BEING PRESENT - PART I
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 76.
Hello, my friends. I cannot believe another holiday season is already upon us. I actually spent the first few days of November saying, I can't believe it's November over and over.
And then I heard a British comedian joking that all November, all anyone ever says is, I can't believe it's November. Now I kind of get a laugh every time I think it, but seriously though, I cannot believe it's November. If you're listening in the U.S., you're looking ahead to Thanksgiving.
Around the world, we're looking ahead to Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day, Boxing Day, New Year's. It seems late November through the end of December is a time of worldwide celebration. I don't know about you, but when I think about holidays, I feel on the one hand, an incredible sense of excitement and joy, just thinking about the celebratory days ahead.
But also I feel this sense of overwhelm. And if I'm honest, sometimes a little dread. I don't know about you, but as I head into these holidays each year, I'm cognizant of a voice in my head that tells me I want to stay present, enjoy every precious moment.
But somehow every year I get sucked in by the overwhelm, dread, and frustration. Honestly, also a little disappointment that I wasn't able to stay present through it all. So I thought it might be helpful to dedicate a podcast or two on the podcast of being present and why it's so hard for us to do.
If you look up advice on how to stay present, you'll find a number of recommendations that involve things that you can do to stay present. Breathing, meditation, practicing gratitude, top the list of strategies you can use to stay present. And I'm all for it.
I love meditation to the point where I'm often so relaxed I fall asleep. I also regularly practice gratitude. And when I find myself really angry or frustrated, I'll take a deep breath and pause before reacting.
All of these strategies are worth considering. But here's what I've found. These strategies work wonders when you're doing them.
But you can't exactly meditate or write in your gratitude journal all day long. That would actually be the opposite of being present if you think about it. But the reason these activities work, at least in the moment when you're doing them, in terms of helping us stay present, is that it gets us to interrupt our thinking long enough to refocus our intentions, refocus our energy toward what we really want.
Obviously, practicing gratitude helps us focus on the things for which we're grateful. Think of it as a Trojan horse of thinking happy thoughts. It's hard not to feel a little lighter when thinking about the ways that your life is wonderful.
It's certainly lighter than focusing on the reasons our lives are challenging. But have you noticed that those thoughts about the challenges of life or even just the stresses of the holidays, they don't stay away for very long. They come creeping back in as soon as you go about the rest of your day.
In the same way, taking a deep breath or meditating can calm our monkey minds for a moment. They can give us a break from the constant barrage of stressful thoughts that might be running through our minds. Those thoughts that are creating feelings of frustration, anxiety, overwhelm, dread, maybe even sadness and grief.
Those thoughts are still there under the surface. So as we dive into this, let's start, for fun, with the feelings of dread and overwhelm. Why not the hard part over with, right? So overwhelm probably speaks for itself.
If you're a mom who's been more or less in charge of pulling off every holiday for your family since your kids were little, probably even before they were born, if you've felt a sense of pressure and responsibility to literally make the holidays happen, I'm right there with you. I'm not generally one to get mired in conversation about feminism or patriarchy, but in our generation, I think by and large, women still take on a huge, disproportionate share of the responsibility of the holiday prepping burden. Everything from the standard cleaning the house and getting the groceries, to buying presents, making sure the piles are even, maybe decorating, orchestrating plans with relatives, managing the holiday party calendar for our kids, our husbands, those get-togethers with our own girlfriends.
It's like normal life, but on steroids because it's holidays. I think there's this sense, at least there always has been for me, that it's supposed to be special. We're not just having dinner.
It's a special dinner. And it's not just any special dinner. It's a dinner steeped in tradition.
My father is German, and so growing up, we would have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner of German-versed schnitzel and sauerkraut. And then on Christmas Day, we would have German rouladen, which consists of a thinly sliced steak rolled and filled with bacon, onions, and pickles. My mother would bake loaves and loaves of stollen, slathered with icing.
