Conjuring Holiday Sovereignty Feat. Emma Magenta
The holidays can be wonderful,
but the expectation of increased proximity and intimacy
can be a challenge.
My bestie and fellow coach Emma Magenta
helps us figure out how to show up as the people we want to be,
and navigate this tricky season
in a purposeful, self-honoring way.
Subscribe! Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Pandora | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn
Mentioned:
Emma’s website, hangwithemma.com.
Emma’s previous appearance on Mind Witchery, Conjuring Faith.
Make Magic:
When you’re wrestling with holiday “shoulds,”
pay attention to the signals you’re getting from your body:
your gut, your heart, your breath.
They share messages from your innermost self,
and they can help you understand where you need
to place and hold boundaries.
Transcript:
Emma Magenta: One of the best things that I think we can all be aware of when we’re wrestling with “shoulds” is like how does this feel in my body when I contemplate that this is this “should”?
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: Like, what comes up for me? What are the emotions, what are the signals that I’m getting from my gut or from my heart or from my flesh?
Natalie Miller: From my tear ducts and my eyes.
Emma Magenta: [laugh] Yeah.
Natalie Miller: [laugh] Yeah.
Emma Magenta: What are the messages I’m getting from my innermost self?
[Music]
Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Hi, there. Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m so happy to have my bestie and fellow life coach, Emma Magenta, back on the pod with me today. Hi, Emma.
Emma Magenta: Hi, lady.
Natalie Miller: Did you know, Emma, our Conjuring Faith episode is one of the top downloaded episodes of Mind Witchery?
Emma Magenta: I did not know that. What an honor.
Natalie Miller: I know. It’s amazing. So, if you haven’t already checked out that episode called Conjuring Faith, definitely want to take a look for that. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. But Emma and I go way, way back. We have evolved a ton, personally and professionally, together. And I knew she would be the perfect person to bring on for a very timely episode today.
So, today’s episode is Conjuring Holiday Sovereignty, “sovereignty” meaning I show up like I want. I show up as the person I love to be. I show up in a self-honoring way. I hold boundaries, and I navigate this tricky season from a centered and responsive—not reactive but responsive place.
Emma Magenta: Right on time.
Natalie Miller: Right on time, because, as you know, here come the holidays, and whichever ones you celebrate or don’t, it is generally a time of, let’s say, increased expectation of familial intimacy. [laugh]
Emma Magenta: Or at least proximity. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Yes [laugh], yes, familial proximity. I love it, yeah. And it’s also, this year, for many people, what I’m hearing is that this is like, OK, I haven’t seen my people, the cousins, whatever, right, in two years now, and it’s time. Like, we’re finally getting back together. Or I can’t avoid it, and everyone’s vaccinated now, so I can’t avoid it anymore. And even if you’re not celebrating holidays together, I know there are a lot of like I haven’t met my new niece yet. I haven’t seen my parents in a long time.
So, that is just sort of in the air right now, and I wanted to give you a good week before American Thanksgiving holiday to steep in some of what Emma and I are going to be talking about today around holiday sovereignty, and really just showing up empowered and on purpose through what can often be like, let’s—don’t you think, Emma, part of like growing up is realizing the holidays can suck? [laugh]
Emma Magenta: Absolutely. My experience of the holidays actually is that I loved the holidays when I was a kid. I loved Christmas. And then in my early 20s, my parents split up around the holidays. So, in my life, I have a definite like before times and after times where it’s like before times, the holidays meant X, and in the after times, the holidays were much more complex. And I remember clearly in the first year after my parents split up, spending the holidays—like, really not celebrating at all, that first year.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: So, it’s complicated.
