Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - May Your Heart Grow Three Sizes Today

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

How to cultivate loving kindness during the holiday season (and all year!)❤️Hello! I'm your host, Sarah Mikutel. But the real question is, who are you? Where are you now and where do you want to be? Can I help you get there?Visit sarahmikutel.com to learn how we can work together to help you achieve more peace, happiness, and positive transformation in your life.Book your Enneagram typing session by going to sarahmikutel.com/typingsessionDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to Live Without Borders, a travel and wellness show for expats, the expat curious, and globally minded citizens of the world. We are the travelers, the culturally curious, the experiences and not things kind of people. And we know that freedom is about more than getting on a plane. It's about becoming the most heroic versions of ourselves, which is why on this podcast you will hear insider travel secrets, inspiring expat stories, and advice on how to live abroad. but you will also hear episodes that will help give you the clarity, focus, and skills you need to create a life that will set your soul on fire. I am your host, Sarah Micatel, a certified clarity coach trained in the Enneagram, and I first moved abroad on my own at age 18, and I have been permanently enjoying life in Europe since 2010. If you are ready to make some big moves in your life

and want my help moving from someday to seize the day, visit live without borderspodcast.com. Hello and happy holidays. If you are celebrating, then I hope you are with people you care about and are doing something fun and cozy and just enjoying this season. I am with my family and my sister and I recently brought my four-year-old nephew. He just turned four to this indoor dinosaur exhibit. And at one of the dinosaurs, there was an area where people had thrown coins in to make a wish. And so, my sister found a coin, gave it to my nephew, and he tossed it in. And my sister said, what was your wish? And then she was like, well, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. And he said, I wished for my heart to grow. And my sister and I are just looking at each other,

like, this kid is a genius, this kid is a sage. And I still think that. But then I remembered that my nephew had watched how the Grinch stole Christmas with my parents. recently. And so even though he watched that, I still think that was a pretty brilliant wish for a newly four-year-old child to say. In case you are not familiar with that story, The Grinch, well, I'll just, I'll read some of the story. So, the Grinch hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season. Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason. It could be perhaps that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just. right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes

too small. But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, he stood there on Christmas Eve hating the whos. And the whoes were the people in this Christmasy village who loved Christmas. And so the story goes, the Grinch at night went into town and stole everybody's presents. And his plan was to throw him over this mountain the next day. So he's about to do this. And then he hears the whos in Whoville singing. And then I'll continue the story. So, but this sound wasn't sad. Why, this sounded glad. Every who down in Huville, the tall and the small, was singing without any presents at all. He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. It came. Somehow or other, It came just the same.

And the Grinch with his Grinch feet, ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling. How could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. He puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.

Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. And what happened then? Well, in Whoville, they say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of 10 Grinch's plus two. So the story ends with the Grinch going back into town and making friends with all of the Whoville people. And I just love that my nephew said that he wished that his heart would grow. And then a few weeks later, Santa was riding through his name.

neighborhood. Somebody was giving him a ride so he could wave to all the kids and my nephew got taken outside and he saw Santa and got to wave at him. And he was just glowing and said, when I saw Santa, it made my heart grow. And so I just love that because he's talking about that heart swell that you get when you're just full of joy, that pure love. And ideally at this time of year, that's what we would feel all the time or ideally all year, this is what we would be feeling. But humans are more complicated than that. We are not bliss out all the time, feeling this love for other people. So what happens when you're angry with somebody or constantly irritated with somebody? I mentioned this is the holiday season for many of us, and this often means we're going to be surrounded by family members who we

might not agree with or who rub us the wrong way for some reason. So how do we manage that? I had a real light bulb moment recently when I heard psychologist Rick Hansen, and he's one of my favorite personal well-being exemplars, say that often we get preoccupied with particular people, or even more exactly, parts of particular people or parts of particular relationships. And yes, he says, let's see that part, but the negative bias drags this into isolating and locking down onto just that part. And one of the really important things with any kind of pain or challenge is to keep making ourselves come back up to see the whole, the big picture, not denying what's problematic, but seeing the big picture, the whole, end quote. So that's a very stoic idea, right? Zooming out and not getting so that tunnel vision. And this idea really hit home for me. There might be one thing about a person that really drives you insane, but you don't have to let that one thing define your whole. relationship. So that can be a real game changer around the holiday season. You might be prepared to

walk into a situation with this resistance or this assumption that this person is going to be a total jerk. And when we have those walls up, then we're not bringing that much to the table either. So I love when the personal development coach Brendan Bouchard says, bring the joy. What are you going to bring into a situation, go in there with the intent to try to make things the best they can be. And again, it's not denying the reality. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't plan in advance for things that could possibly go wrong. You know, the Stoics were all about mindfully thinking in the morning, all right, what is this day going to be like? What are the obstacles they get in my way? And how could I deal with that? But we can also go into a situation, bringing our best and hoping to

