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Navigating Holiday Gatherings

12/20/2021

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This is a blog post from a few years ago that I wanted to repeat since it's rich with tips for navigating the holidays. The original blog was written by Gabby Bernstein, hope it serves you! 

Spending time with family can be wonderful and uplifting. It can also be a big source of holiday stress, even for the most functional families. Being around family can dredge up resentments and send you back into old patterns.

I want to help you skip the drama (or handle it with grace if it comes up), so I updated this blog post with tips that I know will help a lot!

Why The Holidays Can Bring On Family Drama

During the holidays, there are lots of reasons why family drama can flare up.

For one, everyone walks in the door with their own issues and hangups. They may be feeling insecure about work or defensive about a relationship, or having a tough time in general. Plus, even the happiest family has old dynamics from childhood that can take over quickly.

Another factor is that everyone may feel pressured to get along. This pressure can actually put you on edge because you feel like you’re being inauthentic. It’s hard to have fun when your guard is up.

And finally, each person has their own expectations of how they want things to go. You might want a festive party while your sister wants a quiet dinner and your cousin wants to get into deep, personal conversations.

Some ways we get caught in family drama during the holidays

It’s easy to think that the drama is everyone else’s fault, but let’s take a moment to gently witness our own behavior. Ask yourself if any of these things apply to you when you’re with your family during the holidays…


  • Do you get into petty fights (regardless of who started them)?
  • Do you judge your relatives’ political views, the way they raise their kids, the food they eat, etc.?
  • Do you often feel like everyone is on your case and slip into a victim mentality?
  • Do you feel like you have to win debates, subtly one-up your siblings or get in the last word?

If you answered yes to any of these, you’re not alone! In fact, most of us do at least one of these things. And when we’re really honest about it, we can admit that this behavior doesn’t serve us.

Sometimes a Clash Seems Inevitable

Let’s get real: Many of us have family members who say or do things that enrage or devastate us. And even if it’s not that extreme, during the holidays you might be forced to sit around a dinner table with people you wouldn’t normally hang out with. You might have conflicting views and different ways of communicating.

In this post I’m giving you some tools you can use to avoid that moment when you lose your cool, forget all your spiritual principles and get yanked way out of alignment. And if that does happen, then these tips will help you come back fast.

6 Ways To Get Along With Your Family During The Holidays

These six tips will help you avoid drama, clear judgment and focus on the good stuff so you can have a beautiful time celebrating!

1. Silently bless everyone
Before you sit down at the dinner table (or even before you walk in the door), say a little prayer for everybody. Pray for them to all enjoy their meal. Send them prayers to have a beautiful new year, and give them your love and your light.

The action of offering up that prayer and giving them a little bit of love puts you into a different energetic vibration. It elevates your energy by redirecting your focus. Instead of focusing on judgment, you focus on what you desire and what you wish for others.

2. Shield yourself from negative energy
If you know you’ll be interacting with someone (or multiple people) who leave you feeling drained or depressed, then you can create an energetic boundary to keep their energy from affecting you too much.

Create these boundaries with love rather than judgment. Remember, we’re all doing the best we can. People who don’t have any energy awareness are not malicious; they’re just struggling to get by. So rather than blame them, simply become mindful of how you can support yourself. There are a couple of techniques I like to use:

​Activate your shield of golden light
Before interacting with one of these people, you can envision a shield of golden light surrounding you and protecting you. Set an intention to activate your energetic shield before the encounter and trust that your energy field is being protected.

Pray to restore your energy
If the negativity hits you after spending time with someone, then you can recite this prayer: “I ask that any negative energy I picked up be removed, recycled and transmuted. I ask that any positive energy I may have lost be retrieved now.”

3. Practice EFT before the holiday get-together
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), also known as tapping, is a powerful tool that we practice in step 2 of Judgment Detox.

EFT is a psychological acupressure technique that supports your emotional and physical health. It combines the cognitive benefits of therapy with the physical benefits of acupuncture to restore your energy and heal your emotions. You just use your fingertips to tap on certain energy meridian points on your body while talking out loud about the issue at hand.

If you’re new to EFT or prefer to have a teacher, cool news: I made a guided video for tapping on judgment! It’s part of my free 3-part Judgment Detox Mini Course.

You can follow my guided tapping video to release judgment before a family get-together or after it — or both. Click here for instant access to my free mini course!

4. If you do get into drama, forgive yourself fast
It happens. Sometimes we get sucked into drama and do the thing we don’t want to do. We yell, we say something judgmental or we let someone else’s words wreck our good time. When this happens, the answer is to show yourself a lot of compassion and forgiveness.

Check out this lecture clip where I talk about how we can experience our screw-ups differently by forgiving ourselves right away.

Every moment offers us an opportunity to experience what A Course in Miracles calls the Holy Instant. The Holy Instant is the moment when you surrender your fear to the care of the Universe and accept the perspective of love.

If you’re having a hard time letting go or getting to that place of forgiveness, then check out this post. In it I give you three steps to go from anger to forgiveness when things boil over.

5. Focus on what you like (and love) about each person
This action takes the prayer practice from tip #1 even further. You can do this in the room, in the moment. Think about what you like about each person, even if it’s something small, like how your uncle always cracks a joke that makes you laugh or your sister-in-law DM’s you good recipes on Instagram.