Natalie Miller: I think for me, you know, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving because it’s a very—in my experience, it’s been a very flexible holiday. Thanksgiving, I’ve spent with friends, I’ve spent alone with pizza, I’ve spent with my family. Growing up, we always had Thanksgiving. My mom always hosted Thanksgiving for our extended family, so I’ve had Thanksgiving lots of different ways, and I love how that holiday—like, on purpose, we say it’s going to just be four days. We’re just going to go ahead and do four days.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: And even when I was working retail, and it was not four days, it was one day followed by a 4 a.m. retail work morning, I still always loved that we kind of—we took a chunk of time every year to say let’s just pause. The Christmas holiday, which my family celebrates, I’ve always had a really hard time with, in part because, we’ll just say, members in my family, me included, are not great at balancing giving and receiving. [laugh] In fact, maybe it’s very difficult for some of us to receive—
Emma Magenta: Maybe. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —raising my hand, right—but, also, easy for us to over-give. And, so, there was always just this like kind of icky glut of, ugh, imbalance and stuff at the Christmas holiday. And I was just—I was never so much a fan. So—
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: So, just want to acknowledge from the get-go that it’s a laden time.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: It’s a laden time. It’s got a lot of memories in it. It’s got a lot of expectations in it. It’s got a little bit of time out of time in it because our schedule—our regularly scheduled programming gets interrupted November, December, right? Hannukah will show up differently every year. Like, everything—there’s just kind of some longer interruption through that time, and so, in that way, you know, with that interruption comes I think potential for freedom, and for being different, and also instability so that some of our routines and rituals are disrupted, and that can be kind of tough.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: I think it’s so great that you’re talking about this topic, and I’m so honored that you brought me on to just be a part of the conversation about it. I feel like even over the course of my lifetime, people have gotten—like, just the general conversation of the culture, I feel like people in general are more aware of how laden—and another word I really like to describe the holidays is fraught.
Natalie Miller: Fraught.
Emma Magenta: How incredibly fraught the holidays can be. And we know how even for kids, it can be a sort of a situation where there’s a lot of sort of treats around. There’s a lot of gifts. They’re staying up late. There’s a lot of family around. I think even for children, it can be a very complicated time, and definitely for adults when you have a lifetime or half a lifetime, a couple of decades—
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: —three or four decades’ worth of experience of the holidays in your past. Like, I feel like the holidays are definitely something that each person has their own personal, individual relationship with, and that relationship can be a positive one and a joyful one, or it can be really kind of painful, like a painful time.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. I mean, since my father passed away, the holidays are always a moment of just remembering and marking his absence, you know, and that’s new. And I think, you know, your story about your parents’ divorce, and then—you know, the thing is, as time rolls on, and our circumstances and families shift and change, so too does our relationship to the holidays. And, so, year to year, depending on what’s been happening, what we will need in order to be able to show up with integrity is going to shift and change.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: I love that. I love that. That’s a great segue to this conversation about sovereignty.
Natalie Miller: Yes.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Yes, yeah. So, Emma, you shared with me—Emma and I are Vox-ing friends.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: We fondly refer to Voxer, to this voice messaging app, as like our version of 19th century letter-writing. [laugh] Like—
Emma Magenta: It’s the best.
Natalie Miller: —it’s these long philosophical missives—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —but also randomly just like, oh, I just got back from this acupuncture appointment, and it was so wild. Let me tell you about it. So, but, anyway, Emma, you visited your dad for like a good long haul this fall.
Emma Magenta: I did.
Natalie Miller: And you left me a Vox about it that knocked me out, and it was a self-honoring, integrity-based boundary-setting with your pop. Will you share what happened?
Emma Magenta: I would love to. So, my dad and I are super close. I was the third child of three, and my mother was an obstetrician, and my father was a farmer—still is a farmer. And, so, I—really, my dad was my primary caregiver when I was a kid. And because of various circumstances, I had the opportunity to go out and spend a month with him in September. He and my stepmother have a farm in Kansas with sheep, and it’s always been sort of a place of refuge for me to go there.
And one of the most painful things about the pandemic for me was, of course, that I couldn’t see family that was far-flung but also just that I couldn’t go back there and be in that place, that farm. It’s not the farm that I grew up on but it’s in the kind of same general area, and it’s just a real place of sanctuary for me. So, I got out there. It’s kind of a pain, traveling from New Jersey to Kansas, and then it’s a long car ride. And, fortunately, I have other family there who I got to see before I got there.
