The Ups and Downs of the Holiday Season

Today's article is a guest post from Gregg Krech. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to take a weekend workshop with Gregg on Naikan, which is a powerful practice of self reflection and cultivating gratitude with roots in Jodo Shinshu Buddhist teachings. The basic practice is deceptively simple. You focus on your interactions during the day, and take time to reflect on the answers to each of three questions.

What have I received from others?

What have I given to others?

What troubles and difficulties have I caused to others?

You can do this focusing on a single person, group of people (like family, friends, or co-workers), or you can bring in all your interactions during the day.

After that workshop, I did daily Naikan reflections for over a year and a half. Since then, I revive the practice whenever I feel like I've lost touch with the numerous gifts coming into my life, even during difficult times. My life has shifted as a result of this work, and I'm grateful to Gregg for having introduced us to it during that workshop, and also for his book on Naikan, which explores the topic more in depth.

I hope you enjoy Gregg's timely piece today. Given how challenging the holiday season can be for many folks, I think this exploration of an alternative set of "three poisons" is a helpful antidote.

The Ups and Downs of the Holiday Season

by Gregg Krech

One of the most common messages in a holiday card is, “Happy Holidays.” We generally expect the holidays to be joyful and happy. We hear uplifting Christmas music and we have images of presents under Christmas trees, menorahs and Santa Claus. But the reality of the holiday season is a bit different. More of a mix of up and down moods and moments. Along with the Christmas music there are financial pressures. There are also crowded stores, heavy traffic, family infighting, and a certain amount of loneliness. When we find ourselves feeling depressed, overwhelmed or in despair, we think, “What’s wrong with me – it’s the holiday season? I’m supposed to feel good.” But we don’t – at least not all the time.

Let’s look at what I call the Three Poisons:

Expectations

Control

Mindlessness

How do they affect our experience of the holiday season?

Any time we have high expectations (actually, any expectations at all) we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. What are your expectations going into the holidays?:

• Everybody in the family should get along with one another.
• I should give people I love lots of nice presents and I should also receive lots of nice presents.
• I should send out and receive holiday cards.
• There should be wonderful decorations and lovely white snow (Note: I live in Vermont).
• I should feel grateful and joyful and other people should be cheerful and pleasant.

These are just a few examples. See if you can discover your own underlying expectations. When you have a moment in which you feel disappointed or angry, can you investigate the expectation you have that hasn’t been met?

Realistically, we can’t simply tell ourselves to drop our expectations. We don’t have that kind of control over our minds and hearts. What we can do is to bring an awareness to how our expectations create disappointment, resentment and even anger. We can become conscious of how our expectations often poison our ability to simply enjoy what life places in our path. That awareness itself can help us to better accept situations that would otherwise push our buttons.

The second poison is control. Many of us use the holidays as a time for reconnecting with our families including those family members who would be doing so much better if they would just take our advice about how to fix their lives.

Of course they haven't in the past, but this might just be the time they're ready to listen and "see the light." As an alternative, why not leave our teacher/counselor hat in the closet and just concentrate on being a loving son/sister/cousin/parent. We can play this role quite well without ever giving advice. And if someone else is trying to fix your life, well, just listen, thank them for their concern, and perhaps ask them if they'd like to go outside and help feed the birds or make a snowman.

Expectations are often the precursor to control. We have an idea of how we want things to turn out and now it is up to us to orchestrate the situation to make sure that happens. There’s nothing wrong with trying to host a nice dinner or party, but we have to allow life to unfold in its own way. There is a term in Japanese – jiriki. It means self-power. Making a conscious effort and taking action can be valuable. But trying to control the outcome is a guaranteed formulae for stress, anxiety and, ultimately, disappointment.

So use the holiday season as an opportunity to practice acceptance – it’s an undervalued quality that most of us could benefit from.

Finally, there’s the third poison of mindlessness – specifically the kind of mindlessness that comes from rushing. The more we’re in a hurry, the more our minds tend to abandon the present moment and think about what hasn’t happened yet. So we need to find a way to anchor ourselves in the present, even on busy days when there’s so much to do. When I traveled with Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1980’s, he taught us to use the ringing of the phone or a red stoplight as a cue for pausing and coming back to our breath. You can use this strategy with any external cue, or create one yourself with an app on your phone. The idea is to have a regular system for pausing and reconnecting with what’s happening right now.

In Japanese Psychology we learn not only to reconnect with the present, but also to reconnect with the world around us instead of getting stuck in our heads. So another way to enrich your holiday experience is to practice using your senses. Touch and smell the world around you. Close your eyes and just listen. Taste your food instead of reading the news while you eat. Self-focused attention is associated with almost every psychological disorder, so use the holidays as a way of engaging with the world around you.

