Creating peace at Thanksgiving gatherings

This time of the year we have many gatherings to go to and many of them involve family members and those close to us in other areas of our life.  Now I don’t know about you, but my guess is that you are much like me in that many of the occasions we go to, we do so with certain expectations.

We know ahead of time who is going to annoy us, who is going to brag, be outrageous or argue with us.  We think in our minds that we are going to do everything we can to stay away from certain subjects and sometimes people to try to keep the peace.  In fact the reason I am writing this is because from a ‘self-defense’ point of view, the things we do that harm us the most, come from our thoughts and mouth.

So what can we do to have peaceful gatherings?  For us to have the peace we are looking for we need to go to a place that may not seem to make sense at first.  If we are to change the relationships that we have, we must choose to be at peace with everyone in our life – and this time of the year especially with our relatives.

How can this possibly be true?  Because if the focus of our inner dialogue about our family members is on what they are doing wrong or how annoying they are, then that is exactly how your relationship is going to play out.  If what we notice about them is how annoying they are, then we are more likely to blame them for our annoyance.  But in reality the annoyance we are feeling is actually coming from our own thoughts.

In our mind we need to redirect our thinking to “My intention is to be authentic and peaceful with this person (relative)”, and that is the experience we will have.  I know this is true, I have seen it with myself and I am sure you have too.

Have you ever had a good relationship with someone and everything is going along very well and then they do something that hurts you really in a bad way?  What happens?  I have noticed that many times the very things that had been cute and appealing to me now begin to annoy me and they are very easily criticized.  We have all done this at some time. 

Our relationships are what we think they are.  I am going to talk about this more in the future, but for now just  know that,  No one is capable of making you upset without your consent.  When we decide to connect to peace, and bring peace to our relatives and relationships, we immediately gain the power to change the energy of the gathering that we attend in this season of thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!