out (and it felt good to get it out without the internal judge and jury pronouncing sentence!), I then asked myself “So Gay, obviously this can’t happen again, what are we going to do about it?” And I came up with a set of processes that will take care of most of what went wrong and the rest, well, those will be things outside my control! I felt better and slept well, instead of the old pattern of being awake all night stressing about the situation.
Another interesting piece of research I heard recently was altruistic (other focused) behaviour and depression. It appears helping others changes our brains, significantly increasing dopamine, oxytocin and other hormones that help depression.
Interesting, that same research also showed that some people will unavoidably fall into depression unless the work they do is heartfelt (my word) and makes a difference. I thought of several of my clients who struggle working in jobs that are not filling their soul. Often their only alternative is to keep doing the job to make the money to keep on keeping on. They feel trapped and depressed which is then compounded with guilt because they can’t fulfil their partners, their parents, societies …(fill in the blanks) expectations. The truth appears to be that some of us are simply hardwired to be unable to do this.
Recently, I was listening to some of the latest research on the brain and neural plasticity. I love that it is such a large and mainstream area now that you can’t keep up with all of it – you have to choose a focus area to even have a ghost of a chance to stay up to date!
In these busy times it certainly seems we have to make a decision to not be busy all the time and to become actively mindful and create space in our lives – otherwise the madness continues. This slowing down is much more difficult that it sounds though.
Perhaps someone challenges you. Perhaps you have to learn new ways to communicate to build a relationship with them, expand your compassionate heart to accept them for who they are and to accept parts of yourself that are less than attractive. You may not feel light and free but the gifts they are teaching you will help you connect more deeply with who you truly are which will, in turn help you become lighter and more free. These are truly our Zen Masters, helping us to enlightenment.
Other times those that challenge us just make us smaller. Perhaps if we were ‘a better person’ we could grow but we can’t and so we beat ourselves up. Therein lies the problem! These people are perhaps not expanding our soul. Maybe we just need to bless them and let them go, at least for the moment, giving ourself the opportunity to regroup, to lighten up and expand again.
