Using the Templates to Navigate the Holidays

by Deborah Merchant

For many of us, the holidays seem unbalanced between stressor anxiety and the many joys of the season. If you are experienced in writing the templates, you already know there is a lot these writing practices can offer. If you are new or relatively new to writing these templates, then this blog may help you see the difference they can make in navigating the holidays.

As described in other blogs I wrote describing how these templates work, I showed how the energy of the word ‘craving’ links youdirectly with the energy of creation. The word ‘craving’ carries the energy of every living thing as it moves from its imaginal, embryonic state to fulfillment of its design.  For your cravings, first what’s implicit in using the word is a level of value or importance to what you are calling in.  Then there is an implicit linkage of what you are calling in to the life force energy of Creation rather than to an objectified connection to what you crave. 

Then, by filling in the blanks following creates, sustains and maintains, and embodies with resonant words or phrases, you’re putting your system into a degree of relaxation because you are drawing from resonant energies, which, like mindfulness practices, reduce stress in the moment and promote relaxation, which has direct physical results. Also, when stress/anxiety is higher, then emotions and the chance of survival quality tensions are present, and the ability to think clearly, putthings into words/express yourself clearly, or access solutions and strengths is minimized.  The meme “When emotions are up, intelligence is down” applies here.   Next, using resonant words/phrases makes us have to imagine alternative outcomes, different potentialities and to stand in a different conscious relationship with what you crave.  All inventions start with imagining something that only exists as a potential.  This is an example of Einstein’s statement that you can’t solve a problem from within the same consciousness as it arose.  The use of resonant words/phrases moves you out of the consciousness, the thinking, the history of experience ofwhat makes the holidays stressful for you. 

Also, a very important point about depression, anxiety, worry and stress-based thinking is that thoughts loop or circle, ‘round and‘round.  The more you think about what you’re anxious or stressed about, the more you think and process from the same rut, reinforcing the negative or life-defeating imaginings, thinking, emoting, and you are caught in a life-defeating version of ‘what wires together, fires together’.  This is how our neurons work.  The use of resonant words in the blanks of the templates forces us out of the loop of reporting what our past experience has been, into an imagined or potential outcome.  The way our brains work, this provides 3 things: 1) we have a new type of thought/feeling/ for our neurons to ‘wire together’ about; 2) we’re outside of our historical experience into a transpersonal (beyond the previously personal) way of knowing ourselves and our life, which is also a new potential; and 3) we’ve moved our experience of the holidays from a looping experience to a spiral one.  All of human experience, development, etc. is designed to be spiral:  you start at one place, let’s say birth, then each experience is added to what is there from before and in this process of updating changes it to a new whole.  You’re the same and yet you have also become different with each passing experience, large or small.  Writing the templates makes us conscious of the reality that every stimulus/experience literally updates the entire software we call our identity or self.  Life,experience, identity actually occurs in a spiral.  Stress and anxiety, especially at the traumatic level, makes this natural updating process difficult if notimpossible, and so we loop rather than move in a spiral. 

I realize that the stressors and anxieties people experience in the holidays can be complex, so I am not saying I’m representing all the dimensions of stress/anxiety which can be at play during this time.  Nor am I saying the Language of Creation templates are a panacea, or that they may bring instant results.  But if you have trouble with stress during the holidays such that you cannot be as present to the joy and meanings about life and humanity this season is meant to remind us of, then I invite you to take a moment to use the templates to open yourself up into at least a little potential to access a little bit of a broader reality than what your history says is the sum total of reality for the holidays. 

Here are a few examples of ways you could start a template to generate increased satisfaction for yourself this time of year:

Craving joy and freedom this holiday season creates _______  

Craving enjoying the important parts of this season creates _________

Craving ease and grace navigating family gatherings creates _________

Of course you write it the way that’s the most valuable to you.  If you need or want help writing an entire template, please feel free to contact me at debmerchant@metapoints.com,  or Elektra Porzel at elektrap@iuwcinstitute.com.