​​Why would it be helpful to imagine you’re in a disaster zone?

Honestly, the mind and nervous system often act like we are when we’re not. Maybe you’ve noticed?

So play with me a moment here, but only because it could benefit you tremendously to feel at (greater) ease as you move through your most challenging situations, moments, and eras.

Let me quickly set the scene. When disaster strikes, all hell breaks loose. Buildings crumble to the ground or fill with water; roads get blocked; people don’t (and don’t even expect to) follow their usual routines; survivors may suddenly have new needs around first-aid care, food & water, shelter. All the usual ways of operating are tossed away—they’ve just become irrelevant, at least for the time being. The usual expectations of others are dropped, too—we’re not going to get mad at someone if they don’t show up on time for a schedule that’s been blown to pieces or if they don’t behave how we prefer for people to behave. We don’t expect things to be in their right places, as the house itself might be off its foundation and on top of the car. No one is shocked or launching into entitled complaining if there’s no available phone, or technology isn’t working, or help isn’t quickly forthcoming. No one expects to be comfortable or to have anyone else make them comfortable.

Application to follow.

Now imagine you’re attending the kind of social event that shakes up all your stuff; going on a blind date—or maybe any kind of date; gearing up for an interview for a job you really want; meeting family-of-origin characters at a gathering that has historically made you a little crazy; spending hours or days at the hospital as patient or support person, with a bunch of things up in the air—any number of possible outcomes and snags and edgy moments to meet along the way. Or just imagine (or notice, if this is current for you) that you’re in a tricky time because you’re healing something or learning new things that will be tested or moving through a situation that overwhelms you even though you chose it (a move, a break-up, a teaching gig). How could the disaster metaphor serve you?
​​

​Seeing your current reality as if it were a disaster zone, try telling yourself some of these things:

• Of course I’ll have some discomfort. It’s okay.
• I’ll just aim for where I think I want to go at any given moment and head that way with no expectation of getting it right.
• I will prioritize calming myself and, when I can, be a calming presence for others.
• I’ll do my best to function well and serenely for myself.
• I’ll consider it a beautiful bonus if I can provide some support to others along the way.
• I will expect nothing of others: no niceties; no kindness; no ways of treating me or one another; no awareness of anything I’m going through; no certain volume or ways of speaking or setting up ambiance; no politeness codes; no doing what I like, the way I like it; no agreeing with me about priorities or anything else; no food that works just right for me; nothing to honor my preferences.
• I will remember I have choice and make my best choices now & now & now.
• I will keep releasing the many things I cannot control.
• I will remind myself often that there may be very little I can control right now, so I’ll seek to control myself in whatever ways I can.
• I will remember there’s nothing I have to do for anyone, and at times there may be nothing I can do, so that when I choose to do something for someone else I can feel good about the choice and give myself to it fully and willingly.
• I will treat nothing as shocking: people will do whatever they will do.
• I will keep moving toward what makes sense to me to move toward, and away from what it makes sense to me to move away from.
• I will follow my guidance system, not others’ ideas of what I should do. I will release them to theirs, whether I think they’re tuned in to that or not.
• I will prioritize tuning in to my own guidance system.
• I will remind myself that I’m guided, and keep responding to what feels aligned and what feels off, trusting my capacity to course-correct as I go.
• I will release how the journey goes, what happens next, how long things take to right themselves.
• If I do anything that makes sense and involves carrying on toward what seems right, and help anyone else along the way, I will declare success.
• I won’t be hard on myself; I won’t expect myself to be a superstar; I’ll cut others a lot of slack too.
• I will remind myself again that I am guided; I will do my version of praying; I will remember that if I’m alive, I’m here to live and love.

See how that could help you out when life pushes you to your walls?

​And then maybe you’ll appreciate any comfort. Maybe any kind of food will seem amazing to have. Maybe any way your body functions will seem like a perfect miracle. Maybe you’ll be all tapped in to all that supports you. Maybe you’ll notice and be moved by any decency from anyone. Maybe you’ll slow down and just let things be as they are, and notice that it’s good enough for now and getting better. Maybe any modicum of fun or laughter will seem like more than you could’ve hoped for--again, a perfect miracle.

A client’s challenging situation recently reminded me of this, and I realized from a search on my website (did you know there’s a lovely search bar on my site?) that I hadn’t properly written about it. I mentioned the disaster-zone metaphor briefly in a bit about getting through holidays well. And now I’ve officially written about it and we can all play with it to keep making easier and more manageable anything that we might believe is hard.

