How to Stay Centered Around Family: Learning to Feel, Heal, and Allow

The holidays have a way of bringing everything to the surface - the joy, the love, the tenderness, and also the old stories, the anxieties, and the patterns we thought we were done with. Being around family gives us a front-row seat to our operating system, the parts of us that still tighten, protect, or try to keep the peace.

In this episode of Recover Your Soul, I talk about the real spiritual work of being with family while staying connected to yourself. We explore how to actually feel your feelings rather than suppress them, how to listen to the information they carry, and how to recognize when you’ve slipped into old roles of managing, pleasing, or fixing.

This is the heart of the Recover Your Soul Process - learning to turn inward with curiosity and compassion, letting the emotions arise without judgment, and allowing others to be exactly who they are.

My hope is that these reflections help you stay rooted in yourself through the holiday season - not armored, not shut down, but present, awake, and open to the deeper healing that is always happening beneath the surface.

You are allowed to feel what you feel. You are allowed to honor your needs. And you are allowed to let others walk their own path while you stay connected to your own light.

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

• 1:11 Feelings As Information
• 2:08 Rachel’s Recovery Path And Mission
• 2:58 Holiday Family Dynamics
• 7:33 Permission To Feel And Self-Soothing
• 13:27 Habits, Control, And Powerlessness
• 19:17 Father-Daughter Distance And Safety
• 26:17 Mapping Emotions: Atlas Of The Heart

