Gratitude: Staying True to Yourself and not Managing Them this Holiday Season

As we enter the holiday season, many of us feel the familiar pull of old patterns… the pressure to keep everyone happy, the fear of conflict, and the overwhelm of family dynamics. In this episode, we explore how gratitude can become a powerful spiritual tool. Not for fixing anyone else, but for staying grounded, present, and connected to your own inner peace.

I share simple Recover Your Soul practices you can use before, during, and after family gatherings to help you soften, breathe, release control, and return to yourself. These tools support you in choosing presence over perfection, compassion over judgment, and allowing over absorbing. You will learn more about:

• gratitude as a lens that dissolves judgment
• moving from control to spiritual sovereignty
• holiday triggers, expectations, and old roles
• powerlessness over others, power over self
• family systems, secrecy, and generational healing
• micro-gratitude and grounding practices
• a separation-and-Thanksgiving boundary scenario
• meditation as steady support for calm presence
• choosing love, compassion, acceptance over fixing

If the holidays feel complicated, this conversation offers an opening to experience more peace, clarity, and gratitude - no matter what unfolds around you.

Start your journey with the FREE Recover Your Soul™ 9-Step Mini-Workbook- A gentle spiritual path to healing, letting go, and awakening.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:45 Why Gratitude Matters Now
• 3:17 From Control To Sovereignty
• 6:50 Seeing Through The Lens Of Gratitude
• 10:50 Holidays, Expectations, And Real Life
• 14:45 Thankful For The Hard Stuff
• 18:29 Secrets, Systems, And Healing
• 23:04 Acceptance Without Enabling
• 27:10 A Thanksgiving Boundary Scenario

