Okay, I know the thing these days is succinct posts with practical bullet points and sound bites. That’s not what I’m doing here. I’m going with

1. Old-fashioned storytelling
   
2. A challenge that’s also an invitation—an invitallenge
3. Okay, fine. I’ll end with actionable bullet points. You can skip to those now if you like.

                                               
My object here is to invite you to use the holidays for your becoming, not for a habitual replay of old stories and bygone identities. Use this time of festivity, connection, and sacred renewal to honor your healing and evolution.
 
A Story of My Hapless Mother and Holiday Misery
In my growing-up story, the woman who played the mother character was both beautiful and flimsy. She had no concept of her own beauty, no solid grasp on her own goodness and inherent worthiness. (Both of these had always been constantly, in clipped comments and spiteful tones, thrown into question by her own mother.)
 
Once, when we lived in France (I was maybe seven), I remember creeping into the living room during a gathering that featured grown-ups speaking French and English with more accents than I could track. My eyes flashing across the room, I captured a live snapshot of my Arkansas mom taking a drag off a cigarette. My mom didn’t smoke! But hey—in 1960-something, just anyone can reach for that prop in a smoky social scene and get away with it. I was struck in that unforgettable moment by her beauty. She could’ve been a movie star, from where I stood in semi-hiding.

There were other such moments of brief, dazzling light shone on the subject of my mother, but they never stuck. She would always go back to her fretting self, probably jerked into that known place by the mother an ocean away whom she kept close in her mind, whose worn voice played in shrill loops over anything new my mom might try to tell herself. No certain opinion, no clear creation (she sometimes stripped old furniture and infused it with new life), no authentic laughter startled out of her in an unguarded moment ever ushered in the woman she wanted to be.
 
Nope, she reverted every time to the frazzled mom who could cry for days or scream for hours, because it was all too much for her. Dad’s work called him away, a lot, to spend two and three weeks at a time in Spain, Portugal, Italy—wherever; wherever the women were sexier and stronger than she was. She was stuck in a small Normandy village, alone and adrift among the Frogs, inept in every way, challenged even to ask the grocer a question.
 
She didn’t trust her capacity to hold her husband’s attention, to be a good mother, to put any kind of beauty into the world, despite the fact that she could and often would do all three—or dabble at least, till her insecurities ridiculed her in my grandmom’s voice into getting small again. (If she were really so small, she wouldn’t have felt so trapped and miserable there, but she didn’t have that interpretation at her disposal. She didn’t have tools for moving from her habitual thoughts to something kinder and truer.)
 
Holidays during the years in France actually still glitter in my memory. I believe these were actually fun events, with warmer-than-normal family feelings infusing the festive scenes, and a smattering of gifts wrapped in gold and doused in magic. But then, just before I turned ten, we moved back to the U.S., and that put us in driving distance of my mom’s childhood home, or what she still simply called home (not yet having been able, with all the corporate moves, to truly make her own).

This launched years of dreaded and dreadful holiday events. There was no choice, or any concept of possible choice, in the matter of what we were doing for the holidays. That decision was made by cultural expectations upheld with a vengeance by upright human beings: we were going to be with family. This would include predictable church scenes, predictable meal-preparation and meal scenes, predictable gift-opening scenes. Some of these things were just fine on the whole, or seemed to be, but for my mother, it all represented nonstop encounters with her demons. I learned to discern, over the years, the constant subtext in things said by her mother and sister and the increasingly obvious preference given by the one to the other. My mother always paled in comparison to her more glamorous, more confident sister.

Once returned to our nuclear-family reality, we then cycled through the predictable scenes of my mother processing the self-esteem trauma reactivated by holiday events. First, she was just pissy, peevish, prone to small explosions. As the pressure built, she started giving my father hell for all he didn’t do for her—and not that she was wrong, especially with Uncle Pill and Aunt Glam so freshly in view. As with the glaring contrast in the love my grandmom doled out between her two daughters, no one could miss how the diamonds and finery Aunt Glam uncovered from her husband's gift boxes put to shame the not-much and not-memorable stuff my mother pulled from hers.
 
