From Our Home to Yours: Reflections and Blessings at Christmastime

Our home in wintertime several years ago

Blessings at Christmas and

Reflections on Peace, Healing, 

Compassion, and Love

 

Warmest holiday greetings to friends and family far and near! 

 

As so many of us do, at Christmastime and during these long nights and darker days, I find myself reflecting over this past year, one which has been both difficult and deeply blessed for Ron and myself. 

 

As many of you know, in the spring Ron began feeling symptoms of intense exhaustion and weakening of his muscles. What followed was a diagnosis of statin induced necrotizing myopathy, two trips to the hospital with one via ambulance (after an original infusion treatment caused blood clots to form in his lungs), and ultimately successful ongoing treatment which is managing his symptoms. While Ron continues to feel the impact of the illness, he is now doing so much better than he was! 

 

Today we are hugely grateful for Ron’s progress and the ability to again resume so many of our normal activities. This includes trips to the Oregon coast, to Victoria to visit Kevin and Arlyne and Ethan and our Canadian family, and 10 days in Kauai just this month where we celebrated Ron's 75th birthday.  

 

Ron and I treasure our relationships and time spent with our beloved friends and adult children and their partners — Brian and Marita, Kevin and Arlyne, Matt and Rubí, and Alli and Kane. This year has been one of challenges and also many positive changes for our loved ones. It is of course also such a joy for us to be Grandpa Ron and Grammie to Audrey (3), Ethan (4), Eleanor (5 ), Carsten (6), and Oliver (7). They are each so precious, so beautiful, so loved.

In addition to these many gifts, in January Ron and I began doing volunteer work with Afghan and Syrian refugees settling in our area. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to cultivate the rich friendships that we enjoy today with our new neighbors. 

 

This year I was also asked to be Intercessor for an annual women’s ceremony that I have been participating in since 1999. It is a great honor to hold the safe and sacred space for this ceremony which honors women in all of our life stages. 

 

And, finally!, I was able to have a memorial ceremony for my mother, which had been postponed due to Covid. I am so grateful! 

 

This is but a glimpse into what 2022 has held for my husband and myself.

 

* * * * *

 

Kuan Yin, Goddess of Compassion

It also comes to me to add some thoughts on peace, healing, compassion, and love. In doing so, it is important to speak to both the shadow side of the holiday season and to it's potential gifts and grace.

For many, this time of year is not just one of Christmas cheer, joy, celebration, gratitude, peace, and love. Often the felt experience of the holidays, at least in part, is one of stress, depression, sadness, isolation, family conflict and loss, pressures to get the right gifts, and/or to pull off the perfect entertainment. Often there is a heavy weight that comes with this time of year and which stands in contradiction to what we are taught to believe that we are supposed to feel.

 

Rumi wisely asks us to "welcome it all" in The Guest House:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

—  Rumi

The invitation here is to stand in our truth, our authenticity, and wrap ourselves in kindness, compassion, curiosity, and openness to accepting ourselves just as we are. Out of this acceptance emerges the opportunity to listen and learn, to grow into greater wholeness and truth, and to seek the lessons and healing and gifts held in exactly the places that we struggle with and are most challenged by.

Many years ago my therapist compassionately and wisely told me that "whatever we try to push away only grows stronger." This is a profound teaching. 

Rather than the self-rejection that comes with denying, judging, shaming and "shoulding" on ourselves, or others, we can try something different. We can practice noticing our thoughts and emotions and holding ourselves with compassion. Again and again and again. We can be increasingly mindful and seek to simply become more conscious of what we are experiencing — the stress, the depression, the "I can't wait till it's over," the yearning for the short days and long nights to end — and inquire into this seeming darkness within ourselves with curiosity, courage, and tenderness. 

What is being sent as a guide from beyond? What has been depressed — shoved down, denied, judged, neglected — that is bringing on the depression? As Gabor Maté so wisely asks, Why the pain?

Over these many years of my gradual awakening, I've been learning to love myself. Something so simple, so core to our well-being, and yet something so enormously difficult for the vast majority of us. Again and again, the messages that we absorb in our culture are to get over it, be happy, blame and shame ourselves and others for the "depression, meanness, and crowd of sorrows."

The blessed miracle that I have discovered is that we actually have a choice, one that I did not recognize or understand before I embarked on this amazing journey of healing my heart and transforming my life. We can actually learn to love ourselves. This is possible... but only possible to the degree that we become conscious of the moments, the beliefs, and the multiple ways that we withhold compassion, acceptance, and love from ourselves.

And, of course, to the degree that we are unknowingly empathically impaired is the degree that we will struggle with consistently bringing empathy and compassion, kindness and understanding, and tenderness and love to others. This has been a painful lesson for me, and a vital one.

This is a lifelong process, this welcoming wholeness and embodying love. It is not easy to consciously stand in our authenticity, our truth. Certainly I spent many years in reflexive triggers where my judging mind wreaked havoc on myself and others, including those I most love. I couldn't see then what I was doing. I was acting out of my neglected and unhealed heart.

Then the enormity of this path of Grace and Love appeared before me decades ago without my even knowing what it was. It will be 40 years on February 8th since that doorway first appeared and I stepped through. And since that day everything has changed. Absolutely everything.

May we all find the wise and loving support we need to increasingly welcome it all and grow into the wholeness of our holy sacred selves.

* * * * * 

Today, and even through difficult times, there is abundance, peace, compassion and love. Ron and I remain connected with our loving family and friends, gratitude and beauty, and consciousness of how blessed we are. 

For Christmas and in the coming New Year, may you too be blessed with loving connections, with healing and wholeness, and with what most nourishes your heart and soul. 

May we embody the true spirit of Christmas. May love be your guiding light.

 

With love and blessings,

💗

Molly

 

 * * *

 

(This may seem unrelated, but its healing 

wisdom is woven through this post and so much 

that I share. This is why I am recommending 

The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté to everyone. 🙏)