Spending time with family over Christmas - with Mark Westmoquette

My podcast has been going now for a year! Thank you so much to everyone who has listened over this time. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to share with you interviews with some very inspiring people, which I hope you’ve enjoyed and got a lot out of. And we’ve got some great people lined up for next year…

In this episode I thought it would be nice to do a Christmas special and talk, myself, about a particularly thorny area of practice: spending time with family – which for many of us sums up the Christmas period quite succinctly! Or for some it's not spending time with family, which can be equally troublesome.

It comes as no surprise that certain family members can be our biggest troublesome Buddhas. And since Christmas is often a time when we see a lot of family (or perhaps avoid seeing family), there may be many potentially wonderful opportunities to learn and grow from those encounters. While it may be difficult to keep our regular practices going over the Christmas period, when things are busy and our normal routines go out the window, that is by no means a reason to think our spiritual work must come to a dead stop. Working with difficult people, challenging relationships and troublesome encounters ought to be as much part of our practice as silent meditation. 

In this discussion, I talk about my own experience of family Christmasses growing up and how I've reflected on how I habitually cut myself off from feeling, and struggled with accepting the limitations of my mother's disability. Then, after talking more generally, I offer six things that might help – or at least might be worth bearing in mind – before plunging into our family festivities. Then I finish with describing a couple of the Buddha's troublesome family members and how he dealt with them.