When you find yourself caught up in the ups and downs of the holidays, just enjoy the ride. The bouncing is good for your spiritual muscles. And if you find yourself out of breath – that’s wonderful. It means your attention is in the right place.

Gregg Krech has been studying and teaching Japanese Psychology for 27 years and is the author of several books including, The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology (2014). He is currently conducting an online retreat for Tricycle magazine on the theme of Self-Reflection and Gratitude. In January, he will be teaching a distance learning program for the ToDo Institute called Living on Purpose as a way of launching the new year.

the basis for the bodhisattva work of non-violent intervention

I was on the bus this morning and I saw a woman hurrying across the street in front of us. She was clearly anxious and as she passed the large, wide front bus window, I noticed a ball of tension rising within me. Looking at her struggling, I felt a resistance, a not wanting to "deal" with her appearance in my life.

And it hit me - this was the confused mix of compassion and control I often respond to the human-filled environment with. I felt whatever she was experiencing trying to enter me, and I both wanted to heal it, and banish it at the same time. While desiring to heal or help someone is a compassionate feeling, it often tied to a self centered desire to significantly reduce the amount of time you have to spend witnessing another person's suffering. Wanting to banish suffering can also be a noble impulse, but too often this impulse is tied to violence and/or hatred.

"Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.
The vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers, be familiar with their instruction,
Bind grasses to build a hut, and don't give up."

We are called to learn how to see ourselves, and others, completely - moment after moment. That turning "the light o shine within" allows us to act in the world, as opposed to react to it.

Shitou (author of the above) , lived a lot of his life in intimacy with the planet as it was. The ancestral trees, grasses, medicine plants, waters, mountains - these were as much his teachers as any human, if not more. At the same time, familial and cultural human ancestors probably played a large role in his life. Another reason perhaps why it took only two poems to cement his place amongst the great Buddhist teachers. He didn't need a lot of words because he had taken everything in, and wasn't controlled by it, but could engage with it fully.

Things are probably more complicated for a lot of us living now, but at the same time, there are these lines from the Sandokai:

"In the light there is darkness, but don't take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light, but don't see it as light."

Bumping up against human stress and suffering might be more concentrated now, but still is not all that different from twelve hundred years ago. The stress and suffering of the planet is probably much more in our faces now, but decay and death have always been with us.

At the same time, we don't have the luxury to just copy what the various ancestors did. Or we can, but it won't bring the liberation we say we're seeking.

In responding to changing weather conditions, soil conditions, sunlight and moonlight conditions, each generation of trees grows somewhat differently from the previous ones. And yet, through the seeds, their ancestral lineage remains fully intact.

The basis for the bodhisattva work of non-violent intervention is being able to see ourselves, and others, completely - moment after moment. And then acting from that clear seeing.

Calm is Not Boring

To some extent, in our culture, we associate calm with a certain relaxed dullness, like lying in a hammock on a summer afternoon after a hard day's work. On the other hand, we are often alert but tense, as when we face danger or financial problems ... We associate alertness with a crisis mode. But this polarization is not intrinsic to human consciousness. What we are gradually learning in this practice is utter calm that is highly alert, like the frog that Suzuki Roshi used to talk about, sitting on a lily pad.

Larry Rosenberg, Breath By Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation

I experienced this utter calm during our weekly class at the zen center last night. As people talked about their experiences, or ideas about the teacher's talk, I found myself listening simultaneously to what was being said and what was coming up within. I took in the visuals - the lights outside our zendo, the piles of dirt from the road construction, my dharma brothers and sisters, the jagged crack along the floor. And I sat with the rising and falling of my chest, the entering and fading away of every breath. Until a few lines from Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life arose, I experienced the familiar anxiety that comes before wanting to share, and then I spoke them:

There's nothing that does not grow light
through habit and familiarity,
putting up with little cares,
I'll train myself to bear with great adversity.

I've been working with these lines for about two and a half years now. In order to keep them with me daily, I chant them silently to myself as I brush my teeth every night before bed.

Sitting here now, I can see where this teaching is a gateway into that utter calm I experienced, and Rosenberg and Suzuki were speaking about. Because all of those "little cares" that arrive in our lives have the ability to muck things up greatly, if we can't meet them as they are in the moment. The pain in your back, for example, easily can lead to tension, and then irritation, and then angry acting out of some kind. So it often goes.

Many people come to Buddhism seeking calm and peace, but don't really understand what calm and peace actually are. And since it's easy enough to get to that "relaxed dullness" through things like television, drinking, eating, and other such commonplace activities, some of us fail to notice the presence of actual calm and peace.

I know I used to meditate like mad, associating calm with boredom, and thinking zazen was kind of an endurance contest I had to win somehow. In this, there was no room for the world to fully enter, to be "confirmed by the ten thousand things" as Dogen once said.

Can you be like the frog, taking it all in, ready in a moment's notice to eat the meal that comes?