From there, she moved to giving her kids hell for all that we thought of her (we thought she was our servant; we thought she should do everything for us that we would never have even an ounce of gratitude for; we thought that she had no right to any happiness of her own—actually, all wrong, and all very confusing to the kids involved, stated as trembling facts, punctuated with slaps). There were predictable scenes of her going silent, crying over slow, morose ironing or tense chopping of onions and slapping together of casseroles. There were the quiet moments she got lost in a book—an activity that allowed her to pretty much disappear and maybe feel only half-bad about it. (I liked the books best, feeling maybe only half-anxious about them.)
 
In the culture my mother grew up in, stepping from ill-favored daughter to hastily taken wife with no transitional time to know herself and choose her path, she certainly had no choice over how to spend the holidays. She had no concept of her guidance system that let her know which way to head through inner tugs, through sensations of contraction versus expansion, through emotions to pay attention to for the information they bring. She knew only rules in a punitive Universe, embodied by a paternal white-bearded God figure that she was not allowed to question, and wouldn’t dare re-envision.
 
I’m so fortunate for where I am in time. I’ve noticed a million times over, throughout my adult life, that I’ve got a wealth of resources my mom didn’t have. I even smoked freely for a brief time and inhabited my own beauty guiltlessly, if not with total comfort. I rejected the religion of my childhood categorically and took years of trial-and-error experimentation to rebuild a belief system that honored the spiritual truth of my being—something I was entirely and effortlessly in touch with as a child. (It helped that the France years meant virtually no religious constraints, as there was no Baptist church in spitting or driving distance, and my parents trusted no other religion.)
 
My Invitallenge to You.
If your holidays are miserable and your holiday choices are based in obligation or some lie you tell yourself about having no choice, I want to sweetly ask: what are you doing? This is not 1960-something.
 
Please gauge the evolution. Like me, you have healed and evolved beyond your parents. Would you like to keep evolving? Are you willing to use anything and everything to keep coming closer to your guidance system, holidays included? Will you practice presence anywhere and any time of year, especially since presence is simply about tuning in to what’s here right now, and the here-and-now still exists during the holidays? Reminder that presence allows you to access choice, because your connection to the felt, sensory experience of this moment, as it actually is, allows you to bypass autopilot tendencies; question antiquated assumptions and stories; and reach right now for a choice that actually makes sense (to you).
 
Actionable Bullet Points.

• Refuse to be a victim of the holidays, which intention is best served by being clear about choice and getting 100 percent behind each choice you make. Note that the latter may require you to get supports in place so you’re able to do just that. It’s fine to choose family traditions, but you don’t have to. If you do, don’t bitch and moan and dread; don’t find fault with the characters you already knew would be part of the scene, showing up the way they do; don’t act shocked by predictable things unfolding in predictable ways.
• Use the holidays to connect to and follow your guidance system. Respond to inner guidance around minutia (when to put something down, bring something up, walk away for a minute), so that you can follow the guidance for big things too: I’m not eating that food or explaining my dietary choices; I’m leaving for hours of solo adventure the second someone starts bleating about the favorite family scapegoat; I’m going home on day two instead of day eight.
• Practice presence, because that’s how you’ll stay out of past or future, how you’ll tune in to information (guidance) coming in through your body and senses now, how you’ll calm and support yourself with the breath, and how you’ll have access to choice—the one you need to make right this second in order to have fun, to get your needs met, to give your authentic best—and perhaps to keep heart and mind wide open.
• Play with boundaries. Sometimes it’s great to stay open, and sometimes your well-being asks for you to shut something, move away from it, end it altogether. Feel into your right yes and no and seek to tell the truth, or aim as close to it as you can get in the moment. Again, practice boundaries with the small, inconsequential stuff so you can do it with bigger things too. If you think you’re not good at this, there’s only one way to get better: yeah, it’s true—practice. Why not practice during the holidays?

I just talked to a brilliant and beautiful friend who's staying away from family of origin this year during the holidays. It took her years to get to this level of self-permission. I invite you to it. What I invite you to, more specifically, is just the level of permission and boundaries you need. And if you choose to engage with anyone at all who brings up stress for you or in any way makes you question your goodness or well-being, please get lots of supports in place. (Here's a solid holiday support I offer, an audio program with written supplements, priced at $22 for 2019 Holidays.)