And by the time I arrived at my dad’s house, I felt really pretty emotionally tired and strung out. And I was kind of vaguely aware of that. And he, of course, was really happy to see me, and he—that first day that I got there, they have a furnished basement, and we went down there. And he showed me a couple of boxes, one of which was actually an ancient suitcase that I really think is probably from like—I don’t know—1918, like this suitcase that was really old, and another really ancient-looking wooden box.
And he said, “Listen, I have a lot of family pictures in here, and I want to look at them with you at some point during this trip.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” So, then, the next day, I was literally taking a nap down in the basement. And I went in September, and it was really hot, and they’ve got a spare room down there, and so it’s super cool.
So, I went down there to sort of escape the heat, and take a nap. And I was literally napping, and my dad, who I adore, he was so excited to have me there that he woke me up from my nap, I mean, in a very like innocuous way. He kind of poked his head the stairs, and was like, “You awake?”
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: And, of course, I was like, “No, I’m not freaking awake.” [laugh]
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: “Like, I’m sleeping.” [laugh]
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: And then I was like, “Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I am awake.” And then he came downstairs, and he started—he was so excited to show me, he started unpacking these boxes. And I was kind of like, “Oh, OK, I guess we’re unpacking these boxes now.” And he showed me this thing, and he showed me that thing. And I was trying as politely as I possibly could to indicate without saying it that I was really not in a headspace to look at these old family things, to look at these pictures.
And, oh, my god, I mean, this is not exactly what was in there. But the types of things that were in there were like flyers from my great-great-great-grandfather’s drugstore, letters from my great-grandfather’s second wife to my grandmother, like, all of this family stuff that was—I think this is a really key thing about the story—it was not at all junk to me, and it was not at all junk to my dad. It was something really important and meaningful, and I was standing there while he was unpacking this stuff, and I got more and more upset.
And it was one of those things where, like, you feel yourself—I felt myself starting to well up, and I almost cr…I could not figure out what was going on. Like, I was so upset in the moment. And, finally, I just had to say directly to him, “Dad, I cannot do this right now. I cannot do this.” And he was so excited about the stuff, and he knew that I was interested in this stuff, that he was just kind of confused.
And then, of course, the tears started. I did start crying. And I said, “Dad, I am coming off of a really intense period of time, like everybody else in the country.” My personal pandemic story is that early on in the pandemic, a member of my family died of COVID, and then my husband and I had all kinds of ups—my dog actually died. It’s, of course, it’s not the same as losing a person, but my dog died at the beginning of the pandemic.
My husband and I had all the types of ups and downs that everybody else had during the pandemic. And then right before I left for this enormous month-long trip with my father, Hurricane Ida hit New Jersey. And literally the night before I was supposed to fly out—I had to postpone my flight—my basement flooded with a foot of water, and my husband and I had to do all the things that you have to do when your basement floods, which is moving stuff around, calling the insurance company, getting everything cleaned up.
It was extremely stressful, so that by the time I arrived in this place of sanctuary for myself, I really needed to be really still and quiet, and not make very many demands on myself. And I certainly was in no emotional condition to look through important, meaningful, old family papers. So, I just kind of poured all this out to my father. I was like, “Listen, I can’t do this right now. I am com…this is the situation I’ve coming from. I don’t have the bandwidth to do this.”
And he was like, “OK. OK.” And after that, he gave—so, he gave me space in the moment. And then after that, during the entirety of the trip, I had this sense that he—he sort of backed way off in general in terms of what his expectations were of me. And then what was great was that slowly over the month, I—this is kind of a weird phrase to use, but I got better.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: Slowly over the month—it’s really beautiful there. It’s the countryside. There’s no traffic noise. There’s no, like, there’s no horns honking. There’s no exhaust smells. There’s no concrete. [laugh] It’s dirt roads, and beautiful prairie, and animals. And that’s what I grew up in, so that’s what feels really comforting to me.