She wasn't German, but she knew how much those traditions mattered to my dad, who actually immigrated to this country when he was only eight years old. We still eat this meal, although I confess, I've never loved all of it. Thankfully, my parents get all the ingredients, and no matter where we gather, my mom takes the lead on cooking.
But the point is, this is tradition. Something we do to make the days of Christmas special. And my mom goes to considerable effort to make it all happen.
My dad definitely does things to help my mom, but my mom is and always has been the holiday superhero, orchestrating everything from the meals and decorations to the special outings and thoughtful presents. She even made each of us our own Christmas stocking. Every year, she would make us a special Christmas ornament, and early on, she cross-stitched an advent calendar.
Every day leading up to Christmas, we would sing in front of that advent calendar, and we'd tie a ribbon on the day of the month. And then we'd run to a special spot in the house to collect a daily treat, usually a handful of Hershey Kisses or some other candy, but sometimes an ornament or a small present. And then on Christmas Eve, we'd unwrap PJs.
All of this from the advent fairy. But then Santa would deliver a pile of presents the next morning. And let's not forget, Santa is Santa.
And then mom and dad got us their own presents. My mom made our holidays so incredibly special. My memories of these times growing up are magical.
And so I've followed in her footsteps in terms of wanting to create something magical for my own kids, continuing many of my mom's traditions and also creating our own. I've always wanted to make our home beautiful for the holidays, lit up with lights and candles. From November through honestly sometimes April, because I lose motivation to take down the lights during the doldrums of winter.
It's a standing joke in my house that the Christmas decorations are up for literally half the year. Please feel free to judge me all you want. I am one of those people and I love it.
As you're listening, you may be able to relate to magical memories of the holidays, whatever you celebrate. Or you could be thinking that this is the opposite of your experience growing up. I wonder how your thoughts about your past experiences over the holidays lead you to either recreate your own version of the magic or to do the polar opposite of what you experienced.
No matter your past, good or bad, no matter what holidays you celebrate or religion you practice, you have thoughts about the holidays. And I'm willing to bet that these thoughts are actually keeping you from being present as you go through these magical moments with your family. Now that my boys are older, we typically host Thanksgiving and then travel for Christmas.
So starting right after Halloween, honestly, I start putting up the lights and trying to get things organized. If you host anyone in your home for the holidays, or honestly even if it's just you and your kids, we want to make it nice, right? We want in a perfect world for the house to be clean and organized. We want everything to be just so.
We want a fridge full of everyone's favorite foods and we have to plan out all the ingredients for the special meals. I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago and I had the thought that I should start getting stuff to get ready for Thanksgiving. I got the cranberry sauce and some dressings, but then I realized that so much of what I would need had to be purchased much closer to the holiday.
And so I was already feeling this sense of dread that I'd have to go shopping along with the thousands of other people buying turkeys and vegetables for their Thanksgiving dinner on the Tuesday or Wednesday before the holiday. As you think ahead to the holidays, how much overwhelm and dread comes up for you? It's depressing, honestly, that even as I look forward to the holidays, I feel weighted down with these other negative feelings. It's honestly so typical for us to beat ourselves up for those feelings of dread.
Do you sometimes feel annoyed or even resentful that you feel this sense of dread and overwhelm? And then it's like you catch yourself and you think, no, wait, it's the most beautiful time of the year. Happy, happy, joy, joy. It's like we clobber ourselves over the head with it.
You should be happy, damn it. Look at how lucky you are. You shouldn't be selfish.
And by the way, this is how practicing gratitude can backfire on us. Because before we know it, we're not present with what we're grateful for. We're beating ourselves up because we think we should be more grateful than we are.
It's literally a lose-lose situation. You know, I don't think there's anyone in our lives that we've ever treated as badly as we treat ourselves. You probably wouldn't even speak to a perfect stranger as badly as I'm guessing that you sometimes speak to yourself.
