Christmas is an invitation to gentleness.

In recent months, I have had someone truly show me the meaning of this line. It invites me into an enquiry that often makes me feel really mad.  Because most of the time I am right.  And I am sure you are too. And I don't want to let go of that. 

I'm noticing that my rightness is small, it's narrow, so fearful, so rigid, sometimes bolshy, insensitive and vicious even. I can't see much from my rightness, other than the small matter of me being better than someone else, having more sophisticated thoughts or views.  I'm certainly not connected, warm or inclusive.  I'm defensive, guarded and stubbornly attached.  And it's so often in the name of feeling safe, secure and is trying to be a poor imitation of the true ground that I'm seeking to feel held by. 

I also see how my rightness is embodied, it's a reaction, a defense that belongs to my body most of the time.  Even if I try and let go by changing my thoughts, it creeps back again later on when I replay the conflict in my mind and I get to feel even more right when I repeat all the ways I am justified in my head.  And so it goes on, and on, and on, and on.

So this is the experiment - it's in the body.  It's in the observing of what it physically feels like to take this righteous stance, to stand a 'ground' that's not a ground at all, it's a brittle opinion that holds us back from loving, that holds us back from acceptance and kindness too.

My adventure is into the radical and scary experiment of letting go and relaxing in the moment of madness, returning to this body, where all the rightness is held, and watching my capacity to free myself from the mess, the tangle, the tightness.  I know the gentleness that my body can hold, the blurred line of my existence and the relaxation into the world around me that feels way more like what life should be like. 

And I'm embarking on this as we step into the Christmas season here in East Sheen, London.  Where there will be fights over the turkey timing,  differences of opinion of what presents we should buy which family members, complaints about all the little things that get brought up with lots of family around and lots of communal living to take our place in.