Recipe for contentment this holiday season

Focus on what is in your control.

The recipe metaphor is a common one. My brief google search led me to a few blog posts, even a poem with the same name, although not particular to the holiday season. Here is a poem by bentlily titled A recipe for contentment:

Release yourself

from expectations

of being perfect

while still trying

as best as you can

to make your own heart

proud.

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Cooking is a creative activity I deeply enjoy. If I need to get my creative mojo back, I make something in the kitchen. It is definitely a comfort zone and there’s nothing wrong with returning to sources of comfort when growing and stretching yourself.

In fact, find your resources and tap into them. Find the existing sources of joy and contentment in your life and source vital energy from them.

The recipe metaphor is personal and authentic to me. I was thinking about what would be of value and service to write about for this week where so many share variations on the same theme, there’s a lot of noise and a lot of advice giving.

The holiday season is an emotionally vulnerable time. Many gather together, many are separated from each other by choice or by circumstance, there are losses that feel more fresh, disappointments that rise to the surface and my personal unfavorite: expectations.

It would be impossible to write a recipe that attends to each unique reality that human beings experience during this time. Instead I bring attention to the diversity of our lives, what we carry, what we hold collectively, what we brace for and what we grieve.

Gentleness is a crucial component of contentment. I’ve got an issue with whoever coined the critically inaccurate phrase that social skills are “soft skills.” How is heart-centered gentleness, validation and compassion, soft? In fact, if you scan the outer environment and world stage with horrendous pain and violence and conflict, whose response do you resonate with more? The “hard” response of blame, finger pointing and neglect or the “soft” response of truth telling, service and generosity?

Those “soft” responses honor our connection to each other. They honor our innate vulnerability. They honor our interdependence with each other.

To feel with and step into another’s shoes is empathy. To suffer with, is the heart of compassion. Last time I checked, the willingness to feel and suffer is pretty darn hard and generally avoided in default mode by human beings. Because it is hard and also the crux of spiritual evolution. Not to transcend our humanity, but to deeply embody, witness and feel that which is dense and difficult. To feel all of it, the whole range.

What if your intent to feel your feelings more makes you a spiritual warrior?

That’s the only kind of warrior I am interested in being. To drop the war with feeling our feelings, avoiding pain and disconnecting from our humanity.

Emotion regulation is not about regulating a feeling away to get more calm, to get more contentment.

Emotion regulation is about allowing, witnessing, curiously investigating and nurturing a feeling. It is about the experience itself.

Emotion regulation at its core is honoring your sentience. Beyond good or bad, preferred or unpreferred. Having the courage and skill to meet whatever feeling greets you at the door today with neutrality and curiosity to discover the hidden gem.

Tara Brach’s RAIN practice is one of my favorite Buddhist inspired emotion regulation tools. Download her PDF and put it up on your fridge for the holidays and beyond.

The acronym stands for:

Recognize what is happening and what you are feeling.

Allow the feeling to be there without judgment, from the observer consciousness.

Investigate the message behind the feeling, why is this feeling visitor here?

Nurture with compassion that it is difficult to feel difficult feelings, for all humans.

These steps require a pause, so grant yourself a bathroom break. Close your eyes, rub your hands vigorously together and place a hand on your heart. Ride the wave without anyone watching, this is for you, held by you. If you like, play around with a somatic hold with one hand on the back of your neck and one hand on your forehead. This is a containing posture that soothes racing thoughts and emotions and triggers oxytocin.

This leads me to the recipe for contentment over the holidays (and beyond).

Fundamentally, there are a few key ingredients to foster greater contentment.

1. Daily commitment practice upon waking:

   1. How does my body feel today? Listen and sense within.

   2. How do I want to feel today? Listen and sense within.

   3. What actions will support me feeling that way? Create your plan.

   4. Plans are created, and plans pivot and change. Commit to your own flexibility.

Why a daily commitment? Well, in the morning you’re the most fresh and uncorrupted by others’ energy. That is if you exercise boundaries around your time and phone.

Here are some questions to reflect upon:

• Can you commit to turning in to listen to yourself before others (in your household, in the media).

• Is this important to you?

• Do you believe you are worthy enough to be directed by your internal knowing and not at the mercy of the external world and others’ agendas?

This is a huge, behavioral change that requires your buy-in. Everything is a trade-off. If you begin your day with a brief check-in with your body and heart, you are more authentically self-directed. If you begin your day with checking your phone as your first activity, you have opened yourself to others’ energy and agendas and will be more other-directed. There is no right or wrong here. Simply drawing attention to energy, your agency with choices and your values.

To be authentic, is to be more connected to your values.

To be authentic, is to be self-honoring and self-directed.

To be authentic, is to listen to the wisdom of your body again and again.

And sometimes the self-directed choice is to to choose what is best for your community.

The other ingredients are like a lovely spice mix. Choose the spice that’s needed at any moment. The real star of the show is the daily commitment practice.

If you intend to feel more contentment this holiday season:

1. Honor your boundaries, repeat them as needed and claim space for your needs.

2. Hold your heart with gentleness as losses surface from the past or remain present.

3. Shine the spotlight of your attention on that which you can control, only.

4. Listen more and play with what it feels like to observe and not engage.

5. Breathe deeply and ground your energy down into the center of the Earth.

6. Remember that when it’s difficult to connect with humans, connect with nature.

What would you add?

What helps you foster greater internal peace and contentment?

How can you play more with what is challenging and drop the resistance and fight?

Remember, less is more. Gentle is more. Listening more opens up a lot of doors to curiosity and self-discovery. Boundaries are about communicating what is right for you and setting them is an act of self-honoring. Taking space for yourself is valid and ok. Give yourself permission slips. There is no right or wrong choice, only trade-offs. That’s what it means when people say, “yes to something means no to something else.”

Start with your daily commitment practice. Pivot as necessary. If your life is a movie, play around with watching it a little bit more than acting in it over the holidays. What details do you notice when you do so that you would have missed? Distance can be a good thing, especially if the intention around fostering distance is in service of fostering contentment.

The natural law of impermanence is real. Everything is changing all the time.

Let this season be what it is.

Focus your attention on what is in your control.

Grow your observation skills, learn and listen more and find new corners and capacity within yourself to make choices that serve personal contentment and integrity.

Here’s a resource recommendation for you—

If you don’t already know who Nedra Glover Tawwab is, this is my gift to you. She writes a fantastic newsletter here on Substack called Nedra Nuggets which she also speaks of on her instagram page. She is a psychotherapist and New York Times Bestselling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, now also in workbook format.