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

Today's episode is around gratitude because it's a lifeline to our spiritual sovereign self. And as we step into the holiday season, where we will indeed have some pretty complex and sometimes triggering situations that come up, I want to give you some tools on how to stay grounded, how to choose peace, how to come from your higher self, how to use the soul recovery tools to choose to see it in a way that offers love, compassion, and even acceptance for everything. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast. I'm Riff Rachel. I am so grateful for this community. And today we're going to be talking about gratitude. And of course, it is the season of Thanksgiving and coming into the holidays. And so a lot of people are talking about gratitude, but I really do feel like it's just a topic and a subject. And I want to give you in this podcast, I want to give you some tools, maybe some recover your soul. Ooh, some recover your soul superpowers to be able to be with what is going to be a potentially complicated, sometimes scratchy, sometimes not so easy time with family, so that you can have freedom. You can experience inner peace. You can have gratitude for what is, and you can allow yourself to be present in the situation without trying to control, fix, change, and ultimately without you suffering through all of it. You've heard me say so much in the recovery soul process that suffering is our wanting it to be something else, that it's our clinging, our attachment, our push, our drive for it to be different. And what's interesting is that when we really start looking at how intense this control addiction that we have is, we want to see it through this lens of saying, yeah, but I'm trying to be helpful, I'm trying to make it be better for everybody. I know that if they did it this way, that it would be good that way, that if they would only see that this was the better way, we'd all be happier. And I want to remind you that you might be right. You might 100% be right. That if they actually would do these things, if people would show up in the way that we're talking about, there might be benefits. And it may not be as scratchy, it may not be so hard, it may not be as difficult, it may not be so painful. But then we're trying to control who people are and what their journey is and how they show up. And we learn in recovery soul, we're powerless over all of that. And our desire for other people to be a certain way, for us to be okay, means we're giving our power away over and over and over again. So as we step into the holiday season, let's talk about the power of gratitude and the incredible spiritually transformative gift it can be to be able to see everything that happens in your life through the eyes of gratitude and love and how it will allow you to be present so that nothing is unacceptable. Nothing. Even if somebody's acting out, even if somebody is saying horrible things, even if somebody doesn't show up, even if the situation didn't turn out the way that you wanted, what if we open into a completely new way of being present with it, where it doesn't wreck us? It doesn't completely wreck us. I get it if you're in the situation in your life where this seems pretty far out there, because it's taken me the last eight years of working the recover your soul process through my own recovery of alcoholism, through my own recovery of codependency and people pleasing, and being in the 12-step rooms of AA and Al-Anon, being in my spiritual practice, and then the incredible gifts, the nine-step recover your soul process has unfolded in my life and given me that continue to deepen. Talk about gratitude. Every day I learn more about what these steps offer for me. They continue to evolve, they continue to deepen. And that level of gratitude that I have around it is so, so rich. When we're able to switch the switch in our lives from seeing through the lens of what we do not like, what is not working, what we aren't grateful for, how we wish it would be different, and switch that switch to a place where we open. We open with compassion, we open with curiosity, we open with willingness, and we open to take responsibility for our own well-being, for how we are choosing to see it, that we can indeed have a perception that shifts just enough to get us out of the victim and into a power empowerment space, that regardless of what's happening around us, that we can be present in a way that no one can affect us negatively for. Let's talk about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is notorious for uh being a time where everybody gets together and there's all these expectations about how it's gonna be the perfect meal and everybody's gonna be happy and everybody shows up so good. And you know, there's not always that what happens. For most of us, if you're here listening to this podcast, it is very likely that you have somebody in your life who is not doing well, who's an addict, or you're dealing with somebody who has mental health issues, or a dysfunctional family, or complexity. If you had a perfect world and a perfect family and perfect life, you're probably not here listening to this. You're probably here because you're working on your own codependency, on your own people pleasing. You're maybe in addiction yourself. So it is likely that you're looking at situations that are going to be coming up over the holidays where a lot of tension is gonna arise, where there's gonna be opportunities for you to step fully into your new practice of how to be fully yourself, how to be fully awake, fully present in your own best well-being, regardless of what's happening around you. What I want you to begin to understand is that gratitude also means being thankful for the hard stuff. It's really easy to be thankful for all the good stuff, thankful for abundance, thankful for good health, thankful for the beautiful traffic today, thankful that everything's working out perfectly for me. And although we want to open the channels to have things be smooth and easy for us, it's really through the really complex, often painful, sticky challenges that we experience in our life, where some of the greatest opportunities are for us to grow and to see and to learn. One of the gratitudes that I think has been interesting for me recently is that with everything that's happening right now energetically as a collective consciousness here on earth that is so big, there's a lot of big things happening in politics and the world, there's a lot of division, there's a lot of difference between people who are really wanting to share and deep in love, and a lot of people who are really in fear and holding on to control, and it's creating some upset in the world. And the gratitude that I have is that instead of seeing this as something horrible, my gratitude is that it's being brought to the surface, it's being revealed for potential healing. And if you look at that huge scope of what that is, and you bring it down into our family systems, and you say, sometimes we've been for years, for generations, the model's been don't talk about it, don't show any weakness, don't let anybody see behind the cracks of what's