Why not use this time of festivity, connection, and sacred renewal to honor your healing and evolution?
Love & blessings, Jaya

Seriously: Check out my Holiday program, Before They Drive You Crazy, TAKE THE WHEEL. It's chock-full of spiritual-meets-practical supports.
And here's my free pdf that offers a formula and script for holding your boundaries during hard conversations with difficult people.
 Get the free pdf lays out the premises for an experiment in conscious dating.

(most helpful mixed metaphor ever)

​
I'm about to do a whole audio program on difficult personalities, to serve you during the holidays and always. Here, in this post, I offer a crazy-helpful and super-simple way to determine your base-level response to anyone.

I've been inviting people for years now to meet every face as the face of God.

It's gotten me in trouble before when people think I mean, Say yes to anything anyone says to you! Open the door to anyone who knocks! Oh, no no no. Sometimes the face of God shows up for you to learn to say no or practice unapologetic door-shutting, even shutting it in someone's face. In other words, some faces of God invite you to hold a boundary.

Recently, out of the blue, I happened on a crazy simple way to think of this concept and parse out what any particular face has got for you when it shows up here and now.

Think of two available buckets that you can drop any face of God in.
   
Bucket #1 is the face of God that makes you go, Oh, YES. Variations:

• Yeah, that sounds right.
• This hits me right.
• Perfect!
• This confirms what I was thinking and leaves me trusting myself more.
• This brings clarity [relief, expansiveness, a sense of hope, a reminder I can trust myself, another burst of energy where I was faltering].
• That makes crystal-clear something that was fuzzy.
• This brings to the surface what was still kind of buried.
• This feels like the missing piece.
• I think I just got my next operating instructions.

Hey, it could also be a partial yes (so focus on the yes part), as in, Ooh, that little bit! That one part is spot-on.

And bucket #2, of course, is the one that makes you go, NO. Variations:

• That hits me wrong.
• I don't know why, and don't need to know why: this just doesn't feel right.
• This makes me feel bad [heavy, confused, scared, required to let go of what matters to me].
• This makes me second-guess myself and lose self-trust.
• This inspires me to declare opposites day.
• That strengthens my resolve to do it my way.
• I hear the wisdom [clarity, sound thinking, logic] in that, and it's still not right for me right now.
• I need to move away from this voice.

 
There. This basic parsing system alone can make a world of difference. You're free when you can leave people alone to do what they do and simply mind what you do. When you're crystal-clear that you don't have to react to people words (just hear them and parse away, bucket #1 or bucket #2), then you just get to mind your peace, and leave off any painful engaging with (mental or spoken)

• defenses
• responses
• explanations
• anger
• frustration
• teeth-grinding judgments

... and whatever else you do that disrupts your own state while they're just doing what they do. I repeat: Leave them to their ideas, opinions, criticism, advice. They get to have them. You get to have your peace.
Love & blessings, Jaya

Recipes for Sanity & Self-Honoring during the Holidays

It's not just your crazy mother or clueless cousin doing what predictably makes you quietly go insane. It's you. It's that you predictably go quietly insane.

This collection of simple and radical recipes should get you to more nuances of grounded, present, open, easy, humor-aware. (For a humorous angle on what normally feels like no joke, see the Recipe for Not Being Driven Insane by the Ones Who Drive You Insane. There's a radical experiment possible with the Recipe for Letting Go of Control—take it to heart.) All of this should support you to give thanks at Thanksgiving (and beyond) from a genuinely appreciative stance.

Use the headings to navigate all the material below. Go to what serves you and what you want to serve. Recipes are preceded by some notes on presence. (I'm on a personal and professional mission to keep going deeper and getting more subtle with what it means to be present.)

These are the recipes covered below (scroll down to "RECIPES BEGIN HERE" and sub-headings below that of specific ones that call to you):

• Recipe for Letting Go of Control (the disaster-zone metaphor that puts it all in perspective)
• Recipe for Presence
• Recipe for Being at Ease
• Recipe for Connecting to Others You May Not Typically or EasilyConnect With
• Recipe for Not Being Driven Insane by the Ones Who Drive You Insane
• Recipe for Connecting to Source, Self, and Others

Notes on Presence
Going back to known people and places with predictable challenges and triggers doesn't require replaying the same call-and-response scenarios.

