​I invite you to give this a moment of attention even if you don’t feel much resentment. Let’s get super subtle here and be free free free. If nothing else, check out the bullets below the pic and find one thing to keep in the fore to enhance your well-being (which includes aligned, not exhausting, service).

Resentment has such a bad rap. It has its unfortunate place over with anger, where people relegate unwanted emotions—over in the bad zone. Who wants to be resentful?

Yeah, please don’t sit around resenting. But resentment might show up briefly anytime, kind of like the delivery person, and when it does, there’s something to receive with a thank you.

Beyond the scope of this writing are all the reasons you don’t want to shove resentment down into the cells of your being to accrue & fester there. That happens with denial and vilification, so instead, let’s just make resentment the nice delivery person, who’s in a hurry anyway to get on with the next delivery. Just open the door to briefly, get the goods, and get on with your day.

Resentment as delivery person may put a wrinkle in something you’re doing right now, but you WANT the thing being delivered. That thing’s going to make your life easier or more pleasant somehow.
​

Here are some typical message-deliveries resentment brings. And bee-tee-dubs, you might just consider whether one of these might be for you to keep cleaning up even if you’re not tuning in to any resentment:

• you’ve been saying yes without first checking in with yourself
• you’ve been saying yes when you mean no
• you’ve been saying yes when no is the right answer
• you’ve been confused about what it means to be nice or polite or a good person [or fill in a role, like spouse, parent, progeny, worker]
• you keep hanging out with people or in situations that deplete you
• you aren’t making self-care important enough; you’re not taking full responsibility for your own well-being
• you’ve forgotten the importance of fun & pleasure & ease as part of your total well-being (and thus offering your best service)
• you’ve been letting things like guilt or obligation, or someone’s manipulation tactics or fears, or your old habits or tendencies [or fill in something more relevant] determine what you do or don’t do
• you haven’t been telling the truth out of some misguided notion that something else, like someone’s hurt feelings or anger, is more important (and it may be worth identifying your something else)
• you need to keep working on (naming, setting, holding) those boundaries situationally, every time one is called for, now & now & now
• you think you should give [do, finish, show up for] more than what’s actually yours to give [etc.]
• you’re out of balance with giving and receiving, or giving to others and giving to self (and here’s my latest EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique session on that topic)

I love to think in terms of the first whiff. If you get just the tiniest whiff of resentment, pause with it a moment. It’s got something for you. Don’t ignore it. Ask it nicely what it’s got for you. Ask what it’s pointing you to that’s going to support you to be

• more self-honoring
• kinder & clearer to self & others
• more balanced
• lighter, less encumbered
• equipped to further set yourself free free free

Love & blessings, Jaya

​You can set up your life (or this hour, this day, this week, this era) so that it’s more and more and more frustrating.

Or you can set it up so that it’s more and more and more easy and flowy and fine.

Basically, what follows is a simple story to illustrate.

I just had a typical bout of grand frustration while doing taxes. (Not tax time you say? Um, some of us file for an extension when you’re getting yours done on time, so our due date is coming right up.) (Are you starting to get my relationship with taxes?)

So it all started with some thorny stuff. I got frustrated fast, because I came in with the idea that I really wasn’t into this. (Ah, the power of opting in 100 percent.) I was also soothing the frustration as I went, not just letting it rip. I was doing fine. But I wasn’t all joy and sunshine. Let’s say that soft, expansive belly breaths maybe weren’t predominant. Or maybe not in the vicinity.

And then, things got thornier. And I got more frustrated trying to get help from customer service or even trying to get to a human being. Even the chat was intercepted by a mean-girl kind of robot. And I permitted myself a bit of railing to my mother, whose house I’m living in for the purpose of being helpful and uplifting, so … mission not accomplished.

And then a bunch of data got purged from Quickbooks. It all seemed very random, like someone flushed a toilet in a parallel Universe and my data went down the invisible pipes.

I have standards and quite refuse to literally slam my forehead repeatedly into the wall, so I did not do that. I did get up and move away from the task.