Imagine that some woman that you don't know comes up to you in the mall and says, I'm honestly already overwhelmed by the holidays. I'm willing to bet that your answer to that honest, burdened stranger would be, I know, I hear you. But then when you feel it yourself, you say to yourself, pull yourself together.
You shouldn't be so overwhelmed. You should be looking forward to the holidays or you start blaming other people in your life for how you feel. Imagine the look on that poor woman's face in the mall if you actually said words like pull it together to her.
You shouldn't be so overwhelmed. You would never do that. You would never say that to a perfect stranger, but you're perfectly capable of smacking yourself in the face with these condescending words.
The truth is we don't want to feel overwhelmed and resentful. We don't want to dread something that we also truly want to look forward to. What we want is to feel the magic.
We want to cherish these precious moments with our loved ones, particularly our kids. We want to create something special for them. We want to make our kids and other people in our life feel happy.
We want them to know how much we love them. I'm a big fan of exploring my future self and literally painting a picture of my future life exactly as I want it to look. One way to do this is to write down an image of your life exactly as you want it to look.
But as you write, you write in the present tense as if it's already happening, as if it's already true. I want to share my example of this future letter with you. This is a vision of me living out my perfect holiday.
Here goes. My son is home from college after final exams and my youngest son has also finished his. They're relieved and grateful to be starting their winter breaks.
We've already had a few great family dinners. I'm soaking up every moment of our time together. Each conversation is a gift.
I'm blown away by how much the boys have grown up. They have strong opinions about what's going on in the world and I love that they're informed and have learned enough history to be able to have thoughtful, respectful debate with my husband about what's happening in the world today. The house feels so full, having everyone under the same roof.
There's literally always someone in the kitchen eating something. I love having the house decorated. I love the pile of Christmas presents under the tree.
I'm excited thinking about the expression on the boys' faces when they see what we've gotten them. I've also gotten thoughtful presents from my family. I've been making these t-shirts for everyone in our family with a family slogan on it.
We call ourselves the Peeps. And I love that I've found this idea that's thoughtful but relatively inexpensive and not hard to execute. I love that I have some really good ideas when it comes to present giving.
We have parties and dinners to look forward to, special outings, tickets to Nutcracker, holiday caroling, baking cookies and pies. We're going skiing after Christmas. I'll get to spend time with my boys, just the four of us, and I'll also have special time with my parents, my brother and sister, and their kids.
I'm loving every minute of this holiday. I want to share a little secret. Writing that vision of what my future self wants for the holidays, that was more challenging than I thought it would be.
For every happy, present thought I had, my mind had a response. Let me tell you what was really going on in my mind as I first wrote that vision of what I really wanted my future self to be thinking. So here goes.
So, my boys are done with exams and are ready for break. I was so happy to have my son home for college. And also, he brought home a pile of laundry.
We had a great dinner that first night he was home, and then he immediately went out. He actually ended up spending the night out with friends. My youngest also spent the night out the first night my oldest was home.
But I keep reminding myself there are more nights ahead of us, and I should be grateful that we've had a few dinners together already. I am trying to soak up every moment of our time together, and I'm blown away by how much the boys have grown up. While I love listening to the boys and my husband debate world events, I'm also painfully aware of how small my voice is.
I spend so much of my life juggling that I don't often have time to pay attention to the news. When I do, it's frankly too depressing. But also, I'm so far removed from my U.S. and world history lessons that I can't reference the Constitution or remember the last time an incumbent delayed an election.
I'm disconnected from my memories of world history. I feel stupid and separate. My boys have these powerful conversations with my husband, and I don't feel a part of it.
But the house does feel full. Although, everyone isn't under the same roof every night. Most nights the boys go out.
So I'm still going to sleep with empty rooms in my home. There is literally always someone in the kitchen eating something, which means that there are always dishes everywhere, and I need to run the dishwasher two times a day. I seem to be the only one who unloads it.
The laundry. There's so much laundry. And I've had to go to the grocery store every other day.
