Fiftieth Invitation

Inner Steps to Take for Holiday Challenges

The Holiday Season can be very challenging for people. Often the life-circumstances that are most difficult in one’s life become magnified at holiday time. Maybe you feel lonely as a single person or perhaps you feel lonely in your marriage or partnership, or someone you love is sick, or your family relationships are strained... whatever the issue is, just know that it is common to experience what you feel is off in your life as more intense than usual. If this is true for you, just know that you have lots of company at this holiday time. The expectations for holiday time frequently do not match one’s reality. This can be disappointing, depressing, isolating, despairing, and sometimes marked by sabotaging behaviors that push people and opportunities away.

First Step:  be aware that you may struggle more during the holiday time and allow space and understanding of this as a phenomenon that happens.

Second Step:  be compassionate with yourself. You don’t need any more stress on top of the stress that’s already happening.  Be intentionally extra kind to yourself. Breathe into your heart and soothe yourself in the same way you would talk to a friend or a child who is stressed out.

Third Step:  name the triggering life-circumstances that you are experiencing, (e.g. being alone while everyone seems to have somebody, feeling estranged from your partner, watching your child be unhappy, struggling in school, being unemployed, on and on...) The triggers are what you see as the reasons for your unhappiness. 

Fourth Step: name the feeling that is arising for you in relation to the trigger (e.g. lonely, sad, angry, despairing, frustrated, small, inadequate, unimportant, unworthy).

Fifth Step: track back through your memories and remember times you have felt this way before.  By doing this, you can recognize that these feelings have arisen at various times in your life and live within you. The life-circumstances are the triggers, not the cause.

Sixth Step: shift your focus from the triggering life-circumstance to the feelings that arise in you — and give permission to these feelings.  These feelings call for extra care and tenderness for yourself.  Make space for these feelings and allow them to be there. Remember, what you resist, persists.

Seventh Step: take the time to explore and name what it is that you truly want.

When we name something we want, it is usually the feeling experience we are actually seeking and that we associate having that particular feeling with particular life-circumstances.

We go into the trance of believing that we need to have “such and such” happen in our lives in order to feel a certain way.

Dare to penetrate through the layers of thought until you finally have insight into the feeling you are actually longing to experience. For example, if your mind says, “I want a partner,” inquire further with the question, “What is the feeling that I believe I would have if I have a partner?” Let’s say the answer is — “If I have a partner, I would not feel alone, and I would feel loved and worthy.”  The belief is that what is wrong right now is that I don’t have a partner and a partner is necessary in order to have the experience of feeling loved, worthy and not alone. Of course, we know that we can ask plenty of married people about how they feel in their lives and they might not respond with, “Loved, worthy and not alone.” Ultimately nothing outside of us dictates how we feel with ourselves in life. It’s an inside job. 

Eighth Step: make a list of all of the things you believe you want to be different in your life.   This may be similar to the list from the seventh step and it may be a little different.

Ninth Step: start a new list, starting with the words, “If I have _____________ (and fill the blank with one of the things on your list), I believe I would feel ________________.”

Then circle all of the feelings you are wanting to experience. These feelings are what you are truly going after.

Tenth Step: draw a big circle on a page and write all of these feelings you want to feel inside the circle. The circle contains the feeling map of what you truly want for yourself.

Eleventh Step: sit with yourself. Turn inward. Say each feeling out loud and explore where these feelings live within side of yourself and how you experience them in your body. Perhaps you may utilize memories of when you have felt these feelings before but instead of focusing on what was happening back then (as if those life circumstances caused you to feel the feelings,) focus instead on the sensations of these feelings in your body right now as you invoke them. 

These feeling states are inside of you. If you cannot access memories that give rise to these feelings, then imagine what it would be like to feel them and how you would experience them in your body. You can use your imagination and visualize scenes that help you to contact these feelings within. Whether you see yourself in a spaceship or in a faerie kingdom, it’s all yours to create and dream into.

These feelings that you long for live within you. Once you know this, you can discern what helps you to access these feelings or what makes it more difficult. There are things and people you can engage with that help you to enhance your ability to access the feeling states that you prefer.

Remember, life-circumstances don’t make us feel certain things. We enter into a societal trance believing that things outside of ourselves can make us feel certain ways, whether its a product being advertised as key to making you feel more beautiful or people in your life who keep asking you about when you are getting married, or if you are having children, or if you are going to move up in your job. 

Bottom line, every life situation has its issues. These issues often become more pronounced during the holiday season. But it’s not really about these problems. It’s about how we respond to the issues and life-circumstances in our lives.  In more circumstances than we usually realize, we are able to access the feeling states we are seeking for within ourselves. Always return again and again to being compassionate with yourself, no matter what you are feeling.

Lovefully,

devajoy