How to Engage in the Holidays Without Abandoning Yourself

Holidays and family gatherings are the ultimate test of our ability to be with ourselves, and how well we've healed from our personal difficulties. When people come together, it triggers all sorts of challenges - unspoken tensions and tribal rules, old behavioral patterns, and people acting out because they can't express their own wants.

In these environments, it's really easy to get outside of ourselves and get swept up by the drama of the dynamic, and stay there until it depletes us…but it doesn't have to be that way.

There's a way for us to stay in equilibrium and circulate our attention so that we're caring for ourselves while authentically engaging with others. All of this starts with understanding what we want, being able to receive it, and then loving ourselves enough to be with ourselves.

From there, we can create a little home within when things get weird, tense, or challenging.

How does the act of looping our awareness make for a better experience when being around people? How do we identify when we need to tend to our own wellbeing? In this episode, we talk about how to deal with all the complex emotions and patterns that are triggered by family gatherings.

 

Things You'll Learn In This Episode

Judgment is a flee move 

One of the things many of us are prone to do in gatherings is to start internally judging what we deem wrong. Why is this actually a fear-based action? 

Love yourself enough to say what you want

Gatherings also bring us in contact with a hard truth: most people don't actually know what they want exactly. How do we learn to identify this for ourselves? 

Don't keep score

Being around our families and people we knew in our formative years can bring up a lot of old patterns that existed back then or people might treat us differently. How do we handle this with loving awareness?

Learn to loop 

In collective settings, it's really easy to abandon ourselves in favor of making everyone else happy. How do we identify when we're starting to do that? How can we use looping to avoid depletion? 

Looping

The Choice Map

 

About Your Hosts

Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., BC-DMT*, is an evolutionary catalyst and freelance mentor who has been a pioneer in the field of body intelligence and conscious loving for over forty years. Katie has an international reputation as a presenter and seminar leader, bodifying the core skills of conscious living–authenticity, response-ability and appreciation–with conscious enthusiasts from many fields. She is the co-author of twelve books, including the best-selling Conscious Loving, At The Speed of Life and Conscious Loving Ever After: How to Create Thriving Relationship at Midlife and Beyond. Katie has been a successful entrepreneur for over forty years. She specializes in turning concepts such as commitment into felt experience and igniting new actions that emerge from the inside out. Her unique coaching and leadership programs have generated hundreds of body intelligence and relationship coaches in the U.S. and Europe. She co-founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle and the virtual Body Intelligence Summit. Katie has appeared on over 500 radio and television programs and traveled well over one million air miles as the ambassador for the work that she and her husband Gay Hendricks have developed.

 

Sophie Chiche is a seasoned coach and consultant who has traveled the world working with thousands of people and dozens of teams. With a passion for fully expressed living, Sophie coaches, and facilitates group sessions to help people and teams remove what gets in the way of them living their most meaningful lives.Not only does she work with clients to design the life they want, but she's also developed methods, mindsets shifts, and healing modalities to create it elegantly. Born in Paris, raised in Barcelona, and lived in LA for 30 years, Sophie now lives in the middle of nowhere Arizona, where she rides her Harley with her boo, Wall. And plays a lot of pickleball.

 

 

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