happening from the outside. We all look great. From the front of the house, everything looks good. And maybe inside your house, people were being abused. There was neglect, there was, there was um really, really painful and difficult things happening. But there was a need for it to be a secret that we kept secrets. I work with so many people who grew up in alcoholic homes, and the level of secret keeping was profound. We don't share our dirty laundry with anybody else. Dirty laundry is not dirty laundry, it's systemic generational dysfunctional systems. And those are being brought to the surface, not to be shown to the world as if there's something wrong with us, but to be brought out to say, there is nothing wrong with us. We don't have to be in these systemic systems anymore. They no longer work for us. And I will not show up and participate in these old systems in the ways that I did before. And when we do this from a place of compassion, a place of peace, a place of understanding, from a spiritual holding, we aren't rejecting anyone or judging anyone or making anything be bad. We're just no longer participating in what doesn't align or feel right or good to us. And this is going to make changes down the road that we cannot even possibly understand. But it is the energetic opportunity of the butterfly wings vibrating out in one place that ends up affecting change everywhere. So these systems, these family systems that we've had for so long, where we just don't talk about it, where we don't bring it to the surface, this is not about shaming people. It's not about calling people out. And sometimes it may not even be about closing doors and relationships. It's about showing up in a way that is different. And gratitude is the foundation of this practice because gratitude means that you release all judgment. It means that you can actually see that no matter what is happening, there's value in it. And I think one of the things that has shifted so much for me in my life is I spent so many years like not having a space for gratitude because I was so upset. And I was upset for a valid reason. There was a lot of really intense, difficult things happening in my life. My husband and I were both alcoholics. The kids were really struggling. There was a lot of pain, there was a lot of um confusion, there was a lot of upset, there was a lot of struggles with money and with um marriages. I mean, it was just, it was up. So it isn't about saying that when you move into this practice, like everything's gonna be hunky-dory, because that's not what it is. What it is is that you see it, feel it, experience it differently. You because you're only there to have control for yourself. Step two and recover your soul as we are powerless over every single thing outside of ourselves. But you have sovereignty over you. So here you are at Thanksgiving, and you're in a situation where maybe, oh my gosh, let's let's think of a let's think of a scenario. I have a friend who is in a situation where she's currently separated from her partner, and she's in a decision-making period. Is she gonna stay married? Is she not gonna stay married? But she's asked for a break and created a break in her life. And this partner is still wanting to participate in the family because of course he does, because that's what's comfortable for him. And he wants to show up and he wants to still have Thanksgiving, but she doesn't want to have Thanksgiving. She wants this break. She wants to be able to go and be with her kids and her family in a way that feels right to her now. When we use the recover your soul process, we realize how much we take in on ourselves of how many people's emotions we're feeling in that moment. The responsibility of what the kids think, the responsibility of what her partner thinks, her desire to keep everybody happy, her fear of anybody being upset. These are the foundational pieces that we're working on that are coming up during this time. This is what I want to share with you. That there is so much coming up and being exposed for us to see from a new light. And you could just completely fall apart in the overwhelm and say, I can't keep everybody happy. I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna, who's the biggest dog in this fight that I'm afraid of? And you please that biggest dog. When we begin to step into a spiritual experience and a spiritual path, we recognize we're safe. That's the first and foremost piece as we step into our own well-being, recognizing that we are safe in our connection to our higher power, to our higher selves, to our ability to be present with who we are and what we need first and foremost. And then the energy around those people who are the fighting dogs, the biggest energies, can settle a little bit and we can use the recovery soul tools. I'm powerless over what this person is thinking. I'm powerless over what they want. I'm powerless over their big energy. I'm powerless over how they speak to me. I'm powerless over what they think of me. I'm powerless over their upset. And when we say those things, we don't say them as if we're just tossing them off. No, you imagine and feel the energy and the tension that's in your body about how responsible you feel for other people and their emotions and their needs and their wants. And when you say the I am powerless over, you are handing it over to the universe because the universe knows what to do with it. You are handing it over, letting the energy of it disperse and truly deeply believing and understanding from the depth of your soul that you are truly powerless over what this person thinks or wants or feels or says. And their big dogness, their big energy, that fear that we've been pushing up against for so long dissipates a little bit. And this is where gratitude comes in. There's a gratitude, a thankfulness for the opportunity to see this situation from a new lens, to be thankful that they can and have the opportunity to heal or see from a new perception if they so choose it, that there's a gratitude that they're held by a higher power if they so choose to open their eyes and see it. But the gratitude that you can experience in your own life is like, oh, I actually get this chance to be present in this in a new way. And from that place, the choices become more clear because it's no longer about people pleasing and codependency or making everybody happy. It's about you being in your most resolved, compassionate, graceful, peaceful. I'm just getting this visual of like grounded and open space. And you just watch all of the story and all the chaos and all the things that are happening. And when we're in recover your soul, we start realizing we don't need to be responsible to make sure everybody is having whatever kind of experience would be safe for us because our safety is within us and not determined by them. So in this situation with her, she gets to decide for herself what feels right and and if the decision is to say we're in this time of separation, and that includes Christmas, I mean, that includes Thanksgiving and potentially Christmas, that she can give herself permission to feel whatever the feelings are and have gratitude that those are showing her something too. That the