How do we go through bananas so quickly? I love having the house decorated, but it also feels cluttered. There's a pile of presents under the tree and also a huge pile of Amazon boxes at the front door waiting for me, and I am apparently the only one in the family who opens these boxes. Plus, many of the boxes contain presents, which then need to be wrapped.
I'm excited to give my boys and everyone else their presents, but also I'm thinking that I still have to get one more thing, or the piles aren't even, or is there still time to get this ordered and delivered by Christmas? We have a Honestly, some of them are going to be painful. The obligatory company dinner or lunch. Getting stuck in conversations with people you don't really know.
Eating too much, drinking too much. Feeling bloated, maybe even hungover the next day. It doesn't take much.
Holiday caroling, nutcracker. I'll be honest, I think about it every year and I never get around to buying the tickets or going caroling. I'm still cleaning off the counter from the latest dinner or trying to stealthily wrap gifts, or I'm on the couch scrolling for Gifts for Dad on Amazon.
Time with my boys, just the four of us, with my family. I love it, and I'm already wishing all of the hectic busyness of it were over. Can you relate? Believe it or not, the psychological term for having both positive and negative feelings about something at the same time is ambivalent.
You know, it's funny, I've always thought of being ambivalent as not caring one way or the other. Maybe I've confused ambivalence with indifference. But ambivalence actually means having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
So in fact, feeling ambivalent about the holidays merely means that you love them and hate them at the same time. Did you know that when we have opposite emotions at the same time, it actually causes us to feel anxiety and a lot of discomfort? It's like a cognitive dissonance, an internal fighting of our mind. It's confusing to say the least to feel wonderful and terrible about the same thing at the same time.
It puts our minds in a state of chaos. And over the holidays, our feelings are generally more intense across the board. Our lives can become more hectic.
If we have challenges with family or friends, these challenges can be magnified as we navigate spending more time together during the holiday gatherings. We can also feel loss and disconnection more acutely during the holidays because again, these times in life are supposed to be special. And so we can feel the loss and separation even more.
Overall, we have these high hopes and expectations for how we want the holidays to go. And sadly, reality sometimes doesn't meet our expectations, at least not in every way. Without meaning to, we set ourselves up for disappointment by creating this idealistic image about how happy we're going to be through these magical holidays.
But we also know from years of experience that the letdown and disappointment and overwhelm, that all of these negative emotions are just waiting for us to dive into the throes of the season. And here we are on the brink of all of it, and we're exhausted already. So now what? If all of this is resonating with you, I can imagine that you're feeling exhausted with the weight of all of the drudgery lying ahead of you.
But here's the critical message. Your ambivalence is actually what's causing you to lose the ability to be present during the holidays. In fact, your ambivalence is what's causing you not to be present in your life in general.
It's just that the holidays magnify all of these feelings. Okay, so let's break this down. And first, maybe I should back up and actually define being present.
On a basic level, being present means being focused on the thing in front of you, be it a conversation, a project, a task, or a person. Being present is literally being in the moment without being distracted, without wanting to be somewhere else, without being in your head and lost in thought. It's certainly not overeating or over drinking just to numb your life and make it feel a little bit better.
But here's what's interesting. I think many of us think that being present is the same as appreciating and being happy in the moment. That being present is the same as being in this constant state of gratitude and peace.
But what I want to invite you to consider is that being present is actually being open to the reality of the current moment exactly as it is right now. Not worried about the future, not dwelling in the past, not waiting to get through it, not wishing it were different. Okay, this sounds like a long list.
And actually, as I've been working through this, I think I'm going to do at least a part two on this topic next week because it's a big one. But also, believe it or not, it's relatively simple. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, the present moment is all you have.
You're here now. Right now, as you're listening to my voice, you are in this moment right now. Are you awake to it? Are you open to it? It can be relatively easy when you're alone or in an unhurried state of mind to be present.