How is it even possible to do it differently? In a word, presence.
Presence is the how. It's the thing that allows you to have half a prayer of choosing (hey, even super-solid agency in choosing) how you want to respond, as opposed to reacting from your well-rehearsed personality strategy. It even helps you find your footing again when you catch yourself in reactive mode, either internally or externally. (Sharp tone? Rolling/glaring eyes hijacked by your inner teen?)

I actually believe it's not that hard to cultivate presence and step in differently. And in fact, your quotient of ease will keep increasing as you do, then it gets easier and easier.

When you're in the past reviewing or measuring the present against all you've ever dealt with; or when you're in the future (even, how will I get to the end of this day)—you've left the present. You've therefore abandoned yourself (because your actual self is here, now) and you're not engaged with your smarts, wit, potential clarity, power of choice, compassion for self and others (I could go on). You're also unable to take responsibility for self-care, never mind total self-honoring that nurtures and invites your best self.

Presence doesn't require exertion. It's more about relaxing and allowing than straining. It does require a willingness to keep practicing, keep coming back, keep tuning in. It also requires allowing what is: thus, when you're present, you'll be present not only to the love and nice smells and unicorns and rainbows, but to the twisting in your gut, the painful ideologies of other human beings, your own tense body and judgmental mind, and so on. Presence means tuning in to and allowing whatever is—not setting it up so that you control what is (probably what you're up to when you can't relax).

Uh, what's the point of getting present (in the midst of what could be love-fun-warm-fuzzies) to what hurts, feels bad, creates sorrow, anger, and tense resentment?

I've got 3 great answers to that.
Great answer #1: You're in reality and aligned with what's actually happening when you get present to all of it. This means you're more sane, and more equipped to think clearly. (Delusion is so messy.)

Great answer #2: Since presence means tuning in to ALL that is, you get to choose your focus. That's actually a lot of power—just be willing to be sloppy and graceless for a minute; elegance will gradually increase. Your choice in focus will allow you to respond more often than you react, which includes responding kindly to your own reactivity when it grabs the reins. Presence means you're here in time and space, alert to what's actually happening, accepting it and responding to it authentically (including moving toward what you want more of and away from what you want less of).

Great answer #3: Presence also allows you to make choices, draw boundaries, and note when you need a break, a reset button, or any form of self-care. Presence allows for swift course-correction.

Swift course-correction is one of my favorite things to play with. Never beat yourself up for noticing you're not present. Then there's no pain in finding yourself off-track (you WILL sometimes find yourself off-track): with no judgment, you get to simply and quickly course-correct as awareness comes in. A neutral metaphor from Abraham-Hicks is the rumble strip on the freeway: as soon as you feel the tires go bumpety-bump-bump-bump, just veer back into your lane. No need to self-chastize or agonize over being on the rumble strip again. (One of my favorite simple phrases to go to: There's no problem.)


RECIPES BEGIN HERE

Recipe for Letting Go of Control (the disaster-zone metaphor that puts it all in perspective)

1. Go into the scene mentally giving everyone permission to do what they do.
2. Pretend each character is a force of nature (they all are).
3. Pretend you're in a disaster zone, so your mobility is compromised, your usual comforts are gone, it's a total mess with no end in sight, and you've got two jobs:
   1. Watch for how you might get your needs met, and keep finding what supports you; keep noticing that you're okay, really.
   2. Watch for how you can help or alleviate the suffering of those around you. You're not bigger than all that's happening in the disaster zone. You're not God, if you will. But you can offer some ease, humor, physical help with tasks, compassion, kindness.

This will set you up nicely for having no expectations of comfort. By and large, people don't rail at tsunamis and earthquakes. They surrender to what's happening, get help, offer support to one another. So surrender. Learn what's possible in the midst of all the crazy factors that are just way beyond your control.

Recipe for Presence
Use these three steps to COME BACK to presence. (They can be gone through over and over and over. If you think it's not working, this could simply mean that you're not willing to go through them one more time, now.)

1. Ground yourself: Tune in to your feet on the ground; feel your body in the furniture. Feel the connection. Now you're more in your body.
2. Connect to your senses: Pleasant or unpleasant, there are things to see, hear, feel, smell, taste (and aren't you charmed if you have access to all five of those?). So go through them, one more time. Now your bodily senses are activated and informing you about what's actually happening (not about stories from past or bleak predictions of future—no need to predict even the next hour).
3. Connect to the breath: Watching your breath go in and out, you come to the core of you. In other words, you get centered or you recenter. You slow the breath down and actively, consciously feel its soothing effects. As you do this, the breath naturally slows and elongates. Now your entire nervous system thanks you.