Love & blessings, Jaya

​11 ways to HIT THE RESET BUTTON during the Holidays
Invitation not to let bad sensations accrue, not to allow untended thoughts to take you down the rabbit hole! Prioritize feeling good: this will connect you to your guidance system and let in the inspiration of the moment to keep moving toward love.

1. Take a breath. Take several conscious breaths. Watch the breath go in and out. Get absorbed by the breath.

2. Go outside and breathe there. Look into the sky. Experience what's out there with all the senses you can engage.

3. Exercise. Stretch. Run up & down the stairs. Go around the block. Do anything to move your body and focus your attention off the mind and onto your marvelous capacity to feel, move, inhabit a human body. Find someone on YouTube to guide you through some qigong or yoga or whatever. (Here's my favorite simple qigong sequence with Mimi Kuo-Deemer.)

4. Stay away from work, even mentally. Leave it alone and see what seeds sprout later. You've already given it great attention. Celebrate that. Let it go.

5. Feasting for the holidays? Chew more, taste more, give yourself full permission to eat whatever you choose to eat. Take long breaks between times of food intake—not to be righteous, but to enjoy the contrast and to be hungry again when you eat more. (Hydrate between meals!)

6. Do the unexpected, have an adventure, go somewhere you've never been, do something appealing that scares you or goes against how you see yourself.

7. Meditate, even for 5 minutes. You could even exit (physically or mentally) during a conversation you don't want to take part in and just watch your breath go all the way in, watch it go all the way out. Until you decide you’re done, keep coming back to the breath when you stray from that focus.

8. Call someone you almost never talk to, or haven't talked to in a while, or even the one you've believed is too far from the last contact to justify any lasting connection: you connect if you're drawn to. (Follow the inspired impulse, not the thoughts about it.)

9. Feeling challenged? Tell yourself or another or write down all the reasons why this hard thing you're going through is perfect, the best training ground for what you know you need to develop in yourself. This is a moment to keep applying your own belief system and to take further whatever you've been experimenting with to live more consciously and be healthier and truer to yourself.

10. Unplug for a day (or days) from any computer activity, phone apps, social media. Include news in the exclusion. Walk away from political conversations if that feels better.

11. Sleep. Nap (30 minutes or less to stay out of deep sleep, 90 minutes for a whole sleep cycle). For naps and nighttime rest, be sure you go to sleep with a consciousness of RESET, of all things new/all things possible when you wake up.

(The writeup of 11 resets above comprises the whole post, and here’s the link to see it on my website if you like.)
Love & blessings, Jaya

​It’s American Thanksgiving time again, when people in the U.S. are urged from all directions to be grateful. And the gratitude craze isn’t all-American: especially in spiritual circles, it covers the globe.

I’m not (entirely) against gratitude, but I have written before about the potentially more solid and powerful aspect of appreciation, as compared to gratitude (which may have stickier components, like that of needing to put out I’m-so-grateful to deserve good things coming your way).

In this writing, I’d like to explore the POWER of appreciation in your process of creating your life.

As you look around you and observe your life from eagle view, or take in this one moment, appreciation is always available.

It’s an option. It’s a choice.

It’s worth reaching for, because what you appreciate really does nourish your total well-being. It feels good to appreciate. You feel good about what you behold when you appreciate it. You set yourself up for feeling more goodness, and hope expands, and your sense that your life is worth showing up for expands.

So then your sense of can-do expands. Your ability to take the next step with ease expands. With appreciation in the fore, you may find yourself more energized and clear in creating your life.

Everything expands as you give it your appreciation. It gets better and feels nicer and turns its best face your way. So …

• Appreciate your home
• Appreciate what transports you
• Appreciate this body you’re in, that is both home and transport
• Appreciate what and how much you can do
• Appreciate your work
• Appreciate your people
• Appreciate random people you cross paths with
• Appreciate what you have access to because of where you live
• Appreciate the animals you get to encounter or interact with
• Appreciate Mother Earth, and her trees & stones & water
• Appreciate the weather

​That’s a good one to stop on (the list could go on and on, obviously). It’s a good one because we’re BOTHERED by the weather these days. It can disturb us.

But note that anything else on the list can go off-kilter! Things (people, places) go wrong or get wacky all the time. It’s all in progress and impermanent, either breaking down or growing & improving.

So something not wanted or not to your liking can be found in most anything most anytime.