But did you know that it's possible to be present in the current moment even during times of stress or dread, during moments of anxiety and anger? It takes a mindset shift to become the observer of your life and the observer of your mind. Most of us spend our lives thinking that our lives are happening to us rather than seeing ourselves as just one piece of a continuum of circumstances entirely out of our control. And yet, we are in total control of ourselves.
We aren't being whipped around by life, being made to feel overwhelmed as we rush around to get everything done, being made to feel resentful that no one helps us or appreciates how much we have to do. We aren't being let down or disappointed by others. We're actually doing all of this to ourselves.
Being present is being open to our minds and understanding how our minds are creating our emotional experience. Remember that vision of my future holiday, both the one I envisioned where everything was perfect and all in its place, and also the one where I recognized all of the buts and all those and the not-reallies, the one where I realized that my boys' debates with my husband make me think I'm not smart enough to take part, or where I noticed the boys going out every night and wish things were different. How about the holiday parties that I think should be better than they are, and then the wine and the desserts I consume to try to make it all feel better or more celebratory than it really is? It sounds a bit depressing until you see that I'm creating all of it in my mind.
I'm creating the version of me that's aware and appreciating every moment of the holidays, focused on the parts of the experience that are beautiful and real. And I'm also creating the version of me that feels insecure, frustrated, resentful, and let down. My mind is creating all of these experiences, and it's exactly as it should be.
My holiday ambivalence is a real thing. It's my mind in a tug-of-war between wanting a perfect, sparkling, merry, joyful, connected, peaceful holiday season, and thinking that it will never be good enough, and that I'm responsible for creating all of it, and that no one's going to help me or appreciate me. All of it is a choice.
Without awareness, my mind is going to stay stuck in its traditional pattern of holiday ambivalence, hopeful highs and depressing lows, loving it and hating it at the same time. So how do we get out of it? Well, the first step is to accept the holiday ambivalence. Nothing has actually gone wrong.
You have thoughts that the holidays are wonderful, and you also have thoughts that the holidays are stressful. Of course you do. It's also a pattern you've been practicing for a really long time.
Your brain knows what to expect. I was reading the Daily Stoic, and yesterday's passage included the phrase, acceptance is not the same as passivity. When I suggest that you can accept holiday ambivalence, I don't mean that you need to just accept it and get over it, like the holiday is just going to be terrible, like usual, and you need to just move on and get over it.
What I mean by acceptance is that you become awake to the fact that your brain is creating this holiday ambivalence, and therefore that's what's true for you right now. But rather than giving up, I want to invite you to observe over the next few days, become the watcher of your mind. What are you thinking that's creating joy and peace and love? What are those thoughts that are creating the positive emotions you want more of this holiday season, and honestly, all throughout the year? And what are those thoughts that are creating the dread, frustration, overwhelmed sadness, anxiety, and all those other negative feelings you might be experiencing right now? What is your mind saying that's creating these feelings for you? This is the first step to becoming and staying present.
You are here now. Here's another quote from Eckhart Tolle. Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one.
But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. Your life is never not now. You are here now.
You are present by the sheer fact of living in this life. Whatever you're feeling right now, happy, sad, anxious, depressed, angry, these feelings are true for you right now. What might be different if you didn't have to run from your present moment? In the next episode, I'm going to explore more deeply some of the common thoughts that keep us stuck in the negative over the holidays.
I'll explore how to decide what negative emotions you might need to process, and also those that you might be able to decide to let go. We'll also explore how to lean into the more positive emotions, because after all, what we all really want over the holidays is to find more peace and joy. But what if I told you being present meant finding peace even in the midst of the storm? What if that really were possible? This week, observe your mind.
Open yourself up to the holiday ambivalence and let it be okay. Overwhelmed? Ask yourself why. Anxious? What are you thinking? Sad? What's the reason? There is a story in your head behind all of these emotions.
Are these stories you need to accept or let go? Being present is becoming conscious in a way that opens you up to a new appreciation for your life. Your life is never not now.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
