Ashok Gupta's video addresses emotional challenges during the holiday season amid the pandemic — chiefly survival anxiety about health and finances, resulting depression, isolation, and grief. He encourages mindful awareness, self-compassion, reaching out to others, and introduces his program metaphor (a 'dove' of retraining the brain and relaxing the nervous system) as a path to re-engage with joy and purpose.
So the first thing to say is the reason that we're experiencing that anxiety is because this situation has gone to the core of what we call survival anxiety. Anxiety is the fight or flight response, or more the flight response, which is the fear response, the runaway response, and anger is the more fight response. And because of the situation, we're finding ourselves in survival anxiety in terms of the health impacts on ourselves, the potential health impacts, the health impacts on our family and our friends and just the people around us. So there's that kind of survival anxiety. And more and more what's coming up is the survival anxiety around our finances. What will the situation be like next year? Will our business survive? Will our job make it through this, through this upcoming recession? And all of those questions and all of those anxieties are perfectly normal and understandable. But what's important is for us to observe it and be aware of it and acknowledge it. So the first thing that I'd like us to do is not distract ourselves from our emotions during this holiday season, but instead use it as an opportunity to become more aware of how we're feeling and push away not the emotions, but the devices, the screams that are screening out life. We're screening out our kids, we're screening out our emotions. And this is incredibly dangerous for us as human beings to be doing this. So instead, in this mindful Christmas you now want to have, let's become first of all more aware of our emotions and then secondly, accept and validate those emotions. It's okay to have this emotion. So with that self compassion, we can validate and say, it's okay. This is a normal emotion. I'm okay. I can be compassionate with myself for having this emotion. Whereas usually we might once again push it away or tell ourselves off for feeling like that, or say, why can't I be stronger than this? And that anxiety that we're experiencing is because of the changes to our way of life. If we're having any depressive episodes or sadness, this is because when anxiety burns out, it can lead to depression. So anxiety and depression are the flip side of the same coin. Anxiety is our worry about the future. And when we become exhausted from that worry, we then can unfortunately slip into that state of depression. And once again, if you're experiencing depression or very depressive symptoms, it's very important that you speak to your doctor and work through that in that way. Thirdly, we're experiencing isolation. And that's not just the physical isolation, but the social isolation. It's so funny, I noticed that in April and may I was getting contacted by so many people to join Zoom Calls and have online get togethers and parties. And because people are so fed up of being on screens now, that's kind of died away. And we're not engaging with people around us, our family, friends, as much as we used to. And it's incredibly important that we don't just kind of slip into that morose feeling of, oh, well, we're by ourselves and there's nothing much we can do but to actually make sure we are reaching out. And if we're feeling lonely, how much more lonely are other people feeling? How can we solve our own loneliness by reaching out our hand to others, reaching out our hand first to others who may be feeling isolated and lonely. So maybe that's something that we can think about to have a more mindful, stress free Christmas. How can we help others feel stress free? How can we help others feel less lonely? That could be a beautiful gift that we give to people. And that might be elderly relatives, that might be people who are going through challenges, friends who are going through challenges. And that is a gift, that is a true gift that we can give from the heart. And finally, this sense of grief. You may have heard of the grief cycle. Not many people talk about this, but actually the pandemic has triggered this sense of grief and isolation. And if I can just share a slide here which describes what I mean by grief or the grief cycle. So the grief cycle is this idea that when we have a shock, it moves us through different types of emotions. So when the pandemic first hit, there was shock and denial, people saying, I don't know what this means, is it really real? And there was a numbness of how could this be possibly happening? And then this anger and fear that comes as a result of that, the anxiety, the frustration. And as I said, once anxiety burns itself out, it can turn into depression and detachment, where we have a numbness to what's going on, we know that something's not quite right and we don't feel good inside ourselves. And there's a depression, a detachment, a sense of helplessness, a sense of victimhood. So just see if you can recognize any of these emotions that you have been going through or are going through now. And remember that these aren't linear cycles. This is why these little curves in the cycle, you may have one emotion, then another emotion or another feeling within this whole process. Then there's this idea of dialogue and bargaining where we begin to try and make sense of a situation, to find meaning and try to work through our challenging emotions and our shock. And finally there is acceptance. This is often the end of many cycles, many emotional cycles, where we understand that it doesn't help us to stay stuck in this cycle, but instead to move to a place of surrender and acceptance, of letting go and then beginning to return to some semblance of normal, a meaningful life. So where do you think you are in terms of this cycle? How are you feeling right now? Have you ever asked yourself that? Or have we been too distracted by the glittering lights of the world around us? And instead, a mindful Christmas is about. So let's just go back to what we were talking about. So there is this idea, letting go of the grief and looking to find renewed meaning. And in the Gupta program, we talk about how whenever we want to sail through life with peace, we want to act like a dove. Now, what does the dove need to fly? It needs two wings. So one wing is the retraining of the brain. The second wing is the relaxing of the nervous system. And the tail feathers give us direction, which we call re engaging with joy or indeed finding purpose and meaning in life. So if we start with that first wing of how do we have a mindful holiday? The idea of retraining the brain.
