Support4Change Blog

December 17, 2006

Category: Commentary on Life Today

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
 

Another train ride! This one on Dec. 17 as we travel from Melbourne to Sydney. By now I imagine I’ve fully adjusted to Australian time and have seen lots of interesting places. [If you’re a new visitor to this blog, you can read an explanation of what is happening by reading the blog entry of It Pays to Check the Weather.]

My recommendation for an article today is Energy Boosters and Drainers. I begin the article with the following story:

About twenty years ago, I had the great good fortune of spending three days at a workshop with Joseph Campbell on “The Mystery of the Essence of Life.” We met in the chapel of a convent near Santa Barbara, California, that has been converted into a conference center. In discussing the difference between living and dead symbols (and between living and dead rituals), he pointed to a dove in the stained glass windows on the wall.

“We use the dove as a symbol of spiritual and physical peace,” he noted. “Yet the essence of the symbol is not the dove itself. It is the light that shines through the dove. If we get caught in the symbol itself, we lose its essence.”

I’ll never forget that lesson. I can still see the light flooding into the room and often think of it when I watch people take part in old rituals that no longer have meaning for them. I think of it when I have been so busy buying or making greeting cards — with a beautiful picture of a dove and a message of peace — that I don’t have time and energy to allow beauty and peace to shine into my own heart.

How can you move past those activities that perpetuate traditions empty of meaning for you and create, or perhaps reconnect, with the potentially rich purpose and substance in this season? How can you let the light shine through again? You do it by taking a good, hard look at the way you’ve celebrated holidays in the past.

Begin by turning off your automatic pilot, take is, by taking an honest, clear-eyed look at all those holiday activities you have previously done automatically. Then you can consciously explore what there is about certain holiday activities that allows you to experience them as “energy boosters.” Participating in them is well worth the effort.

Similarly, you will realize that other activities are “energy drainers,” such as the “obligatory” annual party with people who drink too much and talk too loudly. You always end up wishing you stayed home.

Read the rest of the article and you just may decide to slow down this year and increase your energy booster and decrease those energy drainers.