The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
My grief is not yours to fix. My sadness has nothing to do with you. You are more than I could have ever hoped for. These are the words I repeat to my daughter as I bundle up and rock her to sleep tonight.
I say these words often during this time of year; there is so much that comes up for me during winter time. Everything in nature goes dormant around us, the days are short…and here in the Pacific Northwest it is colder than many of us would like. I find myself missing the people I wish were still here to celebrate the end of another year with me — people who have passed away, or people who I am no longer in regular contact with.
My daughter, who is seven months old today, in some ways can and can’t understand the words I’m saying. She can understand the emotions behind the words; she knows my speech carries my emotions.
Once the warm fall days turn slightly more gray and dark, our descent into winter begins, and now, a week away from the shortest day and darkest night of the year, we’ve all been trudging along for some time. Can you feel it?
ID: Holiday lights twinkle in and out of focus with a low-lit background in this photo.
My grief is not yours to fix. My sadness has nothing to do with you. You are more than I could have ever hoped for.
These are the words I say—not only to my children, but to other loved ones when I am feeling sad. Voicing this sentiment helps me release any obligation to feel perpetually happy during “the most wonderful time of the year.”
My two-and-a-half year old is learning about emotional states right now. “My am sad.” “I am sick.” My am happy.” He will also exclaim, when he’s wanting to play one of his new favorite games, “Mama be happy!”, “Mama be sad!”, “Mama be mad!”... And I play along, making the faces and gestures he requests. We are learning, often together, that we are more than just our states of being. We can feel many things, and we are different from the emotions and feeling states we’re temporarily seated in. In technical terms, this little guy is in the midst of learning to “mentalize.”
ID: A child in a dress-shirt and bow-tie raises their arms and expresses sadness on their face with a frown and their eyes closed.
Mentalization is the capacity to be aware of our own and others’ mental and emotional states. It’s the essential foundation for what we call empathy in adults, and it’s learned early in life when loving caregivers appropriately attune to and describe little ones’ inner thoughts and feelings to them. According to Peter Fonagy, a researcher at the forefront of the field of mentalization and infant-caregiver attachment, “optimal development of the capacity to mentalize depends on interaction with more mature and sensitive minds,” and the earliest iterations of this—like this game wherein my son has me pretend to “be sad” or “be happy,”- —are present even in toddlers. As a bodyworker and East Asian medicine practitioner, I can’t help but notice how when we play this game we also express these emotions with our bodies.
It is seldom the case that an emotion does not have some kind of reflection in the body, and vice versa.
As an example, have you ever known someone to happily be in pain?
In East Asian Medicine, the acupuncture channels are a unique repository of resources and an incredibly fine-tuned network that is designed to keep pathogens away from penetrating into the internal organs and causing disease. The body understands that disease of internal organs is the most deadly of all illnesses; the acupuncture channels literally help to keep us alive.
There exists within each of us repositories that hold various types of constraint that our hearts have endured: grief, fear, disappointment, betrayal, or anger, to name a few. When an acupuncturist works with these channels, it means that we are standing at the threshold of possible change of course, a moment in time and space wherein the heart gains an opportunity to transform something it has held onto—sometimes even for a whole lifetime. These treatments can be incredibly helpful any time, but even more so when we have an emotional experience that is present, prominent, and one we are consciously aware of.
When we stay with ourselves we are able to learn so much about our own experience.
My wish for each of us this holiday season is that we can stay with ourselves and when we inevitably veer off course, return gently. My wish for each of us this holiday season is that we can stay true to our experience and to the cornucopia of human emotions that visit us, especially during the most wonderful time of the year.
December 13th, 2022