How to add joy and experience meaningful connection with family and friends
The holidays are a potent time filled with spiritual significance. They are also a time of material enjoyment, family gatherings, festive food, gift giving, and bringing light into the world.Want to listen instead?
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Another Expanding on Expansive where I pick a post from this week’s posts on Instagram and on social media, and I dive deeper into the teaching behind the post, or I pick a theme within a few posts and dive deeper, or give you a tip or a practice that you can do today in order to experience the magic of spiritual-material unity, which is the nature of reality on our planet. And so that you can live in greater spiritual-material balance and so that you can create and generate for yourself and for your loved ones and for the people you work with and live with greater spiritual-material abundance. And when you do that, you build your resilience, your spiritual immunity, your emotional resilience, and we need it at this time.
It’s been a tough year for all of us in different ways for different people, but it’s been intense and so intensity demands that we show up even more fully to this intensity. Otherwise, we go under. And so it’s been intense to just rise to the intensity of the wave that came upon us unexpectedly this year. And a lot of good opportunities have come out of it.
So it’s been challenging and there’s been losses and there’s been opportunities that are going to begin more and more to flesh out as we go into 2021. And so why is it important that we live in spiritual material unity? Because what I posted today was expensive awareness, that, “The nature of reality is spiritual-material unity.”
Why is it important that you know that? Well, I want to give you today the formula to spiritual fulfillment and material enjoyment in the holidays. And that’s why it’s important because if the nature of reality is spiritual-material unity, then you don’t need to live a split life– have spiritual experiences on the weekends. If you belong to some faith or your daily spiritual practice, or when you go on a retreat, which we haven’t been able to do this past year much with COVID, and then you live the rest of your life is like material with no nourishment. The spiritual nourishes the material. So when you only are in the spiritual, you feel so nourished, but then you go back and you’re depleted really quickly because you’re living in a material world and you don’t have this connection of spiritual to material, constantly flowing. And so in the holidays, which, whether you are celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, or have your own goddess spirituality around the winter solstice, whatever you celebrate, these are auspicious times with a lot of spiritual meaning and symbolism and potential, but they’ve also become super materialistic with getting gifts and buying things.
And what do they call it, like Black Friday?
I think it was called that– Black Friday. And it’s just like all these deals that are all good. And we all want to get things for less money, but we’re also getting a lot of things that are eventually going to go to the garage sale or to the landfill. And there’s this urgency to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And so, again, a season that has a lot of spiritual potency in it, and there’s a lot of material, both gifting and buying, but there’s also material enjoyment. If it’s food, if it’s the lights, if it is gifts that we give ourselves or ask for or give others. So it’s a potent season for spiritual-material balance, not by not having material things and not receiving gifts or giving gifts, but by imbuing our material gifts and our material experiences with spiritual value so that we enjoy so that when we taste a cake or eat a dish or receive a gift under the tree, there’s joy in it because we are filled spiritually as well as materially. We’re gratified materially and we’re fulfilled spiritually.
So the formula is super, super simple: something spiritual, something material, and you have the unity. Okay. So that’s what it looks like at the highest level. Now, let me give you some examples of that. So for example, gift-giving. Something spiritual is creative experience. If you tap into creativity in your gift-giving, so that’s the spiritual part, and you add to that make your own gifts, that’s the material expression of creativity.
It sums up to joy, fun, and it’s gratifying. So that’s how you can use the formula for gift giving. Now, for example, let’s do it for holiday foods. Okay? So the spiritual part is celebrating traditions, traditions– your personal family traditions, your ancestral traditions, your cultural, that is, you know, you’re taking the energy that came from your traditions and you’re celebrating that.
That’s the spiritual aspect of it. Add to that the holiday foods, that’s the material expression of the traditions and the energy of your ancestry and cultural experiences. Together, it combines to this unity and fulfillment, nourishment, enjoyment, and festivity. And I’ll give you examples. So each one of these is a blog post on my website from last year. And so the links are in the bio to all three of them. So you can actually read more what each one actually is about. And I have examples for each one so that I’m not just giving you the formula, but I’m giving you ideas of what you could do with the formula.
