8 Tips for Waking Up Over the Holidays

You've developed a nice meditation practice. You sit every day, you face the stresses and strains of daily life with calm and equanimity, and you feel that, finally, you're beginning to get some kind of handle on your patterns.

Then... you go home for Christmas. Or Christmas comes home to you. Either way, now more than ever a budding meditation practice can fall apart. But this is actually the very best time to keep your practice strong.

First, the disruption in your daily schedule will challenge your discipline. If you can keep your practice solid through this, it will be stronger than ever. Second, renewed contact with your family can bring up a lot of old emotional skeletons: what a great opportunity to work with awareness!

Here are 8 tips to help you make the most of it:

On the cushion:

1. Decide the night before when and where you're going to meditate the next day. Then do it. Early in the morning is best, as holiday schedules are unpredictable — best to get to it sooner. Bonus: meditating in the morning will set you up for a more mindful day.

2. Take your meditation cushion with you on overnight visits. For you, it supports your commitment; for others, it's a great conversation piece.

3. During overnight visits, let your hosts/guests know you meditate every day. It will be easier to excuse yourself to do your practice.

4. Adopt a really obvious pose, like sitting on the floor or facing a wall, if you sit in a non-private space while visitors are around. That way, if Uncle Ralph wanders in while you're meditating in the family room at 7am, he'll know not to disturb you.

Off the cushion:

5. Practice deep listening. This is especially beneficial when visiting chatty relatives. Imagine that your whole body becomes an ear, and feel the vibrations of what they are saying moving into and through you. Listen to more than their words: hear their tone, their body language. Most important: include in your attention your own inner responses.

6. When you get irritated, use the opportunity to practice sending and taking. Imagine you can take all the irritation in the world into you in one in-breath, leaving everyone else free of it. Then imagine putting all the nice things you enjoy into one out-breath, and give it all away to others.

7. Take a mindful walk every day. Whether alone or accompanied, open your senses to everything that's there: sights, sounds, smells, sensations. Give your walk your full attention.

8. Imagine every visit will be your last. The only thing we can really count on is impermanence: death can come to anyone at any time. Bearing this in mind can help you focus on what's truly important.

Working with Your Inner (and Outer) Critic

Image: a gargoyle of a nagging wife from a church in Grendon, Northamptonshire.

One of the best ways to avoid experience is to project material out onto others. Let's take being critical as an example. Criticism is often a family disease, passed from generation to generation, which is why it can come up pretty sharply at this time of year.

In my case, I learned to be very sharply critical in a number of ways, including nagging, nasty jokes, "straightening people out", and so on. When I nag my husband or kids, I sometimes have strange moments of clarity wherein I hear my mother's rhythms and tones in my own voice. A sobering experience!

So I look inside, very carefully, when I experience the impulse to criticize. I find that internally I have a critical voice that is talking almost all the time, telling me things I should be doing to improve myself or the world. Under that, discomfort...an anxiety, a sense of things being out of control, of having the responsibility to sharply put things back into "order". Under that, there is anger. Anger that the world is not cooperating with my need for things to be "in order". Under that, there is fear. Fear that if things are not all "in control" I will "lose everything" and "be abandoned". And under all of that, a sense of being vulnerable and alone.

So it is the energy of this fear that cascades upwards through my mind and finds an outlet in criticism. By allowing it to do so, I'm missing the opportunity to simply experience the fear in its true state: simply as energy. I am cultivating the habit of nagging (when has nagging ever helped?). I'm causing suffering for those around me. I am teaching my sons the habit of nagging as well, just as my own mother taught me. But worst of all I'm falling deeper asleep, even as I feel so clear and "right" about my judgments.

When people are critical, they are generally feeling that internal critical voice. This, ironically, makes them hypersensitive to criticism themselves, because anything anybody says that could be seen as criticism is amplified many times by their internal critic, and the only way to silence it is to fight back, defend ourselves and prove them wrong. None of it works. None of it relieves our suffering, it simply distracts us from the pain of feeling what is really there.

When we have a meditation practice, it's typical to start to see all kinds of futile and hypocritical qualities in the behaviour of our friends and family. But observing the foibles of others without recognizing their resonance within ourselves can turn us cruel. So if you experience criticism, or notice the impulse in yourself to criticize, hooray! Here's an opportunity to practice. Try to look at the pain beneath the interaction: their pain, and your own. You don't need to fix it, or transform it, or figure it out, or do anything at all. Just acknowledge that it is there, and observe it. Feel it resonate in mind. Let it come, and then let it go, because it will. Things always come and go, that's their nature.

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen

Getting to the Good Bits

Meditation is a delicate balance. We're in this because we want to end our suffering. That is renunciation, and is actually essential to a good practice. But when we start looking for a specific outcome, like enlightenment, balance, stability, etc., we just get even more confused. As long as "getting to the good bits" is on the agenda, we're in our own way. Because wanting to get to the good bits IS the obstacle.

Remember that nobody, not even the Dalai Lama, not even the Buddha, has ever had any control whatsoever over the outcome of their meditation efforts.

Every time we sit down it is different. But letting go of the illusion of control and just focussing on the work causes a kind of internal release or relaxation. This experience of release is important: you don't only renounce the mental habits that cause suffering, you also renounce misguided efforts to avoid the suffering that has already arrived.

At the beginning of learning how to meditate, one sits on a cushion, adopts the right posture, and waits for the halo to land. Then there's this whole period of confusion and struggle when we realize the halo isn't landing, instead it seems to be raining poop. Eventually, we give up trying to fight the poop and — well, if a halo doesn't exactly land, at least we reach another level. We reach a level where the cushion is a refuge, even when it means feeling our pain instead of avoiding it — where we can see that sitting deepens sanity.

So forget about the good bits. I can't guarantee you they'll happen, and I can't guarantee they'll not happen. It's what IS happening that is important.