It's holiday time - let's talk relationships
Nov 08, 2022As we move into the holiday season and this month of gratitude - let’s talk about relationships.
Holidays can be a time filled with joy, connection, and happy memories of rituals and time together. It can also be painful and lonely due to loss of loved ones, changes in relationships and life circumstances. How do you feel and honor your feelings while connecting with gratitude when you’re grieving or having difficulty adjusting to the changes in your relationships/life? Meditation offers a powerful resource. This time of year offers time for natural introspection and reflection. Use it to your advantage. You have the power to influence your relationships through your own inner experience. You can use meditation to sit with your emotions while cultivating feelings of love, compassion, gratitude, peace and forgiveness toward yourself and others.
Here’s how.
Think of one person you love dearly, who holds a special place in your heart. Now think of a person who challenges you - maybe you love them, but your relationship is fractured, or maybe you have a hard time liking them, but you need to live or work with them (this could be a family member, spouse, friend, or co-worker).
Bring yourself and these two individuals into your meditation with this practice:
- First, recite the meditation below for yourself. Visualize yourself being surrounded with love, peace, and light. If it’s hard for you to visualize yourself, look in a mirror or at a picture of yourself as you lovingly say the words.
- Next meditate on the special person you love. Replace the word me with you as you visualize them surrounded with love, peace, and light. If you aren't able to see their face in your mind, look at a photo of them or write their name on a piece of paper and look at it as you lovingly recite the words.
- Finally, meditate on the one you feel challenged by. Visualize them surrounded with love, peace, and light as you lovingly recite the words, again write their name or look at a photo if that helps. you
End the practice with love to all, peace to all, light to all. Take a few minutes to soul journal how you feel. Practice this daily.
Below are the words to the meditation. If you’d like to listen to a recording, this is the one I use in my own practice. You can either recite along with her or use it as call and response and repeat the words after she says them. In the recording, when you hear “me” replace it with “you” for your second and third rotations.
Love before me
Love behind me
Love at my left
Love at my right
Love above me
Love below me
Love unto me
Love in my surroundings
Love to all
Love to the Universe
Peace before me
Peace behind me
Peace at my left
Peace at my right
Peace above me
Peace below me
Peace unto me
Peace in my surroundings
Peace to all
Peace to the Universe
Light before me
Light behind me
Light at my left
Light at my right
Light above me
Light below me
Light unto me
Light in my surroundings
Light to all
Light to the Universe
Love to all, Peace to all, Light to all
With love and gratitude,
Jodh
P.S. Every Thanksgiving morning we offer a community meditation that is available for free to our entire HealedLovedFed community. It’s our way of saying thank you for being with us on your journey, and to start the morning and the holiday season with meditation, in community.
Register for the meditation here.
As we approach Thanksgiving, we’ll send details about the meditation we’ll practice.
Meditation begins at 6am cst on November 24 and will be accessible whether you have meditation experience or not. I hope you’ll join us, it really is a beautiful way to start the day!