The holiday season. “Dun dun dun”, as is heard in Clark W. Griswolds house. But we all know that there are really beautiful and heart warming parts of the holidays too and most of us wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s my favourite time of the year.
But let’s be real, depending on how our holidays play out, it’s the perfect time to be under tons of pressure. All the shopping, the cooking, baking, the cleaning, the spending, seeing family that you might not resonate with anymore, and all the comparisons that sometimes take over as less than helpful thoughts.
For many, this is the mother of triggering occaisions. It’s when we work super hard to be the best giver, the best baker, and the best decorator, you know the rest. The holidays are when women, or the mother figure in the family, are expected to step up, big time.
How we end up feeling about our holiday experiences depends on 2 things.
First, how much we rely on our own ability to look inside ourselves to determine what choices will truly give us the holiday we want, as opposed to following social conditioning that tells us what to do to be good, scroogie, or somewhere inbetween.
Second, how much you can work through your own voice wound and not hide in the kitchen cooking for most of the holidays.
Here are a few tips for you to consider as the holidays start kicking up.
Recognize the pressure that social conditioning from the human sauce brings you, and where your biggest triggers live. Where are you most drawn to compete with faceless pressure to strive for what may seem right in the moment, but is more than what you really can or want to manage? Mine was outdoor decorating, but it could be your cooking, your wrapping, or how much you paid for gifts. That all becomes and external source of self-judgement. Write down whatever you come to understand.
Consciously separate yourself from the sauce. Once you understand what your triggers are to overextending yourself based on what the world expects, you can look at it more objectively. Leave the sauce for the pasta, visually and figuritively. Visualize yourself in the middle of an amazing holiday, with a big circle drawn around you and what you really want, leaving the chaos outside. Stick it on your bathroom mirror as a reminder that you don’t need the human sauce or it’s social conditioning. You have everything you need inside of you.
Decide how you really want to feel this holiday season. Is it calm, relaxed, well rested, money left in your wallet, generous with those less-fortuanate, well-fed without going overboard on the sugar? Do you want to feel connected to those you really love being around? Do you want to experience, more than anything, the love and peace that the holiday season is all about?
Use your voice to make all this happen. Your voice isn’t just the one you speak to others with, it’s also the one you speak to yourself with. Use your inner voice to allow yourself to make choices that actually work for you (like naps!), instead of feeling the holiday hangover of overdoing. Choose what makes you feel 100% how you want to feel, along with whatever will bring you those experiences. Always remember, your life, your choices.
Support yourself. Make it a regular thing to connect in meditation or just in quiet solitude. You have clarity of how you want to show up during the holidays, use your inner self to hold you to it.
When we follow our social conditioning and let our voice wound keep us quiet, it really is the perfect storm. Each one is a challenge on it’s own, both together means a less than great holiday.
The holidays tend to take over, like a fast running train. That means we can’t just pick up where we left off last year and expect things to be different this year.
We need a plan that serves us. You will feel the difference.
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