bring other people along with us. maybe your uncle has political views that you don't align with. Maybe your sister-in-law asks too much of your mother-in-law. What's something that you like about that person? What is something that you have in common that you could talk about, that you could get curious about? And if you don't try to change something in this relationship, then what do you think is going to happen? You're just going to try to wait it out until the end of days or hope that they will magically change at some point, that you'll have a thousand, years and eventually things will just go the way that you want them to? How many holidays or even how many days do you want to just keep hoping that something will get better without doing anything? We don't have that many days as I talk about all the time. Today I randomly stumbled upon this passage from Your True Home by Ticknat Han. It opens the chapter called A Deeper View of Life and I will just read the first page. The work of acknowledging everything in mindfulness leads us to a deeper view of what life is. It is very important to understand that impermanence

is not a negative aspect of life. Impermanence is the very basis of life. If what exists were not impermanent, no life could continue. If a grain of corn were not impermanent, it could not become a corn plant. If a tiny child were not impermanent, she could not grow into an adult. Life is impermanent, but that does not mean that it is not worth living. It is precisely because of its impermanence that we value life so dearly. Therefore, we must know how to live each moment deeply and use it in a responsible way. If we are able to live the present moment completely, we will not feel regret later. We will know how to care for those who are close to us and how to bring them happiness. When we accept that all things are impermanent, we will

not be incapacitated by suffering when things decay and die. We can remain peaceful and content in the face of continuity and change, prosperity and decline, success, and failure." So again, we only have so many days left on this earth. How do you want to feel during those days? In the book The Tools by Barry Michaels and Phil Stutz, they talk about a tool called Active love that you can use to transform your negative feelings about a situation or a person into more loving feelings. And this is not just for the other person. It's above all for you to let go some of the hurt that might be immediate. Maybe this is something that has just happened that's bothering you, or it could be helping you let go of things that happened in the past, maybe decades ago,

that you're still hanging on to these bad feelings and they're really hurting you. So whenever you were feeling really ticked off, really enraged, and it gets you caught up in this loop of bad feelings and just thinking about the same situation over and over again. And this is not helping you or the situation use active love. And so I'm going to quote from their book. Imagine that you're surrounded by a warm liquid light that is infinitely loving. Feel your heart expand far beyond you to become one with this love. As you bring your heart back to normal size, this infinite energy concentrates itself inside your chest. It's an unstopably loving force that wants to give itself away. Focus on the person who's triggered your anger. If they're not physically in front of you,

usually they're not, then visualize their presence. Send all the love in your chest directly to them, hold nothing back. It's like completely expelling a deep breath. Follow the love as it leaves your chest. When it enters the other person at their solar plexus, don't just watch, feel it enter. This will give you the sense you're completely at one with them. Now relax. You'll feel yourself again, surrounded by infinite love, which will return to you all the energy you gave away. You'll feel filled up and at peace. Each of these three steps has a name to help you remember it. The first step is called concentration. You're gathering up all the love that surrounds you and concentrating it in your heart, which is the only organ that can find it and hold it. The second step is called transmission.

In this step, your heart functions as a conduit, transmitting love from a higher place into this world. The real power of the tool is in the third step, which is called penetration. When you feel the love you're transmitting, enter the other person. There's a sense of total acceptance, an acceptance that comes only with the experience of oneness. This is a victory. You've embraced injustice completely and are free to move on from it. Moving on. With this new power, no one has the power to put you in the maze. No one can stop you. End quote. And the maze they refer to is that place of stuckness where you're just ruminating on anything bad that has happened. feelings and you just can't get out there. When you're just focused on anger, you're going to

stay stuck in the maze. This is why they say the act of love tool is so important. If you've listened to any mindfulness apps or meditation apps, another tool that you might find helpful is loving kindness meditation. And that's a meditation that we do to expand our hearts, open ourselves up, have more compassion for ourselves and the world. And it often starts off where we're thinking about somebody who we have a great relationship with. We think they're amazing. There's not too many complications. And then wishing them well and saying a sort of repetitive phrase, something like, may you live with ease? May you be happy? May you be free from pain? I just looked at the greater good Inaction website to get that particular phrase, but it's all along that vein. We're just repeating a

few times with sincerity, hand on heart, if you want to really cultivating warm feelings of wishing this other person well, this person who we already like. And it's quite easy to feel feelings of warmth and just goodness when we're thinking of that person. And then the idea is to eventually move on to somebody who is more difficult for us. The relationship is more challenging, but we can still stick with it. May you live with ease. May you be happy. May you be free from pain.

And the idea is also to say that for ourselves, may I live with ease. May I be happy. May I be free from pain. I hope this episode gave you something to think about and may your heart grow. I hope this new year is filled with nothing but good things for you. And that can include some challenges that will stretch you out of your comfort zone and make you a happier, more resilient, more fulfilled human being. All right, that's all for now. Thank you for listening and have a beautiful holiday wherever you are.

Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarah micotel.com slash blank no more.