So, slowly, over the period of that month, I was really able to restore myself, and I was really glad that I set such a firm boundary at the beginning. I’m sorry it had to get to the point where I like literally kind of had to break down to say it, and that I wasn’t—but I didn’t—I wasn’t really—I didn’t really know.
Natalie Miller: No, I know.
Emma Magenta: Do you know what I mean?
Natalie Miller: I do.
Emma Magenta: I didn’t really know until I was in it what emotional condition I was in.
Natalie Miller: Well, I mean, as I think about it, you know, I always love using the smartphone battery metaphor for this. It’s like you—your battery was on red. [laugh] You were bare…you barely made it. [laugh] Like, you had to postpone your flight. You barely made it there, and you’re—and it was just like one of those situations where you’re like I can’t even try to do anything on this phone. I just got to plug it in because it is—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Like, this phone can’t even tell me anything. It’s like I just got to plug it in right now, and I need to recharge, right? And I think that so many of us right now find ourselves with a very low battery after 2020, 2021, after—and in many ways also—Emma, I think you’ll agree—we are just now integrating some of the huge changes that happened, and whether they are positive changes or, you know, they were disappointing changes, like, we’re just now starting to integrate those, right?
Like, they happened a long—maybe they happened six months ago, a year ago, 18 months ago. But it’s like we’re just now really, I think, paying for it. [laugh] It’s like it’s all been on an energetic credit card, and those bills are due. [laugh]
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Those bills are due right now. Yeah.
Emma Magenta: Love that. Like, that kind of goes—so, two things that—two thoughts that occur to me from that. First of all, I feel like everybody’s talking about this but nobody’s really living into it, which is the fact that everything now is going back to normal. And I think in our eagerness for things to be normal, we forget how traumatic this—these last couple of years have been for us.
So, I mean, that’s true for me, and I had a death in the family, and all this other stuff happen. But it’s even true for people who maybe on the surface not that much changed about their lives. It was so excruciatingly stressful for virtually everybody on the planet, even people who were pretty comfortable, right?
Because I think that a really common thing I hear from my clients who are comfortable is that they’re like, oh—like, they feel like they have no right to acknowledge or honor the extreme stress of the situation that we had, right? And I think people even forget what it was like in March, April, May of 2020, like, when we were all [laugh] washing our groceries—
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: —washing our groceries, and you didn’t know—
Natalie Miller: Right. Well, and—
Emma Magenta: —like, they didn’t know how you got it.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And, I mean, and in the United States, we’re washing our groceries, and we’re watching Donald Trump campaign for reelection—
Emma Magenta: One hundred percent.
Natalie Miller: —and we’re watching Black Lives Matter re-erupt at all of the egregious—
Emma Magenta: Yes.
Natalie Miller: —violence, right? So, I mean, like [laugh], when we really think about everything that was happening in 2020, that alone is like—I mean, it hasn’t even been a year since the insurrection at the Capitol. That was not even a year ago.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: You know? And it’s just like all of that, wherever you live in the world, is so much to recover from, much less the shifts and changes that have happened in your own life. Like, what happened for your kids when they were schooled virtually? And what are you discovering now about the effects of that year? And, you know, where are there still, you know, outbreaks happening? And where is there vaccine resistance that you are looking at?
You know, so, I think all of that, we do got to just try, even though it’s almost unfathomable. It’s like let’s try to fathom it because it really is so much. And it is the context for the kinds of like get-togethers and the—and even if you’re not getting together with people, even if you’re just enjoying a little bit of extra spaciousness in your life in November and December, the context is that, right, that like the world literally in California burned down. [laugh]
Emma Magenta: My god, it’s so embarrassing to say this, I forgot about that.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: I forgot about that that was going on also in California at the same time.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. No, I mean—
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: —it’s really—it’s extraordinary. OK. So, what I love about your story about your dad is that you were able to create space around the emotion that came up. So, I know for me so often, the emotion comes up, and I just immediately react. I’ll be cold or I’ll be cranky, right? That’s a very easy kind of—a kind of quick reaction.
