Thriving During The Holidays

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"I'm not a teacher: Only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.

I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you."

-George Bernard Shaw

The Holidays are here in the United States starting with Thanksgiving this coming Thursday.  You may have noticed that the Holiday Season appears to have a magnifying affect on people's emotions; higher highs and lower lows. I'm interested in supporting people to have a more wonderful experience during the Holidays. If you're interested in that for yourself, then you are in the right place!

Most people attribute how they feel during the Holidays to their Circumstances, both past and present.  In other words the reason people think that they have a wonderful feelings is that they grew up in wonderful loving homes where there was always enough food, gifts to go around, and of course laughter, games and rituals.

On the flip side, people who grew up without those things often blame their lack of family, good food, and expensive gifts for their unpleasant experience of the Holidays.

Other people point to their past as the source of their misery or joy.

The good news is that these reasons are simply inaccurate. They are completely made up... innocently of course.

The key to it all is attribution.  Wherever people attribute their good or bad feelings to, is where they are going to go to either attempt to change them, or get more of them.

99.9% of people attribute their emotional experiences to an inaccurate source... circumstances.  So, it makes perfect sense that if you believe that you are going try to change your circumstances to try and change how you feel.

What most human beings do is they get something that they thought would make them happy forever, it doesn't work, and then they set about achieving a new goal for different "better" circumstances. They don't stop to think, maybe my circumstances aren't the source of my experience of life.  It's like looking repeatedly in you sock drawer for a t-shirt, and instead of looking in another drawer they just look harder in the same spot.

It doesn't matter how hard you look in the wrong direction, you aren't going to find what you are looking for.

So while we are busy trying to create the perfect looking life on the outside, we don't notice people who have very little, yet seem to experience great joy. We also ignore the people who actually have the "perfect" looking life on the outside and experience a lot of misery and suffering on the inside.

If you regularly experience suffering through the holidays, know that I get it, and am not making light of your experience. It feels very real and unpleasant. I know it's a time where we are bombarded by images and symbols of how our lives and families are "supposed" to be.  I'm also not saying that If you don't have much family or the family you have isn't very pleasant to hang out with, that you wouldn't prefer different circumstances.

I'm simply saying, regardless of whether you have historically had wonderful holiday experiences, or miserable ones, there is always hope to experience more joy, peace, and love than ever before, regardless of your current lot in life.

The question then is, If our internal emotional experience of life doesn't come from our circumstances, then where does it come from?

The answer: Thought!

We as human beings can't actually have an emotional experience of our circumstances, we can only ever feel our thinking. We don't feel our partner, our kids, our job, or our bank balance... we feel our thinking.

This is wonderful news because you don't have to wait to have different circumstances to have a different feeling on the inside.

The answer, in my experience, is not positive thinking, affirmations, meditation, re-framing, anchoring, or any other methodology or process designed to control your thoughts. We simply don't have that degree of control over which thoughts come in and which thoughts flow out of our minds. That is simply not how the system works.

The key to having a more wonderful experience of,  the Holidays, and life in general, is to deepen your understanding of the Nature of Human Experience.

Here's the best of what I have seen about how the Human Experience unfolds, and to the degree that you begin to see it for yourself, and recognize it in  your own life, your life experience will improve markedly

My invitation to you is to read this next part by looking beyond the words.  It's easy to get caught up intellectualizing the words, so I'm asking you to look to the truth behind the words.

This bit is also the follow up to last weeks article Foundations of Truth.

The Nature of Human Experience as I See It:

This is an inside-out universe.  Your experience of life is being created moment by moment, through the way that you think about it.

Thought is not the only factor though, because, you may have noticed that some thoughts we recognize as just thoughts and let them go, while others we grad hold of and make important.

So on one hand we have our thoughts and on the other hand we have our relationship to those thoughts.

We create our relationship to our thoughts through our consciousness. Our consciousness is our ability to be aware and either: bring our thoughts to life and experience them as being real and important; or we can not take them seriously, know that they are just thoughts, and go on, largely unaffected.

It's the thoughts that we grab onto, pour our energy and attention into, and make important, that have an impact on our lives. 

Perhaps we have an unpleasant thought about our boss or family member and then say to ourselves, 'yeah that's right, they shouldn't have done that to me'; or 'how dare they speak to ME like that!' . And often when we forget these are just thoughts we feel compelled to act and speak OUR MIND; that's when we get into trouble and create circumstances in the world that are not what we would prefer.

There is also a third element to human experience in addition to thought and consciousness which I often refer to as Mind. Insert whatever word has meaning for you.... Some people refer to it as God, or Spirit, essence, or the unconditioned self. My mentor Michael Neill talks about it as the Energy and Intelligence behind life.

Just to be clear, the MIND is not the Brain. The Brain is physical, and the Mind is spiritual.