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:45

In Recover Your Soul, we're learning how to be present with ourselves and actually feel our feelings. We're being reminded that feelings are giving us information that will help us to let go of our old limiting stories, beliefs, patterns, the things that we continually, habitually do without even thinking about it that aren't bringing us to our highest good. And being around family, especially around the holidays, is an opportunity for us to allow ourselves to feel our feelings and be curious about what they have to tell us. What are they showing us? How are they giving us information about what is underneath in our operating system that's ready to be revealed and to be healed? This episode is around family, the complexity that we have in relationships, allowing people to be exactly who they are, and giving yourself permission to feel exactly what you feel. 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 Recovery Soul Podcasting community. It's Reb Rachel. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I am, I can just continue to feel so grateful for this community and our journey together. And we are in the heavy holidays. We just finished Thanksgiving and Christmas is coming. I know that when I was with my family this past week, my son Alex and his fiance and their nine-month-old baby came in from California. Bodhi ended up not coming because he had been, what is it? He'd been somebody around him had tested positive for COVID. And so he wanted to have an abundance of caution to not bring it to us, which is appreciated. And my dad and his girlfriend came from New Mexico, and my mom lives here. And then Rich and I. So we had this really lovely, small family time together that had all of its usual stuff. Alex going out and smoking weed in the garage and a lot of TV watching. That's sort of one of the things our family does as a way to be together and not have the shoe drop and try to maintain the ability to be together. And because there's such different energies, I think sometimes that it's the way that we can be present with each other without getting into conversations that feel too heavy or might be something that will lead to a fight like it was in the past. We're still working on how to really be connected with each other. And we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner, and little Rocky is nine months old, and he is adorable. And that was really the center of our attention was him playing, and he's starting to say some syllables, and he's crawling a little bit. And so it was a lot of just, you know, as it is, a lot of just watching the baby and seeing what was going on with the baby. What I wanted to share with you, and I want to just talk about being with family and allowing and being present with your own feelings. You know, this is the second time I'm recording this episode because I'm still processing my own feelings and there's a lot going on. And it's interesting because I couldn't quite pull it together yet. You know, you know that for me, I generally have an idea of what I'm going to talk about. I close my eyes, I open up to source, and I, and I channel whatever's supposed to be told and shared with you, but I'm I'm really in my own heart right now. I'm still feeling a lot of the feelings. It's a little fresh in a way for me to be able to process because I think that this is the gift that we have to give ourselves, which is permission to feel. And most of us have not been given permission to feel, and we may not even know what that is or where that is in our body, or how to allow it to move through without trying to take care of everybody around us as a way to soothe or calm the environment so that we'll feel soothed and calm. But my hope that the work that we're doing in Recover Your Soul is that we're learning how to soothe and calm ourselves from the inside, noticing what's happening on the outside and reflecting with clarity that we're powerless over everything that's happening on the outside. And even though I have this tiny family, we all have these big personalities. I don't think there's any of us who don't have big personalities in our relationships. And if somebody's not a big personality, they're probably playing small for fear of somebody else's big personality. And I think that it's interesting when we really start to just reflect and watch a little bit more, watch everybody's everybody's situation, how everybody's showing up. You know, I mean, it's interesting to really be working on the book that I've been working on, the spiritual memoir, Recover Your Soul, and this journey that I've been on for 55 years, and it has felt a little uncomfortable to be in my own experience, so much to share with you in the stories and to share in the book, because so much of the work that I've been doing in Recover Your Soul is about touching those memories and then and then letting them go, letting the energy of the memories dissipate and being more and more present and right here, right now. But even being present right here, right now, we get um activated with the stories, with our belief systems, with the operating system that's been part of our being for so long that even as we're doing this work and it's slowly uncovering, it's slowly showing itself to us, the thing that I hope that you are giving yourself compassion for is how deeply rooted it is into this, it's like you don't even understand why you're automatically reacting in some way. It's so, so habitual. And so even when I have family around and I've done pre-work and I've reminded myself I'm not in control of anybody or anything, and you know, even to the point of Bodhi not coming and everybody's doing their own thing and just being present and reminding myself that that's how that's gonna be. As soon as everyone shows up, this habitual pattern shows up that says, you know, make everything good for everybody and make sure everybody's happy. And I kind of watch myself and I think, what is that? What is that? Because it ends up bringing my anxiety up because I'm powerless over all these people. I'm powerless over the conversations, I'm powerless over what people think, I'm powerless over whether someone's edgy or not edgy, or talking or not talking, or cheerful or not cheerful. And even though it's subtle, I think we're all so afraid of the bottom dropping out and having some big blow up because in most of our families, we've had those in the past. I know that there were years where we couldn't get together as a family without some huge fight that happened generally between Alex and his dad. And then Bodhi and I would try to accommodate and make everybody be better, and some big something would happen. You know who was the calmest, sort of most cheerful person out of all of us this trip was Richard, my husband. He was just lighthearted and sweet and funny and especially sweet to me, attentive to little Rocky, and then he would go out in the garage and do his thing because he's learned that he doesn't drink anymore. But, you know, sitting around and just watching TV and watching a bunch of movies all day just doesn't do it for him. So he's gonna go do his thing. But he was the one that's sort of the most relaxed and easygoing about it. Watching this little baby who is just so innocent, and he's either happy or he's not, he's hungry or he's not, he's sleepy or he's awake. You you see how innocent the feelings are and how much we push down our feelings. But the feelings are giving us information. And sometimes the feelings are around not being comfortable. And there's things that I oh, I just I wish I could share with you, but I can't because I just have to maintain a level of privacy for people. I just want you to know that that I I try to share as much as I can with you so that my stories will help you with your stories. Relationships with people are not always easy. My relationship with my dad is is complicated. And he's a very easy person to be with on some levels, and on the other levels, sometimes