So for light– to light is the spiritual, the spiritual quality that you want to bring in gathering with loved ones is the material expression of the light. And together, you have connection, belonging, meaning. You see? So basically you’re just elevating your perception of an experience is that, Oh, well the family is meeting. No, the family is connecting. So connection becomes the quality that you’re paying attention to. Or you feel that you belong, so suddenly belonging is the quality. So you see there’s endless blogs that are going to tell you ideas of how to gather and what to eat and how to light the candle and what gifts to give, but what I’m adding to that is if you choose the quality intentionally that you want to bring in to a gathering or to a gift-giving or to the food or to a ceremony with lights, when you bring that intention in and you experience it, you are filling yourself with spiritual sustenance while you are sitting and having a meal with friends or family.
We did Thanksgiving on zoom with my book club. And so we created a festive meal, my spouse and I, and we had a festive meal and we had lights, but it was just my spouse and I, and it was zoom. And our book club was on the other side on zoom. And we share the different foods that we ate. So if you can’t meet with people this year, it’s okay. You can still do a lot around zoom.
And so that’s the formula. And that’s why it’s so important. When I say the nature of reality is spiritual-material unity, it’s not just some lofty idea. It’s your lens and it’s your compass for creating spiritual fulfillment and material gratification, material enjoyment at the same time. So I’ll give you examples, for example, for what you can do in a gathering. Okay? So in a gathering where you have, you can say a blessing for the world, the world leads a lot of blessings. And so this is a time where you can each light a candle. If you’re physically with people or you’re on zoom, you each light a candle, and you each with that candle, you say a blessing: “I bless the world with…” or “I bless this part of the world with…” or you can bless each other, or you can do a candle project, create your own candles from beeswax or whatever it is, and then light them. If you’re celebrating Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, and you have many nights, each one with an added candle, you can pick a topic and do a blessing for each night. One is a blessing for yourself. One is a blessing for a family member. One is a blessing for your work. One is a blessing for nature. One is a blessing for social unrest that we’re going through or for health.
I mean, you can just pick the different areas, and each night, do a blessing for yourself, the people you gather with, and the world on this topic. So the links to the three articles, the three blogs, one on gift-giving using this formula, and one on festive foods, and one on lighting up your holidays are in the bio. So I want to end with one thing.
When I discovered my spiritual journey, I was 44 years old. So 44 years I had lived without really knowing or being paying any attention to spirituality. Age 44, I realized I had been spiritual all my life because I suddenly understood what spirituality is and how I was living it throughout my life. But I was 44 when I realized it. And so when I decided to bring more meaning to the holidays– for me was the Jewish holidays– or it was seasons, or it was life events. I wanted suddenly to bring more spiritual value to them. And I was met with resistance from my family. Truth be told, I was like, “Oh, you’re so special. You’re trying to do something special.” It’s not an easy thing to bring more spirituality into your traditional biological family, because people have their set way of doing, and unless you are religious, then people feel awkward.
If they have to share something that’s more, so-called spiritual, or more emotional, or heart-centered. So it takes risks to do that. But it’s been so worthwhile because now it’s been 30 years, over 30 years that we’ve been doing, you know, life events, year events and holidays with much more meaning, and I passed it onto my children.
And it’s just, it just, it gives me the spiritual fulfillment and the material enjoyment that I was longing for. And so I invite you to take these risks in your gift-giving, in anything that has to do with lights and candles, and anything that has to do with gatherings and creating yummy foods for the holiday that nourish both your body and soul.
So I leave you with that and I’ll be back next week with another Expanding on Expansive.
Don’t go crazy with holiday shopping and imbue your gifts with some spiritual qualities, so that, that spiritual quality passes on to the person who receives it. And enjoy the month of December for all the life that it brings. And I’ll see you next week again. Blessings.
