Thrive Despite Tense Holiday Gatherings

This can be a cheerful time of year but also can call for attending events with toxic people or environments. Just because we have to be around this toxicity, doesn't mean we have to let it invade our positivity. Carrying negative energy in our being is like drinking poison hoping to sicken someone else. It's only hurting ourselves. Regardless of what your challenge is, here are 3 practices guaranteed to pull you back to your inner peace and positivity despite negativity around you.

Self Compassion Meditation

We all go through inevitable ups and downs in life. The greatest thing about it is that it's within our control to pull ourselves back up. We just have to choose to. That's where the self-compassion meditation comes in, when you're noticing you have a negative energy in your chest. Give yourself grace and compassion to mindfully pull yourself out of it.

This method and the next were taught by my Zen master, Geshe Ngawang Phende, and I'm grateful to share it with you. Dedicate time to close your eyes, curl the corners of your mouth up, and:

1. Maintain slow, deep breaths. Focus purely on your breathing, allowing any intruding thoughts to float away like clouds restoring a beautiful clear blue sky. Do this for a few minutes until your inner pace has slowed and steadied with a fortified focus inward.
2. Visualize and gather the negative energy you're feeling internally as a form of smoke in your heart.
3. On your exhale, visualize the smoke and negative energy leaving your body. On your inhale, visualize your heart being filled entirely with sunlight.

Maintain this meditation for as long or as frequently as needed. This is a great way to flush out negative energy and restore you back to inner strength and positivity.

Special Compassion Meditation

The Special Compassion Meditation enables us to acknowledge the toxic presence and maintain our inner light to cultivate actual healing and inner work despite it. Close your eyes, curl the corners of your mouth up, and:

1. Maintain slow, deep breaths. Focus purely on your breathing and allow any thoughts to float away like clouds restoring a beautiful clear blue sky. Do this for a few minutes until your inner pace has slowed and steadied with a fortified focus inward.
2. Visualize the people you love on your right, your enemies in front of you, neutral beings (people you're aware of like neighbors/coworkers that you don't have any particular feelings about) on your left, and all other beings behind and surrounding you.
3. Focus on the beloved people on your right and the love you feel for them. Concentrate on that energy and hold it while you shift your focus and apply it on the other people, especially your enemies in front of you.
4. As you apply that love to even the most challenging people, extend a mothering love as if authentically taking responsibility to help them come out of their negative energy. This shift acts as a shield blocking out negativity.
5. Imagine on your smiling inhale you are taking in happy air and on your exhale you are sending this loving, healing air to everyone across the world to breathe in.

Gratitude

Light and dark cannot share the same space. When you focus on what you're grateful for and allow yourself to lean into that grateful feeling in your heart it leaves you feeling much happier. There's always something to be grateful for.

• Global gratitude: focus on broad, general concepts (fresh air, community, animals)
• Personal gratitude: answer "If I woke up tomorrow only with the things I'm grateful for today, what would I wake up with?" (my health, mobility, pup, independence)
• Situational gratitude: answer "What does gratitude look like in this situation?" (I only have to be around this environment/person for one day vs one year, I can make my own customized tradition that boosts the spirit of the holiday even more, I'm sharpening personal development to be stronger for greater challenges ahead)

Practicing these in advance will help give you a great head start and make it easier to tap into while you're around that uncomfortable company. Here's a video going into a deeper dive to help you with your Special Compassion Meditation.