“If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family” - Ram Dass
This holiday I got my ass handed to me.
It was probably the most difficult Christmas I’ve had besides the first one after the passing of my father.
With these challenges came growth and new awareness. It was hard, but I am grateful for it all.
I thought I’d share my experience and then conclude the post with some takeaways from the experience you might find helpful.
Tis The Season for Spiritual Growth
My fiancee and I flew into New York to see some friends on the 21st. I don’t really drink anymore, but I love the taste of beer. It it was Christmas and I was with two of my best friends from college who like to drink so I thought I’d treat myself and get one. We had a good time, but later that night my body went into complete chaos and I basically didn’t sleep.
We got to my mom’s the next day and I struggled through the day after not having slept the night before. My awareness was on high alert knowing that my patterns were likely to be elevated at home.
Despite taking it easy, my health continued to spiral leading up to Christmas day. I felt incredibly uncomfortable in my stomach and also a bit lightheaded at times.
On Christmas day, I got into a big argument with my mom and said some hurtful things.
One of my patterns that surfaces with my parents is “don’t tell me what to do.”
I am so blessed to have loving parents and I love them very much. However, my parents thought that telling me their opinions on what to do my whole life was them being helpful. This is common in our culture as cited in the book Hunt, Gather, Parent where the author shared that it’s common for American parents to tell their kids what to do 100 times a day.
I know now they were doing the best that they could, but my unconscious inner child found this incredibly repressive. I now see there was a feeling of not being able to “just do and be me” as I tried to be a perfect little boy. All of this resulted in a lot of latent anger that was built up over the years that can now get triggered when adults try to tell me what to do. This was the real reason why there was a blow up that made me temporarily unconscious and react the way I did. Not because the content of the conversation was incredibly offensive.
Thankfully, we were able to move beyond this and have a nice rest of the day. Here is a picture of me and my fiancee at my cousins.
The day after Christmas, we traveled to my fiancee's parents in Florida. On the way to the airport, I was feeling incredibly off and had a ton of anxiety. I usually can get into a calm relaxed state, but when we got to our gate I started to feel very disassociated. It was like I was just looking around the airport and wondering who or where I was. This lit a fire on the anxiety. I considered not boarding the plane, but sucked it up because I felt like I had already screwed up the holidays enough by getting in a fight with my mom.
The next day I was still feeling a bit disassociated and it felt like I had a 30 lb vest on my chest. We were binging Harry Potter and while sitting on the couch I started to find it a bit hard to breathe. All of these physical sensations further spurred racing thoughts on all the potential things that could be going wrong with my body. I tried to just watch the thoughts as thoughts vs. perceive them as forecasts of an imminent future. But with the presence of such pronounced physical discomfort, this was very hard. We went for a walk and I nearly passed out so we went to the ER. We were there for 6 hours and they told me everything looked fine.
I was relieved, but also concerned because I still felt immensely uncomfortable. We spent two more days at my fiancee’s parents and I tried my best to put on a happy face while enduring what felt like a mini dark night of the soul.
We got back to Austin on the 29th and my body started to quiet down. I had a very deep meditation the next day and had lots of revelation. I connected my heart to both my father and mother’s hearts and felt an immense healing.
In addition to our consciousness having patterns or imprints, our hearts do as well. To connect with your heart you simply get into a calm peaceful state, and with a quiet mind and direct intent and speak to your heart.
Using this technique, I asked “what does my father’s heart feel like” and “what does my mother’s heart feel like?” Very clear information emerged and I was able to reconcile wounds at the heart level on both sides that had yet to be examined. I felt an immense opening and lots of mucus that had been stuck in my throat came up and out my nose with some tears providing immense relief.