Holiday Moments: from Mania to Meditation (Or, how to learn to love doing the dishes.)

The approach of winter holidays can feel like a tingling, sparkling, surprise tip-toeing delightfully around each November corner to thrill and delight us. They can also feel like a punch in the gut, accompanied by the dreaded, jingle-tinged whir of the holiday machine. It seems especially unfair and unsavory that we can even feel both at the same time. The dueling realities of childhood history often contain both loving acts of kindness and shocking acts of betrayal, not only in the same lifetime, but in the same year, in the same day. This mosaic can leave us confused, exhausted, feeling hopeful, helpless, and spent.

Picture one of your best holiday memories, and then one that doesn't hold the same warmth. They might be separated by hours or by years. I'm guessing that each of us, each year, puts a decent amount of energy into trying to regain the feeling of the former, and avoid the experience of the latter. We spend quite a bit of time in the past each holiday season, trying to prevent those ugly feelings or re-create serene ones. We also spend time in the future. We imagine the kind of holidays we want our kids to remember, and task ourselves with providing them a blemish-free catalog of memories. We spend all sorts of time, all sorts of places over the holidays. Almost anywhere but in the present.

Wilfred Bion, a 20th century psychoanalyst, is famously quoted for suggesting starting each session "without memory or desire." His aim is to truly hear one's meaning in each new moment, and not confuse it with what you expect, hope, or hope it not, to be. What if we were to approach the holiday season the same way? What if we endeavored to forget what we know about our own heavy baggage of holidays, both the dirt and the dazzle, and just see what is there?

"What if we endeavored to forget what we know about our own heavy baggage of holidays, both the dirt and the dazzle, and just see what is there?"

This may sound as if I'm suggesting we walk through the next few months with an enlightened stillness that may seem hard to achieve amidst the responsibilities and rhapsody of holiday mania. So, I don't suggest that we expect ourselves to achieve perfect neutrality in the face of gift shopping and holiday cookie baking. But, that we set an intention, pick a moment, or commit to picking several moments, when we try out really noticing just what's there. This can be as simple as stopping, breathing, and looking around. Noticing the light, the temperature, and the sounds in the room without judgment or quickly labeling what we find. Maybe try it now for just a moment. Look up and just identify the colors around you. Nothing more. Just that. See if something inside of you relaxes.

Several years ago, I tried a silent retreat in the beautiful green hills of Massachusetts. Each day we were assigned a schedule. My first day included sitting meditation, yoga, self-led retreat, lunch, dinner, and something called standing meditation. When I arrived for standing meditation, I found myself at a sink full of dirty dishes. Fluctuating between feeling baffled and outraged, I begrudgingly began to work, furious, and awash with mixed up feelings. How dare they call cleaning up standing meditation? I wanted to be outside in the greenery. Wasn't that a better use of retreat? How dare they trick a paying customer into believing "standing meditation" on their schedule was something meaningful, when it was just washing dishes? As you can imagine, it took a long time for me to begin to notice the temperature of the water, the hypnotic, shushing sound of it rushing from the faucet, the glisten of each newly cleaned plate. I didn't have to love scrubbing pots and cutlery, it didn't have to be my new forced enthusiasm, but I could pay attention and see what I found. I found my shoulders relaxing, my thoughts settling into a hum. I realized I had never paid attention to washing dishes before, ever. I noticed that surrendering to just the moment and nothing more brought with it an opportunity. Standing meditation became an unexpected refuge and a time to just be, to just be present.

Since my life and most of our lives don't normally involve retreat, I might suggest baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch. Not just so that you can meditate while mixing the batter and striking a tree pose waiting for the oven timer to go off, but so that you can taste them. When you bake recipes from scratch you notice weird things. Like salt in cookies. When you taste what you've made, you pay attention differently. You try to ferret out the ingredients you measured a fourth of a teaspoon of to see how and where they show up. Salt, it turns out, is a really important part of a chocolate chip cookie, but we wouldn't notice that unless we stop and tried to notice it. To love it even. Not in the sense that salt must be your newest enthusiasm, but to love noticing and accepting what happens to be in front of us in subtle ways.

So, for better or worse, you will likely find yourself doing dishes this holiday season. And, I hope you get to bake cookies, if you are the one who gets to eat them. And I wonder what it might be like if for a moment, or even many moments, maybe even when attending a yearly event we usually don't look forward to, we are brave enough to surrender. What if our holidays were experienced with fresh eyes, in the moment, as if we had never known holidays before.

Jennifer Cutilletta, LCSW

Notes:
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**[Image Credits: Holiday Memories, Meditation, Cookies]

Daylight Savings Time

I dread the “fall back” clock changes of the Daylight Savings Time cycle.  The references to increasing darkness and lessening light set off ripples of loss—of what has been and will not be.  Of holidays that are manically portrayed as happy, yet cause so much grief to so many.  Of aging. Of dwindling resources. Of troubling politics.  It is hard to hold hope in this season sometimes.

There is a place in Ireland, Bru na Boinne, that is an ancient man made mound with a burial cave in the center.  It is so dark and still at its heart, that it is hard to discern what is a human heart beat and what is the earth’s.  It is as quiet as a grave, and as still as a waiting womb.  At a particular time of the Winter Solstice, if the sun is shining, a piercing ray of light will enter through a door lintel and penetrate to the center with such blinding brilliance, the chamber looks leafed with solid radiant gold. For 17 precious minutes of awe, the light sustains.  To the Neolithic culture of the mounds, this moment was a symbolic re-enactment of fertilization, a reminder that the dark is a place of growth and the cycle of life is unremitting and relentless.

As autumn days dim and my human spirit quakes that the light might not return to the day, to the world, to my life or to the lives of those I sit with, I remember this place, and gratefully breathe in the wisdom of the Crone archetype, beautifully captured in this poem:

To be of the Earth is to know

The restlessness of being a seed

The darkness of being planted

The struggle toward the light

The pain of growth into the light

The joy of bursting forth and bearing fruit

The love of being food for someone

The scattering of your seeds

The decay of the seasons

The mystery of death

And the miracle of birth.  (by J. Soos)

So in this season, when the light fades and the cold creeps in, when I am vulnerable to questioning hope, I try to remember the life of a seed, where dark stillness can feel like an end, but is the incubator of quickening newness.  We don’t know what will emerge, but if we can see the darkness as a rich loam and stay present to our experience, we enter the cycle of life, where loss makes way for new, hope is birthed from despair, and dreams can unfold to become real.

May this wintering time be a season of patient incubation and tending what wants to be “born.”

-Monica Robinson, MSW, LCSW

Notes:
*Do you have an opinion on this post? Have some insights to add to this article? We would love for you to leave us a comment below! You are now able to comment completely anonymously if you would like to share your wisdom but aren't comfortable with your identity being shared. Just type your comments in the box below and then click on the box next to "Comment as" and choose "Anonymous!"

**[Image Sources: Alaska A Winter, Brú na Bóinne, Winter Dawn Wallpaper]