If you’re getting anxious, let me tell you this would all end well. I would later be involved in an interesting hours-long process getting data transferred back in. I would learn some stuff. When I solved the puzzle (and I would solve the puzzle), it would be an almost funny and cute matter of two little bunny-eared quotation marks that had hopped away to a distant field, probably very sweetly, maybe in that same parallel universe where that mysterious toilet was, when they were very much needed for the purposes of proper coding within a bunch of crammed-together words and numbers in a tiny font that cryptically contained both my data and a secret code. This code, properly presented, would then allow Quickbooks to open the door to let in the data that I wanted there. I would manage to understand the pattern and see where it was disrupted and …  I would fix it. No bunnies would be hurt in the righting of this data. I wouldn’t even be rough on the computer keys or even my own system. I would breathe lovely, soft belly breaths, while sitting and working in positions that would require no chiropractic adjustments down the line. All would work out.

Fucking Eureka. And bonus, it’s really kind of fun and wondrous to crack a code, right?

Honestly, most of the time I affirm that everything’s always working out for me. I lost track of it for a minute there.

Okay but let me backtrack. How did I get there? Note that I was already witnessing myself FROM THE BEGINNING because my policy and preference is not to live with frustration. I don’t judge it when it comes. However, I witness it coming in and feel the effects and then I usher it out.

(This takes practice, folks, and just noticing when the judgments come in and dropping them again. Keep dropping your self-judgments. They serve nothing except to keep you in modes that better match frustration than flow. They’re not fun, they’re not kind, they don’t make you a better person. They literally serve nothing you’re after.)

Speaking again from my policy and preference (to be clear, not what I was doing with this round of tax work), I do whatever it takes to release any grip on an outcome, a timing, a way the process must go. As quickly as I notice such interference, I let it go and align with reality. I soothe myself with presence in body and breath. I look away from the thorny task and get my alignment back, then I come back again—even if that means no more than a 5-minute break to look up at the sky and breathe and watch the breeze move some leaves around or drink some water or do some stretches or wash a few dishes or whatever.

Back to presence, back to body and breath, back to alignment THEN back to work.

So I wasn’t exactly doing this with tax work. I was watching the frustration (self-witnessing is good and helpful) and I was not entirely believing the messages the mind was forming about what was supposed to go differently or feel better (seeing thoughts as thoughts, not reality, and not believing them is good and helpful), but I also did not properly and fully INTERRUPT it.

So more frustration accrued.

By the time I sat down to spend some comfortable hours cracking the code, a true interruption had taken place. I had stopped. Surrendered. Let go of alllll the things I wanted that I wasn’t getting in this scenario.

I happened to be slated that day to do some EFT/tapping with a group of people on zoom and when we had some minutes left at the end, I brought in this topic. It yielded this 10-min EFT session you might try when you have some frustration about techno-trouble, or about current customer-service realities, or about anything that you believe should be less fraught with trickiness, thus making you more frustrated in the face of reality.

I felt so much better after the tapping.

And then I didn’t go back to frustration. I went back to work already breathing well, and I just settled in, staying conscious of the breath, for whatever was ahead. Which turned out to be some hours. And I got into the puzzle of it in that way that puzzles are actually fun, even when you’re kind of frowning at them going, Well, NOW what?

Because Now what? is in fact a very good question and typically invites the next one thing to try. Especially if you’re in your body, and your breath is flowing.

Also, I played soothing music on YouTube while I worked. Whenever I happened to stop in and see who was swimming by in the ocean footage that went with the music, I kind of wanted to cry, but not the way cruel techno-trouble games in the multiverse make you cry. Just the way dolphins swishing through blue love with little half-smiles on their relaxed and earnest faces makes you cry. Don’t even get me started with the giant turtles. (Though the soothing-music video does start with a giant turtle.)

I didn’t even finish in that sitting. I went to bed early when I felt the first whiff of frustration coming back in. I got up and started fresh and full of hope. I found those two missing quotation marks very quickly, gently grabbed two new ones by the ears, plunked them in, and carried on with a flowy version of finishing my taxes.

Seriously, folks. There’s no problem if we get super frustrated by life’s potentially frustrating things. And we don’t need to fault ourselves for that. Most others wouldn’t fault us.