it just feels like there's not the depth that I wish that was there. And his relationship with his girlfriend, and I can't go into it much more than that because I'm not going into it with him, to be honest. I mean, it doesn't seem fair that I could share with you everything that I feel when the truth is I can't really feel like I can share with him. And I'm not sure what that's about. It's something that this is what we do in recover your soul. I'm curious, I'm asking myself questions about what am I afraid of and why am I not actually sharing what's going on with me and what I think. And I think that as I'm saying that and I'm processing it in real time, I think that safety, and safety doesn't all doesn't mean physical safety, and it's interesting, even emotional safety. It's it's fascinating to allow yourself to really understand what your safety is within you. And to know that sometimes having the kind of relationships that are pretty surfacey is the safest option. It is the safest option. I mean, there's plenty of I love you's, and there's plenty of it's great to see you's, and there's plenty of, you know, how can I make you guys feel better and what, you know, what can I do for you? And I'm glad that you're here because those are all true. Those are all true statements. But it's been a long, long, long, long, long time since I really had a deep conversation with my dad. And I'm not sure what that's about. And I think that the key in recover your soul is to be curious about what that is for you, because I'm 50 to 90 percent of that. I'm the one who's not instigating those conversations. But I am curious about it for me. And it's giving me an opportunity to look more at those belief systems that are underneath. There's more to be uncovered of what am what is really going on with me. And I think this is the piece that I think is so interesting about feelings is, you know, Brene Brown wrote a book called Atlas of the Heart. And when that first came out, I didn't really understand what it meant. And now it's really clear, now that I've read the book and I own it, Atlas being like an atlas, it's a geographic atlas. And when you used to, this is before Google Maps, right? So if you wanted to look at the world or you wanted to see what's going on, you would open up an atlas, and the atlas would say, here's Africa, here's the, you know, northern hemisphere, here's the southern hemisphere, here's the United States, here's Canada. You know, you'd open up the atlas and each page would give you more and more of the depth of information, the first one being the world, and then going into smaller and smaller regions. Well, the same thing is the atlas of the heart. Sometimes in our relationships with people, we have a very large, broad, happy, sad, mad, right? Like it's it's those basic, basic emotions. That's like looking at the world. It's like all we can do is look at the most big emotions that we're having. And then you have to turn the pages of your own soul and your own relationship with yourself to be willing to go deeper and deeper and deeper to understand more about what those feelings are and what those feelings are sharing with you, almost like a map to your own story. I think that this relationship that I have with my dad, which is a very loving, kind relationship, has been this way for a really long time, but I'm not sure as I as I contemplate it right now, I'm not sure how much I've been willing to look at myself and my part in it. I've just sort of been going even keel because there's the part of me that is the little girl that is the good little girl, to be honest, right? To be a good little girl for your mom and dad. And so I don't, I don't want to upset him or I don't want to make him upset or mad or I don't want to hurt his feelings. I don't even know what feelings I would hurt. I'm not even sure what kind of conversations I would have. I just know that it's safest to be surface. And so when I open the atlas of my heart, that work is work that I'm gonna do for myself. And I think that's the piece that's so interesting in our relationship with people is we often want to have the conversations, and you've heard me say this before, we want to process and have the conversations with the other people. But really, the conversation is with yourself. It's about having clarity within your own being about how you feel and giving yourself permission to feel. I'm currently listening to the energy codes by Sue, Dr. Sue Mortar, I think her name is. And the first half of the book I loved. I just, it was about energy and it was about how this work that we can do is beyond what is just psychological. And it spoke so much to the recover your soul process and this place that we are where we're moving energetically in our body, these old limiting beliefs and stories that have been holding us back. It's very, very, very different than um dealing with symptoms on this other level, right? So it's it's uh encompassing everything within us. And I feel like that's what recover your soul offers. And then the second half of the book is the energy codes, as she calls them. And a lot of them are um practices with somatic practices, breathing, uh, really touching in with your body, because we store our emotions in our body. And one of the things that she was talking about that I'm excited to read more about and look more into was really feeling your feelings in your body when you're feeling something, you name it. Is it is it in your finger? Is it an energy that's vibrating in your finger? Is it an energy that's a blockage of your heart? Is it a the lump in your throat? Is it the part of your stomach that has the pit in your stomach? Because that is giving you information. And sometimes we can't actually name the feeling because we haven't opened up the atlas of our heart enough to learn enough about what those feelings are. But you can say, I feel sick to my stomach when this kind of thing happens. And sometimes when my family's all together and I'm holding the old energy of wanting to keep it all together and keep it all good, I feel a feeling in my body that is that is familiar and uncomfortable. And it's the pit in my stomach, and it's um it's like a like a wall of my heart, like I'm protecting my heart, and my stomach feels uneasy. And sometimes I can't even eat because I'm so sort of activated in feeling everyone else's energy. And since I've gotten more and more clarity about how we are energy, we're energy bodies, we're energy beings, we're always responding to everybody else's energy around us. The clarity that I have around sometimes when we get together with family members is that that energy doesn't match. And we're we've been spending our entire lives trying to force the energy to all be the same, right? There you can't do radio channels all on the same channel. I mean, I talk about this all the time, but it just makes so much sense. There's all these different waves, and every energy, every radio wave gives you a different station. That's how we are in our families. And somehow we're trying to force everybody to be on the same radio station when really one person's country and one person's rap and one person's classical and one person's oldies. Because we all vibrate and resonate in our own ways. And instead of trying to force everybody to be on the same radio wave, to have the same energy, it's more about validating and allowing each person to be who they are and respecting and honoring who they are without trying to control or make them be something else. And if you don't enjoy that radio wave, to stop trying to change it or to allow yourself space to not have to um make it be yours, to really feel the difference between their energy and your energy. Because there's no way that you can get a group of people together and have it all vibrate and resonate the same unless you step outside of your family system and you find communities that vibrate and resonate the same as you. And this is the reason why for me, it has been so imperative to create my tribe that I have