I feel the emotion coming, and I just explode or retreat, right, fight or flee. And over time, I’ve gotten better, and I’m still always working on it. But I love that you created just a little bit of space around that emotion, and you were able to express what was happening for you, and, of course, that you and your dad have the kind of relationship where you’re safe to do that.
Emma Magenta: Thank you for that. Oh, I appreciate that—
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: —insight. It was so unexpected when it came up. It was so unexpected, and it was—like, you and I talk all the time about how one part of your self can really want something. Like, I really wanted to look through those papers and things. But your brain—I’ll just use these sort of like terms as shorthand, right—your brain and your heart or your brain and your body are not always on the same page.
Natalie Miller: Right.
Emma Magenta: And I think that that’s a really common experience to think to have your brain engaged on one track and be going down one track and be thinking everything’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. Right? It’s like that meme of the dog sitting in hell at the table where he’s like, “This is fine. Everything’s fine.” Meanwhile, everything’s on fire, right?
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: So, it’s like your brain is on that track, but then your body and your emotional life, all of these other aspects of yourself can be doing something totally different, can have different needs, can want something different. And in that moment, I had this sense that the organism of my being, right, my animal nature was kind of like rising up like in revolt and saying no. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: [laugh] No, you’re not doing this. This is a big ixnay.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, and, I mean, you know, even just thinking about—like, you talked about how it’s a—it’s—it feels very serene and peaceful and restorative to be there in the—in Kansas in the country, right?
Emma Magenta: Mm-hmm.
Natalie Miller: And I know you got there on a plane where you and everyone else were wearing masks.
Emma Magenta: Yeah. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Right? [laugh] You know, like, I know that, you know, even though it is lovely to get there, none of us have traveled as much as we are wont to, and it’s like—you know, it’s fun that you mention the “everything is fine” dog. I’m thinking about, like, these days when my partner and I both leave the house at the same time, our dogs are like, “Um, what the fuck?” [laugh]
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: “Like, you don’t actually leave anymore.” So, they’re very—like, we leave the house, and they’re like—they don’t understand. And I think our nervous systems are used to being at home.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Even if we prefer to be in the country, our nervous systems are used to being in our home with our stuff. And actually being in our home with our stuff has been a survival—like, more than usually, an assurance of our survival.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: So, that’s like so, I think, important to remember. It’s like, oh, right, even if you—even if it was nice to get away, even if you were in a place, like, getting there was stressful, and even being elsewhere right now can feel extra stressful to a nervous system that’s not accustomed to it.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. What I love also about your story is that the “should” thinking and the “what a good daughter does” thinking didn’t—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —didn’t come in and force you to be with him and with all of the family artefacts in a way that was not in integrity for you, right?
Emma Magenta: Mm-hmm.
Natalie Miller: So, let’s just talk a little bit about that “should” thinking, right? Like, well, you know, we’re never together so we should spend the whole afternoon together.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Right? A good daughter helps prepare the meal, and then helps clean up afterward, right? I’m talking about—
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: —those kinds of thinking, you know, that can be very kneejerk. It’s almost, I was going to say, instinctual. I don’t think it’s instinctual. I think it’s very ingrained, these ideas of how to be. So, what do you think? What’s a nice way for our listener to bring a little more awareness to how that kind of thinking might be operating?
Emma Magenta: Well, the problematic nature of “shoulds” is something that you and I have talked about for years, a long time. And one of the things I think that was notable about this trip in particular for me in this particular situation in my life is that I really had the sense on this trip—so, I’m 44 years old. I really had the sense on this trip that I was arriving there as an adult, and that I was interacting with my father as an adult in a way that I have never, never had that before.