These somethings can, could, and do easily make you feel bad, if you let them. They stir up dissatisfaction (and maybe a sense that you're not okay, and then maybe a fear you’ll never be okay). …

Think in terms of where you put your FOCUS.

In any life, any scene, any moment, there’s wanted and unwanted. (That’s Abraham-Hicks language again.) There’s always stuff to appreciate with every fiber of your being, and stuff to bellyache about.

Which will you focus on?

It’s up to you what you animate and fuel and expand with speech and thought and strong emotion.

When you offer & feel appreciation (especially with every fiber of your being), you energize your own being and your very sense of well-being. You also declare and establish that this stuff you’re appreciating is what most matters to you, what’s predominant for you.

And that predisposes you to notice more of it, to make much of it, to lean into all that you appreciate that’s right here, already in place in this imperfect moment & reality.

Thus, you expand and you create more of what’s wanted. By choosing appreciation, you consciously create your life, the life you want.

Call it self-fulfilling prophecy, call it Law of Attraction, call it basic common sense: there it is any way you slice it.

Love & blessings, Jaya

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

If you like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or tapping, here's a session on my YouTube channel on being well and at ease during the holidays.

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.

Gratitude has been all the rage for some time, but some of us can't stomach it.

I was blown away the first time I heard Abraham-Hicks talk about why appreciation is more powerful (and more satisfying, more supportive of joy and well-being) than gratitude.

Gratitude almost always hits me wrong. This, mind you, is in the context of living life as a project in presence, cultivating ongoing awe in the beauty that gets through the cracks no matter what, meeting every face as the face of god, looking for all that supports me at every turn and finding it. I'm not the grinch.

Still, mentions of gratitude can set off that internal cringe.

I hear too many people treat gratitude like a should that somehow, when reached for (especially when they feel terrible), will bring them up a few notches on some spiritual grading scale (that I'm pretty sure nobody, no deity, no entity of earth, heaven, or hell is tabulating).

People are typically being hard on themselves when they rush to gratitude. They're not being still for what actually needs to be met that they're misinterpreting as a failure to be sufficiently grateful.

It amounts to shaming themselves to push themselves into something supposedly more elevated. Thus, they take the focus off themselves when perhaps a different and more clear focus on self would provide the needed release or breakthrough or ability to see the glass half-full.

Anyone who knows anything about my work knows I'm not a validating therapist willing to sit around listening for hours to people retell the story of how life or others have kept them down. But it's not about shoving down or shaming the stories! The beautiful breakthroughs happen in catching how you're framing things with no judgment (WITH ZERO JUDGMENT) so you can consider, dismantle, and reframe your own thinking and see something new, full of possibility. There's pain-body work to be done, too, to meet and soothe what feels bad without believing it shouldn't feel bad. This stuff is powerful, transformational.

Gratitude in itself isn't evil, but it doesn't pair nicely with should. That's a great thing to watch for in your own thinking and speech: "I should be grateful."

Really? When you're saying you should be grateful, consider it may be a royal distraction (never mind spiritual bypass). You might gain more from coming closer to whatever you're thinking and feeling that's throwing you off.

My favorite current teacher, Abraham-Hicks, explains that appreciation is stronger than gratitude this way: There's often a flavor of unworthiness in gratitude. As in,

• I need to be grateful because I don't really deserve what I've got.
• I need to be grateful for what I've got and I'm greedy for wanting more.
• I need to be grateful because what I've got might be taken away if I'm not grateful for it.

When you're in appreciation, you simply solidly feel good about what is. You're taking in what you love about this reality, this person, this meal, this state of affairs, these finances—whatever it is. You're feeling in to your own inner sense of appreciation, and it's authentic! Conversely, gratitude can feel more like an external concept to reach for, or even to force.

So consider trading in gratitude for appreciation this Thanksgiving. Or say both, "I'm grateful for ..." and "I appreciate ..." Try both, in tandem or at different moments! See if, to you, there's a nuance or a world's worth of difference.

Consider dropping the requisite gratitude list and instead keeping an ongoing tally of all you appreciate in your life, your partner, your family members, the place where you live, the job you've got, the skills and resources that support you, the body that serves you.

Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for connecting to my world. I so appreciate your presence here.

love & blessings, Jaya

Here's a later post with more on the power of appreciation (2023): Appreciation: An under-appreciated tool for creating your life.

For more on ease during the holidays, see also Recipes for Easiest Holidays Ever.