This Mind may sounds mystical to you, however think about the very fact that you are alive!  What is that animating energy behind life? I don't claim to know exactly what it is or how it works, but I can describe to you what I see as somebody who has been looking in that direction for a while now.

This Mind or Spirit is pure love and joy.  We are made of Love. Babies when they aren't experiencing physical discomfort tend to be just joyful. It's that part of you that existed before you were ever born and it will continue on after your physical body has stopped working. Mind is that oneness which unites all life. It is our essence that is untouched by all of the drama of our physical lives. It's who we are with nothing in particular on our minds.

This MIND is the source of our innate mental health.  Now, what do I mean by that? Well consider your body is designed to heal itself. It has a built in immune system. If you don't interfere with the healing process, you don't have to consciously heal your wounds, it is natural.

It's similar with our minds.  If left alone, our thoughts will tend toward health and well-being, joy and peace, love and wisdom. There is a tendency toward mental well-being because that is who we really are. The difference between our mind and body is that our body seems to have a waiting period for healing and it ultimately has an expiration date.  Your mental health changes the second you have a new thought  and never expires.

To sum up:  We all think... that's pretty clear. We all believe in and make certain thoughts appear real while disregarding others.  To the extent you mistake your thinking for being real, you will temporarily suffer.  Because while we do have innate mental and spiritual health, we can absolutely think our way into a miserable experience.  It will always pass eventually and we will return to our innate joy and peace if we let it.

You absolutely can spend your whole life thinking yourself away from your innate well-being and never notice that it's there.  Though, from time to time, you will forget to ruminate on your miserable thinking, or you will get distracted, and there will be your well-being waiting for you.  It never actually goes anywhere, which is extraordinarily comforting to know.

You can never do any permanent damage to your essential self. You can simply think unpleasant thoughts for a while and feel unpleasant emotions. You will always return to yourself.  Deepening your Understanding of the nature of thought, mind and consciousness seems to expedite the process.

Another way to put it is, up until this point, your main problem has been the completely innocent, Mis-understanding of the source of your experience of life and how the Mind works.

Consider a snow globe. Your thoughts are the snowflakes and your Mind(innate joy and love) is the water. If you are in the habit of shaking up the snow globe, your strategy for clearing the water has likely been to just shake it harder.  You forgot that the nature of water is clear and that all you have to do is leave it alone and the snow flakes will settle out of the water because the NATURE of water is clear.  Similarly, the nature of your mind is peace and love.

The less you do to stir up your thoughts and take them seriously, the more love you tend to experience. You will also forgive more easily and experience a much greater level of compassion for your fellow human beings You will understand the source of people's actions, knowing they are simply taking their thinking seriously.

Imagine you have your compilation of thoughts, beliefs, judgments  values, memories, ideas of right and wrong, ideas of should and shouldn't, and your self image. All of these are simply made up of thought.

Now imagine that your relationship to that collection of thoughts is that they are real, important, permanent, and factual. You are going to act on most of your thoughts which will lead to a very unpleasant experience of life. We all have impulsive, even violent thoughts from time to time, however it's these people who think they are important and meaningful that are going to act on them. They are the people who hurt others and end up in prison.

These people aren't bad, they just have an innocent mis-understanding of the nature of thought, and gotten really caught up in some miserable thinking. They still have the same divine unalterable essence that you and I do.

Consider a less extreme example where you have an argument with your spouse and you feel bad.  If you misunderstand your bad feeling as coming from them, you are going to try and change them so that you feel better, right? Well, we all know how it goes when we try to change another person, right? Badly! If you think your bad feeling is anything to do with them, you are going to struggle and suffer.

On the flip side, imagine that your relationship to that compilation of thoughts is that they are all illusory, made up by you, and largely unimportant.  You also understand that you can only ever have an emotional experience of your thoughts, not your circumstances. Finally you know that who you really are is untouchable by life and your very nature is love and joy.  Your emotional experience of life is going to be very gentle, is it not?

When you get sad, you will recognize that it's just thought and that it will pass because that is how thought works when we don't interfere with the system. When you feel depressed, you can rest easy knowing that it will pass and it's just thought. And when you feel joy, you can just enjoy the feelings of joy, knowing that that's who you really are and you don't have to do anything to maintain it.

Which experience would you choose?

If you can begin to understand how our minds really work, your experience of life will get really wonderful, really quick!

Have a wonderful Holiday Season!

Until Next Time, remember, your most fundamental nature is LOVE!

Coach Ty

P.S. Remember to check out my new Audio Recording Transformation From The Inside Out for FREE by recommending me on Facebook or Twitter. Click Here to learn more.

Also, watch my 2 New Free Videos on Transformative Coaching and Eliminating Stress!

Right now, through December, I have a SMOKIN' deal on my 1 on 1 Coaching for over 60% off of my normal rate. That's only $50 per session and I usually charge $150. Contact me to learn more!