Let us pause for holiday season
This weekly column seeks to help educate our community about emotional healing through grief. People may write questions to Golden Willow Retreat and they will be answered privately to you and possibly as a future article for others. Please list a first name that grants permission for printing.
Dear Dr. Ted:
I am hoping you may respond to this letter during the holiday season. We are in the middle of a bunch of spiritual holidays as well as the New Year’s celebration. With the pandemic, I haven’t heard the same cheer and joy that I’m used to and realized I miss it, even though I have been such a bah humbug about the energy in the past. It almost feels as if there is a filter on the holidays. Have you noticed this with others?
Thanks, Dale
Dear Dale:
The pandemic has changed so many parts of our world as we walk through these holidays. Wishing for old rituals and the “old norm” are being felt by so many people everywhere. It is amazing how rituals and community behaviors and activities are taken for granted until they are taken away. You may realize that they are part of your everyday life and they can be missed as there is a void within your usual way of being. 2020 has been a year of insulation, fear, anger, frustration, and for many, a strong sense of isolation and disconnection. People are being asked to not come together in the traditional ways in everyday life, and this isolation is magnified as holiday traditions are all about coming together to celebrate family and community.
What I’m hoping this strange year has demanded, is a time of pause in which everyday activities and thinking can be assessed to decide if they are your truth, or ways of being that have been so normalized they are unconscious habits.
Both Chanukah and Christmas stories have a level of having to survive and endure difficult times through faith and community. Through this endurance from difficulty, there is new hope of communities coming together from a place of intentional love and care.
The world is moving through a level of darkness of the unknown due to this pandemic, and as the everyday norms have been put on hold, other systemic problems have risen to the surface as they are unable to be ignored during this time-out period. The world is being given, not by choice, the opportunity to come from a place of love and compassion for people, animals, the earth and harmony of all, rather than the habitual blinders that have allowed many people to ignore humanity.
Taos Jewish Center virtually hosted a multi-faith Chanukah gathering last week in which over 150 people came together to share community and the importance of supporting those in their time of need, while honoring differences that lead to a community of strength, and bring light to the strength of love and faith. This was such a relief and blessing to see people of different faiths come together and honor one another and support each other in this growth. The results are a stronger community through our differences, and the commonality of purity of intent, love and community.
May we all take this time of pause and look within to see if we are coming from a place of conscious connection with humanity. From a place of care rather than separation, we can step into the New Year with a new lens on the importance of community and collaboration, rather than fearful separation. In Spanish, the word paz means peace, so may we take this pause to remember the peace of humanity for one another and together, we can start to have a healthy new norm as we move into 2021 and heal and grow.
Until next week, I wish you health, healing and love.