But we also don’t need to rev up the frustration, and feel justified in it, and rail (and keep railing, and rail to a bunch of people) (and keep railing inside our own minds), and keep creating more of that. Because that will and must keep creating more of that.

As soon as you can interrupt it, INTERRUPT IT. And do whatever you know to do to get your alignment back. And then, if you’ve revved up a bunch of frustration, you may need to take a while in the unraveling, so drop in for whatever it takes. Breathe. Listen to soothing music. Let some part of you weep quietly with achy joy because, in the meantime, there are sea creatures somewhere being too wondrous for words and truly embodying the flow.

We can live in peace and flow. Or we can live in frustration. And that’s true with hard things and things that go wrong and things that are just wrong on this planet and in our current setups at our current level of evolution. And it’s also true when things are relatively wrinkle-free and flowing along.

The more we flow peacefully, present, opting in, the more things flow in general. The more we create frustration and amplify that, the more things bump along uncomfortably or screech to a halt.

So don’t expect yourself to flow nonstop. Do interrupt yourself when you’re out of the flow. And gently soothe yourself back into alignment. Create more and more and more alignment and more and more flow.

Love & blessings, Jaya

Do you ever react to something that looks like it’s gone wrong and then instantly react to your reaction? You feel bad about not having some zen response or about not being unflappable?

No, please, flap away.

You will anyway, so you may as well have your own permission up front to do so. You will react again. You will be reactive sometimes. Something will throw you off faster than you can take a breath and be master of your response. (That’s being triggered. BAM, reaction got set off before you knew what was happening.)

So can that be okay? Because it is. It’s part of life. It’s part of our healing & evolution.

Repeat: It’s part of our healing & evolution. It is NOT evidence we’re off our path or not getting it fast enough or doing well enough.

It’s also part of life that things go wrong. They do! The dog lunges and the leash slips out of your hand, the child runs toward the road, the thing drops and breaks—maybe right when you thought it was the last possible moment to go out the door to get somewhere on time. You missed the stupid rule and got in trouble; you thought you hit SEND but you didn’t; the thing that went wrong got fixed wrong and it’s still not working despite the money & time you spent.

And this: Another human being, in their pain and confusion, says just the thing that pushes a button so old you don’t have even one second to stop your inner 5-year-old from screaming (or heading for the hills, or going still & speechless, or getting all cute and sweet) in response. (Yes, fight, flight, freeze, fawn—4 typical trauma responses.) You react, perhaps in some way you disapprove of.

Please let it be okay. Release the disapproval.

Please get real and get okay with the whole picture: Things will go wrong, and you will sometimes react. If you don’t accept this, you’ll suffer more. You’ll be, as Byron Katie says, in an argument with reality. And when you argue with reality (she loves to add), you lose—but only 100 percent of the time.

But shouldn’t things be going right now since [I’ve healed so much, I’ve grown so much, I’m doing so well, I’ve stopped blah blah blah]?

I noticed long ago that I had an interesting belief about when or under what circumstances things were supposed to go right. Sometimes my clients say things that show me they’re thinking that way too—and thus creating needless suffering. (We’re taught that life works in certain ways and, um, NO, IT DOES NOT.)

Here’s how that interesting belief went: If I was doing well or feeling present or having a cool insight or working with a tool or experiment that I felt great about—or even that I had some lovely sense of discovery or epiphany about (ESPECIALLY then)--then that meant things should go well.

Kind of like a cosmic reward system. Or evidence that yep, you’re on track. See? EVERYTHING is going swimmingly, that’s how you know you’re on track. NOTHING is going to go wrong now.

Great idea. Except it’s not real. It’s a great example of magical thinking.

So in that old belief, when things didn’t go well, I also believed there was a PROBLEM. Something had gone very wrong. Or I had done something wrong. Or I was a FOOL to believe that it was possible to feel good and to have deepening understanding and come into new ways of being. OBVIOUSLY, now that this thing had gone wrong (that shouldn’t have), things would just forevermore keep going wrong and the idea of actually healing or evolving was a pipe dream. Or something was terribly wrong with me and I was unfixable. Or probably all of the above, fuckety-fuck-fuck.

