Dealing With Difficult People When We’re SUPPOSED to Be Filled With Joy
Sometimes the people that we are often surrounded by during the holidays are the people who make us the craziest. Why do I let my mean cousin get under my skin? And my parents! They go out of their way to push my buttons! Maybe it’s time to learn a quick holiday boundary setting and peace creating reaction. Remember, if you practice it enough, PEACE will become the new automatic response! Let’s do this!
In this episode we will learn:
~Why we react so strongly to “button pushers”
~What to do instead of getting upset (it works every time!)
~Choosing peace the Wayne Dyer way
~Om Shanti meditation
Love the show? Please review and rate Stress Therapy here: https://lovethepodcast.com/StressTherapy
Quotes:
“Even if you ‘have a right’ to be mad, even if your argument is the best one, you can choose peace instead of this…”
-Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW
Interesting Mentions:
Wayne Dyer – All of his book are amazing! Start with The Power of Intention
Listen to Cheri’s song, Joy about choosing peace here: https://open.spotify.com/track/28gcvkVn2xw4XjbKGKBs25?si=9dd57c111eb74b7f
The Host for this podcast:
Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW
The Stress Therapist and Author
Twitter: @stresstherapy
Instagram: @thestresstherapist
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Website: https://thestresstherapist.com/
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Stay in touch with Cheri:
https://thestresstherapist.com/contact/
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Buy Cheri’s book: Honey Do To Honey DONE! A Simple System For A Productive And Happy Household With Absolutely No More Nagging! https://www.amazon.com/Honey-DONE-Productive-Household-Absolutely/dp/0997950919/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8
A word from your host, Cheri Flake, LCSW:
Feeling good after our Stress Therapy session? Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, The Stress Therapist on social media or go to www.iLoveTherapy.com to find out about meditation retreats & yoga retreats.
TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker A: Hey, beautiful people. What’s up? So it’s the season of joy. How you feeling? I’m trying to be filled with joy, man. You’re ruining it. Why are all these people making it so hard for me to be filled with joy? They’re all driving me crazy. Today we’re going to learn exactly how to nip that in the butt, because it’s season five, seasonal stress therapy. So relax, settle in, and listen up, because your stress therapy session is about To begin right now.
Speaker A: Hey, beautiful people. It’s time for some stress therapy, a podcast about how to meditate and get better at stress for people living in the real world. Finally, a place to park my 25 plus years of experience of working as a psychotherapist in the mental health field. And now, your host, me, the stress therapist, Cheri Flake.
What’s up, y’all? I’m coming to you live for my little pink tree house studios. I renovated the kids treehouse that had been long unused and kind of unloved, and it’s a little recording studio now, and it’s super cool and it’s super pink, and I am loving it. So that’s where I am right now.
Today. I’m going to keep it short and sweet, but I want to be able to give you this tool because it’s so simple. It has changed my life drastically. So just by using this simple thing that you say to yourself when people are driving you nuts.
Okay. I grew up in a very reactive family. We shared our feelings. I know I live in the south now, but I’m not southern in any way. Neither is my family. We shared our feelings all the time. All of us were extroverts. Everybody was constantly sharing exactly, saying exactly what they think, sharing their emotions all the time. Everything is on their sleeve. And it’s a lot, okay? Especially during the holidays and especially if someone isn’t really feeling that hot about you. Right? There can be a lot of incoming that’s not necessarily lovely, and that can make you crazy.
And here’s the thing. You can always choose peace instead of this. Even if you’re right and you have a right to be mad, you can choose peace instead of this. Even if that person is pushing your buttons and they’re deliberately trying to get you fired up. You can choose peace instead of this. I learned this from Wayne Dyer probably 15 years ago. It drastically changed my life for the better. You can psychically disengage. You can remove your awareness from whatever situation is going on, bring it inward, but you got to be aware. You got to be present. See, that’s the key and just decide, I’m going to choose peace instead of this. I can get all riled up, or I cannot get riled up. When I was young, I really didn’t think I had a choice. I thought I had to get riled up. I had to unlearn reacting to every single thing going on around me and engaging in it. Like, if someone was having an argument, I would get engaged in that, even if it was just by paying attention to it, right? Maybe I didn’t say anything out loud, but just by paying attention to it, following it, that is engagement. It brings you stress. And after a while, if you store stress like that, it brings you disease, right? That’s what disease is.
