Christmas Past

I have been feeling disconnected from my practice of Mindfulness on and off over the past week and am curious about this resistance. I discussed this yesterday with a friend, and as the conversation progressed, I realised I want my experience of Christmas to be the same as it was when I was a very young girl. I have an ideal that I hold onto, which stops me from truly being in the moment and takes me into the shadows of despair and melancholia. After this conversation and a day of reflection, I discovered within the darkness an aspect of my self who is afraid to feel joy and finds comfort in the familiar pattern and landscape of ideals and perfectionism. This realisation has allowed me to breathe into the essence of what I long for from my childhood experience of Christmas and thus free myself up a little to take in and bring back to life those memories that I have left buried in the past as ideals that cannot be relieved or re-experienced.

“I have an ideal that I hold onto, which stops me from truly being in the moment and takes me into the shadows of despair and melancholia.”

Rachel Podger

After this conversation and a day of reflection, I discovered within the darkness an aspect of my self who is afraid to feel joy and finds comfort in the familiar pattern and landscape of ideals and perfectionism. This realisation has allowed me to breathe into the essence of what I long for from my childhood experience of Christmas and thus free myself up a little to take in and bring back to life those memories that I have left buried in the past as ideals that cannot be relieved or re-experienced. On my walk this morning, I paused to watch the movement of the clouds and the patterns and colours that formed in the sky. In this moment I connected with my breath and came back to my Mindfulness practice. The sense of presence and spaciousness that I felt allowed me to remember once more my love of Nature and the importance of being able to come back to myself and remember the bigger picture. As you can see from my brief video and photographs, the clouds move slowly, and the colours change, but the same remains blue behind them. I needed to pause long enough to notice this, and as a consequence, my day now has colour and contrast for which I am truly thankful.