​Allow yourself to dwell in feelings of love for those family members you’re very close to. Think of all the things you appreciate about them and really feel that love and support.

There may be someone you have a really difficult relationship with and you can’t think of anything positive in the moment. That’s okay. In that case, think of a lesson you’ve learned because of that relationship and cultivate appreciation for that.

Seeing someone for the first time

This technique of focusing on what you like about everyone is a way of practicing Step 4 of Judgment Detox, which is to see someone for the first time.  The experience of seeing someone for the first time is one of deep relief. You free the person from the stories you’ve placed upon them and you free yourself from the bondage of attack. You’ll feel relieved because you’ll be returning to your truth, which is love.

If even for an instant you let down your guard and choose to see through the lens of love rather than fear, you will be one step closer to freedom!

6. Keep your side of the street clean by getting honest about your own judgment
We can avoid a lot of family drama by taking responsibility for our judgment and doing the spiritual and personal work to heal it. The way out of judgment is to witness your judgment without more judgment.

Getting clear about all the ways you judge will help you see your part and understand the root of each judgment so that you can heal what you discover. It might sound scary at first. But let me reassure you that this is a very empowering and freeing process.
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Coping With The Holidays

12/14/2021

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Are you feeling stressed and anxious about the holidays? This time of year can feel overwhelming with gift buying and wrapping, decorating and cookie baking, Christmas cards and holiday gatherings, added on top of the pandemic. Sometimes we rush through the experience feeling exhausted and not  enjoying the season, let alone focusing on the true meaning of the season. 

I invite you to exercise some self-care and for just a moment take a deep breath. Slow down just for a few minutes, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw, take another deep breath. Center yourself just for a moment and breathe deeply. Roll your shoulders forward a few times and backward a few times. It's all good, you've got this, you've totally got this! Inhale in the smells of the holidays and exhale out the busyness.

Maybe you want everything to be picture perfect, please know that it doesn't have to be. If you are feeling really stressed, what can you let go...besides your sleep? Can you skip one batch of cookies? Can you pass on scrubbing the kitchen floor? What can you let go to make life a little easier, so you can enjoy more and stress a little less?

​I invite you to savor the holiday times together, to reflect upon the real reason for the season, to look at it through the lens of a child. Look at your family and friends, the twinkling lights, the food and the treats all with child-like wonder, child-like awe, child-like curiosity, excitement and the belief in miracles. 

I invite you to stop and take a moment to be grateful. Express your gratitude for all of the many blessings in your life. What do you have right now in this moment to be grateful for? Let that be your focus, center on that. 

I invite you to practice loving kindness. To perform lots of random acts of kindness, people can use it this time of year. There are a lot of people who struggle during the holidays. Now is a great time to be of service to others. Small gestures of kindness can change the trajectory of someone's day. It can be as simple as a warm smile, holding open the door, being patient with a sales clerk, or delivering a plate of cookies. 
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As you are busying through the next few weeks, I invite you to take several moments to exercise self-care and to take a deep breath. Center yourself and soak in the moment. Be present,  savor what you are doing, what you are creating, what you are enjoying, what you are grateful for. Stop, look and listen to all of the lights, the beauty, the sounds and smells all around you. Savor the moment, just for a few minutes at least, and breathe deeply. Inhale in the smells of the holidays and exhale out the busyness. You've got this, you've totally got this!
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Give Yourself A High Five

12/7/2021

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Have you read Mel Robbins' new book The High 5 Habit? I love the book and the impactful message and practice that it promotes. A quick and easy addition to your morning routine of giving yourself a high five in the mirror, yep it's that simple!

You might be thinking that this a silly thing to do, but the simple practice of giving yourself a high five in the mirror each morning unlocks powerful neuro-associations that create positive chemical, neurological, physiological, psychological, and structural changes in your brain. Ground-breaking science proves why adding a high five in the mirror will change your life for the better.

When we give a high five to someone it's a shared celebration. Holding up your hand with a big smile on your face are two instantly recognizable signs to your brain of genuine pride and encouragement. A high five means you are celebrating with the other person. By giving yourself a high five in the mirror your brain is associating that same genuine pride and encouragement toward your own reflection in the mirror. Your brain is already trained to hold this as a belief system, so you are proving to your brain that you are worthy of this celebration and belief about yourself. 

How often do you cheer for yourself? The high 5 habit gives you an opportunity to start off your day by cheering yourself on, setting the intention and trajectory for your day. 

As Mel Robbins states in her book, "If you want more celebration, validation, love, acceptance, and optimism, you must practice giving those things to yourself. For real. It starts with YOU. If you don't cheer for yourself and your dreams, who else will? If you can't look yourself in the mirror and see someone worth loving, why would anyone else? And speaking of everyone else: when you learn how to love yourself and support yourself, it helps every relationship in your life. When you can celebrate YOURSELF, it helps you cheer louder for others: your friends, your colleagues, your family, your neighbors, and your partner. That's because your relationship with yourself is the foundation of every relationship you have in life."

By giving yourself a high five each morning, you stop seeing the physical you and start seeing the you within. Seeing your soul and all that your life represents. I invite you to read the book and to start incorporating the high five habit into your morning routine. 
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