Many of us have associations with the holiday season for sorrow as well as for joy. Extremes of happiness and of sadness may have good cause. In my case, wonderful memories of great celebrations filled with great food, gifts, and cousins to play with are tempered by the memory of losing my mother just after Christmas in my 20th year after a 6 month struggle with cancer.

Such co-mingling of powerful experiences present opportunities to challenge any tendencies of the mind to take us into smallness and dark moods and to choose our greatness and joy instead.

Here are a few suggestions:

1) Release any notion that it is "selfish" or "bad" to invite abundance and joy into your life. The only thing that can make it "bad" would be if you ask for good things at the expense of others. Again and again, invite abundance, joy, compassion, and wisdom for yourself and for everyone.

2) Release the images, thought patterns and stories about yourself that tend to convince you you are small, hopeless, helpless, unlovable and unimportant. Examine the idea/trance of personality that causes us to suffer such painful thinking because it goes largely unexamined.

3) Practice asking, "Who do I have to believe I am, or, what do I have to believe is true about me to have this problem?" Then challenge the "truth" of the answer you come up with.

4) Practice contemplating the greatness and mystery of life of which you are an inseparable part. Therefore you are a full manifestation of this greatness and mystery.

A great saint once said about the practice of contemplating the true nature of oneself vs. the false notions of oneself:

"One who meticulously measures the length of his shadow, before trying to leap over it cannot be said to understand anything about a shadow. Similarly, the one who, after arduous study of the scriptures, comes to some definitive conclusion about the Self, has failed to understand it. Words recoil from the Self, so how can the intellect, which functions entirely by means of words, understand anything about it?"

4)Trust your Self by practicing again and again simply resting in the present moment in your Heart, your Core, ignoring any thinking that judges your effort or distracts you from this effort to rest in your Self.

5) Recognize that prayer and worry share the same basic template. They are both focused emotion-laden thought about a given subject. Therefore, see that worry is just negative prayer. Since we tend to get what we pray for, when you find yourself worrying, instead of fighting it, take the subject of concern out of worry mode and pray as joyfully and confidently as possible for the blessing that would fulfill the concern.

May these simple points enable to you to experience and share a wonderful holiday season and rest of your life!

Copyright 2006, Jack Elias, All Rights Reserved