And I had much more of this sense of personal sovereignty, this sense of like—and this isn’t—like, I didn’t even have words for this, necessarily. It just was a felt sense that the only person that’s capable of looking after my interests fully and effectively is me. So, like, when I think about this idea of “shoulds,” and how so many of us get wrapped up in “shoulds” and what it means to be a good daughter or a good sister or a good mom around the holidays, one of the things I think about is how your most effective advocate is yourself, and that as you age, as you—or hopefully as we grow, if you’re trying to live a life of self-awareness and self-growth, hopefully what happens is that you get more and more conscious of the ways that those “shoulds” are so often in conflict with this sense of personal sovereignty.
Like, if you are the one that is most capable of—or most fully capable of acting and perceiving what your interests are, so often those “shoulds” are dissonant. And one of the best sort of—I don’t know. You and I hate the word “tips.” [laugh] One of the best things that I think we can all be aware of when we’re wrestling with “shoulds” is like how does this feel in my body when I contemplate that this is this “should”?
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: Like, what comes up for me? What are the emotions, what are the signals that I’m getting from my gut or from my heart or from my flesh?
Natalie Miller: From my tear ducts and my eyes.
Emma Magenta: [laugh] Yeah.
Natalie Miller: [laugh] Yeah.
Emma Magenta: What are the messages I’m getting from my innermost self?
Natalie Miller: I love that. You know, another thing that I love to do is say, OK, substitute “should” for “want,” right? We should spend the whole afternoon together playing board games. OK.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: I want to spend the whole afternoon together playing board games. It’s like, hmm, no, that do…[laugh]
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: No, couldn’t say that.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: [laugh] Couldn’t say and verify that, right? So—and I think there’s also a piece, you know, to that dissonance point, Emma. Oftentimes, when we are trying to enact a “should” that’s not an integrity, it’s not aligned with our—what we truly want, the effect of the attempt to enact the “should” is not what we intend, right? So, this is what I mean. When I say to myself, “We should spend the whole afternoon together playing board games,” I’m thinking, yeah, because I want happy family time. I want to be engaged and having fun together, right?
Emma Magenta: Mm-hmm.
Natalie Miller: But if I attend family game afternoon not really wanting to, I am not engaged. I am not fun [laugh], right? I am snappish. I’m a little irritated. I’m not showing up the way that the “should” assumes I will, right?
So, I actually love to kind of reverse engineer also, right, to say, OK, what’s the vibe that I want? What’s the quality I want? What are the values? Like, all in the qualitative realm, what are the values? What are the vibes? What am I really hoping for?
What do I really want to live? Who do I want to be? Who do I want to be in this afternoon with the family? OK. And, so, what do I think and do that helps me to conjure that vibe?
Emma Magenta: This goes back to one of our age-old coaching questions that we love, which is how do I want to feel? How do I want to feel? Like, if you’re—if you know how you want to feel, and the way that you want to feel is I want to feel close to family, and I want to feel engaged in a meaningful way, then you have a lot more options. Oftentimes, a lot more options can present themselves beyond just playing board games for a whole afternoon.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. Well, yeah, creativity opens because there’s lots of ways that I can conjure engagement. Maybe what I want to do is go accompany my grandmother to the grocery store, and cook together. Maybe that’s what I want to do. Or, you know, maybe that uncle and that cousin that are really grating on my nerves, maybe I don’t really want to engage with them. But I do want to engage with the little kids, and so maybe I can, you know, spearhead a trip to the park with the kids, something like that, right?
But we do, we get access to creativity when we think about how do we want to feel. So, I love that. And, you know, Emma, there’s another thing here that I got to be open to the various ways in which that could happen.
I went on a family vacation once upon a time, and this was when my children were just old enough that they did not need constant supervision. And there was a moment on this family vacation where I’m reading a novel in a beach chair. My eldest bonus daughter is swimming. My middle daughter is creating beautiful sandcastles. My partner is back in the hut, taking a nap. And the little one is, you know, kind of running all around—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —[laugh] as is her Gemini wont—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —running all around, you know, kind of checking in with all of the various parties, and talking and singing to herself. And I remember telling my therapist at the time, I was like, it was so delightful that day. It just felt like we could all do what we wanted to do. But, immediately, my “should” brain was like, “That’s not the way to be family.” Right?