Anyway, from now on, if something’s going down at your house, if someone starts arguing, I choose peace instead of this. You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to be there physically, but you also don’t have to be there mentally. You can mentally disengage. It just takes a little bit of practice. And if you practice it enough, it too will become a habit. Listen, I believe in this so much that I actually wrote a song about it. And I’m going to put it here at the end of the meditation so you can enjoy my little journey on learning how to do this. It took me a long time, but I got to tell you, it is so peaceful, it is so lovely and it is so sweet to just let those words fall on the ether and have no response to it. And it’s a choice that you can make. You have the choice. You have this power. It’s amazing. And it can feel so liberating to choose peace instead of this. So here, let’s choose peace. We’re going to do a meditation Om Shanti. It’s just going to be for a few minutes. And when you come back, we’ll listen to my little pop song about peace, about calm, about choosing it, about actively making it your choice and taking your power back, being empowered during the most joyful time of the year.
Meditation: Find a comfortable sitting position. Maybe you want to be in your beautiful meditation space. Make yourself comfortable so you can sit up without thinking about parts of your body getting tired or stiff or beginning to hurt. Just make yourself very, very comfortable. But sitting up, take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose and let it all go. Another long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Release this breath out of your mouth and one more long, slow, deep breath in your nose and let it all go. And relax into your beautiful body. Allow your bones to settle, your head to settle, your face and neck and chin to settle. Allow your shoulders to settle and your spine to settle in. Relax your belly and your limbs and hands and feet and legs and bottom. Just sit comfortably and just give yourself the beautiful promise that you will sit here for the duration of the meditation, that you will find some peace. Om Shanti. Om shanti. This is the mantra we will use today. When we use mantra, we repeat silently the mantra in our minds over and over again with all of our attention on the mantra. And because our brains were created to think and move about in the future and past, you simply keep coming back to the mantra. When you space out, think about something else. When you remember, you just gently come back time and time again. Om shanti, om shanti, om shanti I’ll watch the time you sit with this peaceful mantra. Enjoy binaural beats and I’ll be right back.
Allow the sound of Om, this beautiful vibration, this excellent energy that om brings to you allow it to fall away from your awareness. Come back into your beautiful body. Take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Let it all go out of your mouth. Allow that cleansing breath one more time a big deep breath in your nose. Let it all go out of your mouth. And when you’re ready, you can open your beautiful eyes.
Okay y’all, I hope you’re feeling a little bit more peaceful and I’m going to leave you with a song that I wrote when I was in the band, 13 Stories. You can hear it on Pandora and Spotify and Amazon and all of those lovely places. It’s called joy. It’s actually on our Christmas record, christmas makes me hot if you want to check that out. But here it is. And I was lucky enough when Wayne Dyer was still walking on this earth to have it featured on his show on hey House Radio. Inspiration. Here it is, joy. And I’m wishing you a very, very peaceful holiday season. Have a lovely, lovely day.
Joy by 13 Stories:
Joy
I take my joy straight up every day…
Bliss is simply what I want
I’m not doing, but I’m done
Change the way you look at things
and it all falls in place
Dig two graves or forgiveness
I choose peace instead of this
You go on about nothin’
While you’re missing what there is…
Es no sobre “getting”
Es sobre “letting”
I take my joy straight up every day
Chorus:
Milkshake
Chocolate covered hard-ache
Dig my own religion
Live like a magician
Take my mind from noisy
To what I find rosy
It’s none of my business what you think so…
I take my joy straight up every day
I walk down a different street
Do not go right back to sleep
I’m your violet incense
I’ve learned I can make grass grow
I know like I know like I know like I know
I take my joy straight up every day
Don’t die with music still in you
Inside my mind God is blue
When I’m 500 years old
I’ll still be thanking you
Open to everything
Attached to nothing
I take my joy straight up every day
Closer: How y’all feeling after that stress therapy session? Good. Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, the stress therapist on social media, at the Stress Therapist on Instagram and at Stresstherapy on Twitter. You can always go to ilovetherapy.com to find out about meditation and yoga retreats and other offerings that I have there. If you live in Georgia and you’re ready to be one of my clients, go to my website to find out how you can sign up for a free face to face consultation with me. At the very least, jump on my mailers so you don’t stress or miss one thing. Until next time. Have a lovely, lovely day.