Recipe for Being at Ease
Know, going in, some basic things about ease. (Think of ease as closely related to personal power. Picture a large cat: ease; power.) Periodically remind yourself of these. Note that the recipe for presence pairs well with the one for ease.

1. You don't have to smile and—counter to what you were told growing up—there's no special virtue in smiling. Notice when smiling makes you feel worse, not better; fake, not engaging.
2. Take solace in plain face, and connect to people from a more authentic place by not arranging your features (thus tensing) to convey something to them. (Needless things we try to convey to others through facial efforts: I'm nice, I'm safe, you're fine, you can trust me, I'm really listening, etc. All of those things can be conveyed or gotten to organically, in good time, with no straining whatsoever. With no effort on your part, they take over the face and express in countless ways when they're actually needed and authentically operative.)
3. Eat slowly. Chew a lot. Enjoy the food you eat by really tasting and experiencing it, by noticing when more feels bad, not good. Just put your fork down for a moment and breathe into your belly—the food will still be there when you pick it up. On top of whatever you're navigating, why add the physical discomfort brought about by unconscious eating? (Here's a blog post with 6 Conscious-Eating Tips.)
4. Apply #3 to anything else that could throw you off—alcohol, sugar, sarcasm.

Recipe for Connecting to Others You May Not Typically or Easily Connect With
This one likely boils down to, Be quiet if you have little or nothing to say and be real when you speak.

1. More than anything, use eyes and alert senses to connect—notice how you use face arrangements, tension, words and word formulas, and drop instead into silence and sensing.
2. Listen more to connect. Listen for something new. Listen for something you're curious about. Listen inside for what sparks you to really want to speak.
3. Tell the truth in conversation or be quiet, but don't pretend. Pretending is too costly of your inner resources.
4. Follow your interests—go for what you actually want to ask and talk about. It's such a relief to let go of formulas and expectations in conversation. (You can literally say, "I don't want to answer that question. I want to talk about this instead." Well, I've done it, anyway.)

Recipe for Not Being Driven Insane by the Ones Who Drive You Insane
This makes a game of the whole thing. What if you were having fun with your aversions and judgments instead of by turns indulging them and feeling bad about them?

1. Go into the scene mentally giving everyone permission to do what they do.
2. Do not be shocked or outraged by the nonsurprising same-old-same-old. Do not bristle against what you knew you signed up for by agreeing to enter the scene.
3. When someone predictably plays their role perfectly, or even generates the best self-caricature you've ever seen, admire that! Be in awe of how they nail it every time—even still surprise you when you think you've seen all their tricks! Mentally give them an award if they outdo themselves. (Hell, you could even sit around making an actual award if you want something to do with your hands besides wring them or shove more food and drink in your face.)
4. For the royally challenging one, keep a piece of paper in your pocket with the predictable and (potentially) maddening things they do already written down. During private moments, check them off. (If no prep time in advance, you can note them as they happen.) If you want to create a point system and perhaps rewards (rewards for you!) at various point levels—go for it.

Recipe for Connecting to Source, Self, and Others

1. Follow the above recipes. You're already connected, so these are no more than tactics to reassert your own awareness of that connection.
2. Stay alert to the magic: signs and symbols, gorgeous timing, fun with words and numbers, echoes, repetition--all manner of synchronicity. My magic program (taped on 11-11 at 11) can support you in that, during holidays and beyond.
3. Forgive yourself for anything. Forgive others for everything.​

Love and blessings, Jaya

P.S. A recipe for the gratitude-intolerant also exists on this blog.

The short version of this post has already appeared on my Facebook page—that glorious cyber-venue that has kindly forced me to cut to the chase and just say it in 849 characters or less (or they amputate with a hacksaw and plug in “See more” plus those three dubious dots that most who live with dignity and purpose won’t touch).