now of friends, where we talk about stuff that we like that that resonates and feels the same. And we're talking about spirituality. And here in Colorado, we're gonna be uh expanding what I call the sacred circle that we've been meeting the first Saturday of every month for this small group uh that gets together for three hours for really profound connection and spiritual teachings. And that's been really wonderful. But now we're gonna expand it into spiritual book study called the Soul Journey Collective. And the idea of the Soul Journey Collective is not that anybody is the teacher, but that we're all just coming together in community to be able to be on the same wavelength, which doesn't mean we have to think or believe the same things. It means that we want to be in a heart coherence with each other and share. But if I expect to have that heart coherence that I feel in those groups over here in my family with these very different energies, it's not gonna, it's not gonna go well for me. And I'm gonna have that pit in my stomach. I'm gonna have that blockage in my heart. And so that's what's been on this particular time with our family together, has been my deepening of my awareness is how much responsibility I have felt over the years to be in charge of everyone else's radio waves. I'm powerless over everybody else's energy. And I've let it disrupt my energy and try to take over my energy for so long. And I'm powerless over theirs. I just need to be present and whole in mine. And what's interesting, what always happens at the end of these trips too, is by the time it's all over, I'm able to completely release and let go the parts that felt kind of sticky and strange, and just be present with the parts that I enjoyed, which is the essence of there is only love on the spiritual journey. Yes, our brains and our minds are in the whip of all of this, these feelings and these thoughts and these projections and these old stories. I mean, that's what we're running everything through, the projector that we're running everything through to create the movie that's on the screen. But when you can just be present with yourself and move into your heart, like the energy code book talks about, you actually let go of the attachment to the stories. Nobody is making me feel anything. I feel these things because they're a part of who I am. And they're opportunities for me to heal and have more clarity and then accept and love everybody's radio wave just as they are, and to let go of expectations and needs and wants that it isn't that you can't have needs and wants because you should have preferences and needs and wants. But when we're needing somebody to be a certain way for us to be okay, we're we're giving our power away again and again and again, versus saying, ah, I recognize this, this is what you have to offer. And so I'm gonna listen to your radio wave and I'm gonna learn how to allow and accept and love this person for just who they are, which is the work I've been doing with my dad for years. I certainly don't want to leave this weekend feeling like, oh, you know, and and have resentment or anger, because there's actually nothing to be resentful or angry of. It's the letting go of 55 years of energy. And I deserve to feel whatever those feelings are and to be present with my son and his family and to feel whatever those feelings are and to give yourself time to process. That's why journaling is so huge. Because when we stop using the journal to complain about everybody else and what we don't like, and we take time to have the journal be a place where we ask ourselves more about ourselves. Well, what did that feel like? Well, what did that remind me of? Where does that stem from? Where does that feel familiar? How does that feel in my body? Why am I afraid to say something? What is that fear from? Oh, that reminds me of this. What is what is the underbelly of that? I wouldn't want to be in trouble. I wouldn't want to do something wrong. I wouldn't want to upset anybody. Oh, interesting. That's still there. That's what happens when you do those journalings, and then you witness yourself and you give yourself love and compassion and grace, and you allow everybody else just to be exactly who they are, doing exactly what they're doing. They're just out there being themselves, powerless over everybody else, but we certainly are not powerless over ourselves. And when we take our power back and we quit needing them to be okay for us to be okay, and we witness everybody in their uniqueness, and then we hold our own uniqueness with light, there's so much more ease that comes from all of that. I already feel better just in talking to you, just in sharing this story and processing out loud, and just the reminder that it's okay to feel whatever you feel. It's okay. And as we have these family situations, and as you move into Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever it is that you're that you're celebrating, continue to lean into the part of you that can be selfish enough to take care of you and hand everybody else with compassion their own experiences and be curious about what mirrors we can use in reflection with our relationships that aren't about blame or judgment or resentment or anger, but they're about us being able to release the intense attachments that we've had for so long around other people and how they feel so that we can resolve our inner struggles. We can resolve our inner struggles because that's the only place that you have control anyway, is to create that freedom, that release within yourself. We're powerless over everybody else. Powerless, powerless, powerless, but not out of weakness, out of strength, releasing them and letting them go. So as we head into 2026 and into the end of December, I'm going to Costa Rica for three weeks with Rich, which I'm super excited about. We are being gifted to stay at a friend's house for three weeks. And I'm gonna allow this to be time for me to decompress, to fill back up, to prepare for next year. There's so many great things happening in the Recover Your Soul community and on the podcast, and to be opening up new coaching opportunities that are gonna be groups, recover your soul circles, and they're gonna be the ability to either work in cohorts to work through the steps with a group, like in as if we're in a retreat setting, but over time to really get what you can get from working with other people in that level, or these soul circles, which will be groups that you can come to. Um it's I'm still working on it, but you can come to that might be people who have are parents of adult children, or that you have a spouse that you're dealing with their addictions or their dysfunctions and and places where we really can connect in common ground to really go really deep. They're gonna be small groups that we'll meet on Zoom. And so I'm I'm working on a lot of things. So I'm gonna give myself some time on that. And those are gonna be uh rolled out in 2026. So at the for the rest of the month, if you're listening to this, you're gonna be getting some replays of the most popular episodes from season six to give me a break as I'm on vacation, and then we'll start again in season seven. I cannot believe it, in 2026. I love you all so much. I am so grateful for you. And I hope and pray that the tools and the spiritual resources that you get here are giving you what you need to release the energies that you've been holding on to that are not yours to carry and to feel the feelings that give you the information that you need to become your full whole self because you are here to be a light in the world. You are here to shine your unique beauty just as you are. And sometimes that means allowing the people around you to be who they are and their radio wave in their own station, playing whoever, whatever their movies or radio stations are, and just witnessing and observing and appreciating them for the uniqueness and their experience. So I will see you next year live. 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.