The holiday season is practically in full swing. This time of year comes with lots of love, joy, and time spent with family and friends. It’s beautiful! But there’s a lot going on, all the time! It can be hard to mentally navigate this time of year when there’s so much constant stimuli.
In addition to minimal amounts of “you-time”, this time of year brings together families, often those who don’t normally get to see each other. This can bring out a lot of joy, and a lot of tension. And if you’re anything like me, you might find yourself trying to propagate holiday cheer while simultaneously mediating matters between friends and family members.
Mediation requires a lot of mental capacity, and I find the easiest way to muster this type of positive mental energy is through mediation. However, this time of year gives you very little time to recuperate from this mediation through meditation, what with the constant celebrating and all!
And really, you owe it to all those wonderful people you get to see for the holidays to be the best you can possibly be. It’s hard to be this best-possible-version of yourself if your constantly mentally exhausted.
So, here are some tactics for keeping your holidays merry and bright, and allowing you to mediate AND meditate.
Placing Mediation
This is the most important step, I think, when becoming a type of mediator in your family or friend circle. It’s important to acknowledge who you are mediating, why you are taking on this role of mediator, and how you feel about your role as the mediator.
Acknowledging all of these factors allows you to understand why you are taking on the role you are. It will keep you removed from whatever the issue at hand is, by placing you in the middle of the two parties as opposed to on one side. It will also keep you from getting angry with the two people or groups that are experiencing the issue, again by distancing yourself just enough to know that you are helping someone else out with a problem, not working through a problem that is your own.
It’s also very important to ensure that you are mediating for the right reasons. Mostly, it should just be in an effort to help the people who are facing a difficulty in their relationship. It shouldn’t be a responsibility you feel you have to take on or that someone forced you into. It also shouldn’t be something you do because you have a particularly high stake in an argument, or because you expect some kind of kind gesture back from the people you help. Put simply: if you don’t want to help just for the sake of helping, then don’t do it.
Making sure you’re in the correct frame of mind to help your friends or family members work through their issues will also end up making you a much better mediator. At least in my experience, if I don’t set the whole thing in my mind the right way, I feel it start to gnaw away at me, which only contributes to my mental capacity (and ability to effectively mediate) declining.
This placing is also, on it’s own, a start to meditating. It allows you to think about the issue at hand distantly and calming, while still keeping everyone’s best interests in mind, including your own!
Practicing Meditation
Now that we’ve put our mediation efforts in the proper frame in our minds, it’s important that we don’t simply hang these frames on a mental wall for them to stay for all of eternity. It’s good to frame it, hang it up for a while, acknowledge and accept how you feel about it, and then take it down and allow it to disappear. This is where meditation comes in.
When I say meditation, I don’t mean locking yourself in your room for an hour in the middle of Christmas dinner so you can sit criss-cross-applesauce and just breath. While this would be the best possible option, its hardly conducive for this time of year. So, rather than making a scene out of a meditation, it’s possible to do on your own, quickly, and quietly.
My favorite tactic is to go into the bathroom in a part of the house (or apartment or wherever!) that is not super close to where everyone is gathered. If there’s a downstairs and upstairs bathroom, for instance, and everyone is downstairs, go to the one upstairs. Whatever is just a little out of the way.
Next, stand in front of the mirror and just enjoy the quiet. It might not be totally quiet, but it’s certainly more quiet than wherever everyone else is hanging out. Make sure to breathe in and out slowly and deliberately; feel every breath go all the way into and out of your lungs.
Think about the way you’re feeling about the issue first. Understand what emotions you’re feeling. You don’t have to get into why, there isn’t time for all of that. Just know what they are. Feel them as wholly as you can as you breath. If this means shedding a tear or clenching your teeth for just a moment, do it! Get it out of your system, then let it go.
Next, think about the people that you are mediating for. Think about all the wonderful reasons you care about them and want to help them, and this will give you the strength to return to the group confident and mentally prepared to help your friends and family again.
Hopefully you won’t need any of these steps this winter. Hopefully your family and friendly gatherings are full of fun and laughter rather than tension and disagreement. But on the off chance you find yourself a sudden mediator, hopefully this will be helpful to you!