feelings might be, oh my gosh, I have this heavy weight of responsibility, and this is giving me experiences to show me the limiting beliefs, those, those underlying sticky, hard beliefs that are underneath it say, I can't possibly have somebody be upset with me. I can't possibly choose myself first. Ah, where did that come from? That came from my childhood when I had to please people like this, or this is how it to be a good girl, or I was responsible for people's happiness, or whatever it was. We're always being given these opportunities to understand more about ourselves and to be grateful that we can see where all this is coming from so that it can be released. And what's fascinating about recover your soul, which is not something that I came up with. I just have words for what already exists in the spiritual world of healing. It's energy, it's an energetic shift and a vibrational transformation that happens within us where we begin to resonate and be more aligned with the truth of who our higher self is and releasing our ego self and our attachments and all these structures that have been running the show for us for so long. And so you step into a situation where you've got, you know, a family that's getting together and people are just being them. They're drinking or not drinking or fighting or being pissed off or showing up happy or ignoring situations. And the more that you can just look with gratitude at it for its pure essence. And maybe just grasping a tiny bit of gratitude is all you can have at that moment. Like just be grateful that you're you're peaceful within your own heart. Be grateful that you're not responsible for all these people and their happiness. Be grateful that you're all just showing up for who you are. Be grateful that they are responsible for their own experiences. But the gratitude shifts from judgment to accepting, allowing, opening, choosing love. And we can think to ourselves, but I don't want to be, I don't like these situations. There's always something that comes from everything that we can learn more about ourselves. And what's interesting is that the more that you step into a spiritual journey, the more we realize that we've been perseverating on things that that are really so um out of our control for so long. Everybody else, whether they're doing okay, what's happening here, what do they think, what do they want, whatever they, they, they, they, they, that we've lost touch with ourselves and understanding who we are as souls and why we're here and how we can use every single moment that we have to open, to heal, to release, to allow, to love and to understand more about who we're here to be and how we can show up with a sense of ourself that brings presence and peace and compassion and kindness and has boundaries and can say what they think without having to demand that people hear what you're saying, but that you can be present with yourself in a way that is beautiful and strong and compassionate. When you're stepping into these situations with family members, one of the keys to do is to check in with yourself, to ground yourself, to take time to breathe, to really step into your body, to step into the present moment and to notice what's going on with you so that you can actually come from your most grounded whole place. And if we're reacting from old pains and systems, which, you know, only makes sense that we would, just being able to witness it and see that that might be what's up for you is a huge success because then you can use your tools to love yourself, bring yourself compassion, use your of course tool. Of course, I want everybody to be happy. You know, that's it's important to me. And of course I'm trying to control the situation, and of course I want Uncle Ted to not do this or do that. You know, I mean, you just give yourself some grace and some compassion. And then you allow your being to shift and ground here in this present moment. And then you open up to gratitude. I'm grateful that everything is working out for its highest good. And I don't know what that is sometimes, but I trust, I trust that I'll understand, even if it's really hard right now. I'm grateful that I can do this. I'm grateful that I can choose my own happiness and breathe. Allow yourself to truly breathe in. Maybe you need to go for a walk before people show up and really just bring yourself into presence and then watch it all unfold as if it's a movie with curiosity, sometimes with a little bit of levity, if something crazy's going on, like imagine that you're watching a show. Because most of the time, all that stuff that's happening out there has nothing to do with you. But you can check in with yourself so that the part that you play is a part you are choosing, and you're not letting anybody else choose the role for you. And be grateful for the beauty that this wild ride is. And as you move to gratitude, something shifts, and you start to realize that there is nothing that's unacceptable. There's an opening in every situation to see from a new lens, a new perception, to choose to see through the eyes of love, to choose to see through forgiveness and compassion and grace, and to choose yourself and to be grateful for your spiritual journey, because that's the only thing you really can control anyway. As you know, I have meditations on Insight Timer and also some in the podcast. So if you search meditation in the search bar on the website for my meditations, or you can go to Insight Timer and get some of my guided meditations. I have a couple new meditations in the bonus podcast as well, which is on Apple Podcasts and on Patreon. Use meditation as a practice to bring you centered, to come into gratitude for this present moment, for your experience, for your well-being. And it will give you strength to be able to handle what's going to be kind of kooky and difficult and wonderful. And be in a place where you can really just pick up and keep with you the parts that are really delicious and wonderful and let the rest go. Take what you like and leave the rest. Thank you for being part of this Recover Your Soul community with me. I am beyond grateful for you. Thank you for loving me. And I hope that you can feel the love that I have for you. And when you're in a difficult situation or you're feeling like you need a friend, I hope that you listen to my voice and these words and these podcasts and that you know that I am indeed that for you. That you can have me sit with you at the table if you need a friend. Imagine me standing with you in the kitchen. Imagine that you are surrounded by this beautiful Recover Your Soul community that continues to grow. There's thousands of us. And we're all here supporting and loving each other. That is an incredible, incredible gift. And for that I am so grateful. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the Recover Your Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, where I share a little bit more on the Recover Your Soul journey and then we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryousoul.net and you can sign up for emails so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcast and community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.