What if you took OUT of the equation all requirements for things going well, smoothly, or in your way (according to your preference) (not costing you anything, not creating discomfort, not triggering some reactivity or taking you out of your zen state)?

What if you simply accepted that, on planet Earth, shit happens. Not a measure of how you’re doing. And when shit happens, you might react.

There was an era when I was seeking to get this new concept wired in. So anytime I got frustrated or distressed or had a flash of a reaction, I would instantly say to myself, Oh, Jaya, you're thinking there's a problem! What if there's no problem?

I did this very kindly. I did it constantly. I rinsed and repeated until it just got worked into my being.

Playing with this, I didn’t have time to judge my reactivity. Or if I was already judging it, the judgment got soothed right along with the soothing of reminding myself that

1. I was simply believing there was a problem, and
2. there really was no problem

Instead of getting caught up in my reaction (and then needing to judge it or defend it or hyperfocus on the conditions that called it forth), I used my reaction as temple bell, or a call to notice that I’m believing something has gone wrong and that, in fact, nothing has gone wrong.

This was more deeply healing than I understood it to be at the time I was playing with this and rewiring my psyche. I was healing old family trauma in which everything imperfect was jumped on, reacted to, punished. In our family system, everything that went wrong gave my parents permission to yell, curse, hit, make their kids wrong. They were wounded human beings who didn’t, at the time, see that they had access to any other way. We are all wounded. And we have access to so many other ways—easier access now than ever.

It’s a good equation to play with. Reaction = Call to notice you’re believing there’s a problem, and to remind yourself there's actually no problem.

I like the way Abraham-Hicks uses the language of contrasting experiences. This unwanted thing is a contrasting experience. And there will always be contrast. Nothing's going wrong when it comes. YOU ARE NOT OFF YOUR PATH WHEN THE CONTRAST COMES. You simply get to meet yourself here and now, and be reminded of what you like better, and consciously SOOTHE YOURSELF, then head that way—toward what you like better.

Let’s all get real with reality and create less pointless suffering. It’s all right. You’re doing all right. This is planet Earth, so … Shit happens.

Love & blessings, Jaya

If you'd like an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or tapping session on reacting vs. responding, find it on my YouTube channel.

4 Things to remind yourself early & often
(which will connect you to self & to guidance)

1. Bring it to now: Come back from the future (quit predicting what you don't want) and come back from the past (quit accruing towers of one thing stacked on top of another so it's all too much) and don't try to figure it all out. What can you do right now to align with this moment? Notice that you're equipped for this one moment.

2. Come back to the breath: Breathing is a felt, sensory experience, but we typically don't feel it. I love to invite people not to breeaaaaathe or even to take a deep breath, but to simply drop into the breath; follow it; stay with it; feel it. Feel its soothing, its kindness, its calming capacity. Feel how it brings you to the core of your being and brings your whole nervous system down a notch or two. It's powerful to take some moments dropping in with the breath and come back to yourself.

3. You don't have to figure it all out right now: This is a great thing to tell yourself to get out of your head, out of fix-it mode, out of believing you're not okay till you have it all sorted out and see the way forward. Actually, if you don't see it all clearly, then you don't have to figure it out right now. Soothe yourself instead (see Come back to the breath above).

4. You are guided: Life wants to get you where you're going. It wants to feed you, provide for your needs, heal and evolve you, keep bringing you closer to love. When you think you need to know what the future will hold, or insist on a blueprint for getting there (when there isn't one), or--yuck--fault yourself because you must be doing something wrong if you don't see the way forward: STOP. Quit thinking you're all alone and it's all up to you to find your way through the dark. You're guided. Connect to guidance.
​
Love & blessings, Jaya

heyyyy. LOOK RIGHT for CORONA SUPPORT label under CATEGORIES. Find posts most likely to support you as you move through the fascinating challenge of a pandemic. You're equipped to meet this, and to meet yourself kindly on this journey!

At the bottom of my EFT playlist on YouTube are some videos made during Covid that can still apply when life throws scary global things at us. This one, for example, was a tapping session on letting go (as we grasped and tried to control what we couldn't).

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.