Healing Your Holiday Spirit – Part Two
In Part One of this series, we began to explore the role that “choice” plays in determining an outcome of “Yippee!” or “Yuck!” to a given experience (in this case, “holidays”).
Now, let’s consider a variation of the Yippee-Yuck© Scale. I call it the Yea-But© scale. It’s particularly useful for allowing us to look more deeply at an event or experience that might involve more than one reaction.
In this scale, each word (or concept or experience) will receive TWO types of rankings (one for “Yeah!” and one for “But….” -each on a scale of 0-3, in which 0 means “none” and 3 means “a great deal”).
For example, we can use the same word we used in Part One: “snow.”
Maybe you sort of like the sparkle of snow in the moonlight and seeing trees covered with snow. So, then maybe you would score the “Yea!” side as a “1″. BUT, you hate having to shovel the stuff, scraping your car, how dirty the snow gets, plus you just hate the cold weather and having to get bundled up during winter weather. So, you might score the “But….” side as a 3. Got it?
Now, we can look at the holiday season more specifically, using the Yeah-But© Scale (below) to jot down some notes.
And, to help enrich this process (and in keeping with the initial “Gift within a gift – Stresswell Holiday Truffle” concept), I have also included a lovely, brief Guided AudioExercise. (It’s about 9 minutes long.)
So, (whether you used the Guided Exercise or not) how did that go for you? What did you begin to notice? Were you able to identify some things on both sides of the scale?
I hope so, because in Part Three of this series, I will share a brief exercise that will help you remember and quietly appreciate those parts of the holidays that give you pleasure (those things that show up on the “Yea!” side of the scale). And, in Part Four, I will conclude with an exercise that will help you to clear some of the ”emotional clutter” from the “But….” side of the scale.
As always, I welcome your comments and questions!
