Love & Trust This Holiday

Showing Up

Many of us will be arriving at our homes away from home, so building love and trust into the home environment will take on a new meaning. Showing up at a family home also means showing up emotionally either for a wider array of people or in a deeper, more face-to-face way for the people we already have a lot of virtual contact with. 

All this means that the process of instilling love and trust from the ground up will take a less routinized and more conscious effort from us. Some of what we will need to do is shore up our patience and tolerance. Some of it will center around practicing looking, listening, and repeating back in different circumstances to which we normally do. Some of it will be about allowing ourselves to relax, to turn off our devices, and to let others take care of us for a change. To give and receive gratefully and graciously.

In my upcoming book Rethinking Intelligence, I share some tactics that I use to promote calm and peacefulness in my home environment. Things like centering and breathing, practicing meditation or doing a mindfulness exercise with my kids—I have shared some of these here in prior blogs. These are tactics that I especially rely on when I am entering into a huge holiday hang with many unique and exciting (sometimes overwhelming) home environments.

Lovingkindness

Another tactic that I find useful is meditating in the style of lovingkindness. With three small children who all have enormous personalities and always pressing needs, I rarely have time to myself. So when I do take a moment to close my eyes and focus on chilling out and resetting so that I can continue to love and serve them and the many others in our family home, I find lovingkindness to be the right move.

What is lovingkindness? It’s a meditation that consists of invoking people in your mind and wishing them well. You tune into the thoughts of various people in your world one at a time, and then you say a prayer for each one. In a sense, you home in on them and give them an embrace of unconditional love for just a second. 

In a serious practice of lovingkindness, you would move from people whom you outright love to those you normally do not accept, whether strangers or people who downright offend you. Doing so, you would build up compassion for the people you would otherwise deride. In the case of building love and trust into the holiday home environment, just taking a moment to think of my loved ones with that heightened compassion helps me center myself, grow calm and compassionate, and remember how lucky I am to be celebrating life with them.