Right here. Facebook post/cut-to-the-chase version:
I'm fascinated by the outright aversion people sometimes feel toward the concept of self-love. Like it's a weird, freaky, even shameful thing to indulge in. If this is you, I invite you to the least gushy version of self-love you can scooch into. Don't imagine a beatific face beaming at you & telling you you're a perfect divine nugget-beam of love & light. How about just sitting kindly, even neutrally, with what you're hating right now, whatever you disapprove of or think isn't okay about a sensation inside you, a story of you, a cringy glimpse of yourself someone else tossed your way when you weren’t ready to duck? Could you just watch that dispassionately & tell yourself, “Hey, typical human stuff, Self. It's okay. There’s nothing wrong with you.” The beginning of the end of self-abandonment.

I could now go for more brief instead of expounding. Haiku anyone?
Dabbing my heart clean--
Fool to have poured honey there.
Damn tissue in shreds.

Bullet points, then (because there’s always more to say, isn’t there, especially about what it means not to abandon yourself ever again, and bullets can make a bunch of brief points in a row):
What does it even mean to abandon yourself?
You’re in self-abandonment when

• you take some horrible thing you’re feeling now, and instead of being with yourself kindly just for now, you project a future in which you’ll always feel this way
• you predict horrible outcomes for what isn’t apparently working out just yet
• you don’t tell others the truth about what does and doesn’t work for you, what you want, what you believe
• you self-evaluate when it’s not time to evaluate, and thus make it brutal, irrelevant, and in no way helpful
• feeling bad, you start looking for reasons you deserve to feel this way
• you accept mean, rotten things you’re thinking about yourself instead of going, “WHOA, Sweetheart, what’s this about? Something’s really off here. Could we just pause to look closer?”
• you replay again and again a scene in which you weren’t your best self, and either defend it tirelessly (aren’t you exhausted, though?) or tell yourself that’s the truth of who you are
• you focus on someone who’s decided bad things about you and make their decision more real than your knowing
• you make up reasons why you can’t do what you really love and make those reasons sound righteous and for the good of all concerned
• you tell yourself it doesn’t matter when it clearly does
• you won’t give time to what matters, what makes you feel better, what makes your heart sing, what makes you feel connected and clear
• you confuse indulging feelings and making them worse withbeing with them
• you tell yourself a story that makes your hard feelings more painful
• and then some

​
Simple antidotes? In a nutshell, stave off self-abandonment by living in self-honoring ways and responding quickly when something feels off.
​
Catch yourself in self-abandonment—kindly, not harshly. Appreciate that you’re getting conscious about what needs your conscious attention. This allows you to course-correct quickly.

Don’t allow momentum to build where bad feelings are concerned.Respond to them more quickly at ever more subtle levels. Interrupt what doesn't work for you and go for what feels truer and better.

Tell the truth to others. Have boundaries and speak them to others whether they’re thrilled with them or not. Don’t drop your boundaries when people push against them, and don’t freak out, either. That’s what people do, so someone will; no need to take it personally. But there’s a great need—your own well-being and authentic living are at stake—for you to hold any boundary that you’ve gotten clear about needing to draw. (Need a coach for boundaries? Well, I could be that coach. There’s also my amazing friend and colleague Kelli Younglove, who has a special gift with this topic.)

Put yourself to bed kindly, so you can wake up trusting life, and trusting that you’re on your own side.

Remember who you are, and don’t buy old stories from others. (Watch the family-of-origin definitions coming at you, and duck! When you need to, stay away entirely. You get to define you.)

Be willing to show up for whatever's happening. I'll close with an illustration of this point from Facebook, posted last May:
I refuse to carry around the feeling that this shouldn't be happening, this day shouldn't be going how it's going, this snafu is such a detour or setback, etc. etc. If it's happening, here it is. I want to align with it. I know I'm not aligned if I feel frustrated, I'm frowning or tensing, I'm getting irritated with human beings. Catching any of these is my cue to pause, reset, allow. What's happening is what's happening, never mind how unpleasant, unexpected, unwanted. I trust that whatever life hands me is worthwhile for me to give myself to. What could I benefit from letting go? The illusion of control, the religion of efficiency, the expectation customer-service people should make it all better at once? I want to show up for that. I want to show up for my life, wherever it takes me right now.

Keep showing up for yourself, whatever’s up, however you feel: self-abandonment no more.

Love & blessings, Jaya