Ingredient Inventory
A recipe to live by: Add light
The season of mixed feelings is upon us all. A song, a sight, a memory, an heirloom, a scene, a decoration, a dish, a particular day, a place, a vacancy, a setting may trigger unfestive feelings. The next six weeks can be charged with obligatory festivities that may or may not align with our inner feelings. Anticipatory holiday stress is something many of our students share with us, and our November/December programming is a befitting counterpose. Our Holiday Season-specific programming, Pranayama classes, Lighten the Mental Load course and upcoming Ayurveda presentation all check the boxes of self soothing practices to hold onto throughout the rest of the year.
We can keep our holiday season warmer, lighter and steadier as cold, dark winter blows in. Patanjali reminds us that latent emotional and behavioral patterns we don’t usually see can become activated by environmental triggers. We can be at the mercy of this phenomenon, and we will be. On the way to a scary scan and preop appointment with one of my top four humans this week, I thought I’d lighten the moment with Sirius traditional holiday music. I am not religious, so holiday = tradition and family to me. Within a minute, I had to shut it off. Listening to holiday songs from my youth, I was spontaneously crying with anticipatory grief of future holidays without loved ones. I suddenly added light. I chose a Jimmy Fallon curated station full of soulful, funky upbeat songs to counter the already heavy and dark feeling I had inside. It kept us from shattering, emotionally speaking. Rather than succumb, I turned it around before my emotions kept me from driving well, thinking straight and being available for my main purpose - to support my loved one.
The secret ingredient is to regularly add light, even when you may not urgently need it. That way, heaviness has an established counterbalance. This will look vastly different to all of us, as what lightens my heart and diverts me from my normal programming will not necessarily work for you. For example, my nature and life circumstances in these householder years keep me generally all business. Point A to B to C and D then back to A. This last week, with a beloved, instead of driving home, I played the same music station and took a long, winding, waterway-lined, beautiful detour. We had new conversations, dug up amazing old memories buried under a few decades of life rubble. A very heavy situation lightened.
The root of innovation in experience is keeping to a regular practice. With a more balanced mind, our awareness of our stress responses, states and needs improves. Our ability to self soothe emerges before we downward spiral too far into an abyss. And when we are in the throes of the klesa-s, we can nip them in the bud sooner and guide ourselves out of the plethora of emotional and behavioral turmoils and setbacks life hands us.