Emma Magenta: That’s not a family. That’s not family times.
Natalie Miller: That’s like—that’s, you know, parallel play. That’s not family times.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: And, you know, she really helped me to see that, well, maybe, actually, for my family, that is family times; that we can be with one another, and we can all give each other the space to do what it is what we want to do. And, so, that’s really where it does come around to values, right? How do I want to feel, and also what are the values that are important to me, you know?
And maybe it’s spaciousness. You know what? I want some more spaciousness in this family. Or maybe it’s truth and authenticity. No, I want to be real. I don’t want to pretend to do things or to do things I don’t want to do.
Emma Magenta: You know, I think for a lot of people, even just to think about the holidays, to take a step back, and say, “Well, what do I want?” Just to say that before the holiday, I think, is more than a lot of us do, right? I think that a lot of times, my experience of the holidays is either that I am on a speeding train, rushing toward the deadline of the holidays [laugh]—
Natalie Miller: [laugh] Yeah, yes.
Emma Magenta: —the cliff of the holidays, or I have the opposite sensation where the holidays are a speeding train bearing down on me [laugh] and I’m like tied to the tracks. So, I think even to pause and say, as we were saying before, “What do I want? How do I want to feel?” is a huge thing. And I think this idea of thinking about your values is like another further step that can enrich our conversation with ourselves about how—just how we want our lives to actually go, right?
And it’s not about a rigid, planning every single thing, right, and it’s not about somehow being selfish and putting your own needs far above everybody else’s needs. I think that’s a big part of the “should” mindset, right, is that if I even think—if I even allow myself to think about what I want, women are so programmed, any marginalized group is so programmed to put their own needs second that I think it’s a really big thing to think about just to say, “What do I want? How do I want this to feel? How do I want this to go?” and then to say, “Well, what are my values? What are the values that I want to enact around the holidays?”
And I think that’s also, just to return to our original theme, when you’re setting boundaries, knowing what your values are can be really key to that. Like, why is it that it’s intolerable to you to sit there at the table with Uncle Ted, and hear him make that joke that he makes every year? Why is that it is intolerable for you to go into the kitchen with all the other women in the family, and do all the cooking and all the cleaning when all the men are in the living room watching football all weekend? Why does that feel so bad? Why is it intolerable to you that Cousin Sally makes that comment about how you’ve loaded up your plate at Thanksgiving? Like, what are the values that are behind why you’re having these visceral responses to things—
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: —that cause you—that are like a clarion call to like, OK, I need to set some boundaries here?
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And, you know, the corollary question for me to being clear about the boundaries is, and who do I want to be?
Emma Magenta: Love that.
Natalie Miller: Like, who do I want to be in this situation, right? And to remember that—you know, I love this. I use the potluck metaphor a lot for cocreation, right? So, sometimes, at the holidays, there is a literal potluck, but I’m talking about an energetic potluck, right? We’re all bringing a dish. We’re all bringing something to contribute.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Right? And I know in a literal potluck, I’m definitely bringing vegetables because I want to make sure there’s lots of vegetables there, right? But I can do the same thing energetically. You know what? I’m going to bring a like full permission for people to take personal space because I know there’s not going to be a lot of that, so I’m bringing that energetically to the potluck.
You know, there’s also this piece, Emma, that in so doing, we are creating a different family. When we’re doing it on purpose, when we’re thinking about how do I want to feel, what are my values, who do I want to be, we show up on purpose, and we—our part of the cocreation of family is empowered with our desires and with our personal integrity. It is actually deeply revolutionary. [laugh] Right? Can really shift and change a family.
Emma Magenta: Truly, and especially when you think about how, like, the kids are watching. Like, if there’s children in your family—
Natalie Miller: Yes.
Emma Magenta: —the kids are watching all of this unfold.
Natalie Miller: Yes, yes, we’re modeling, right? We’re—
Emma Magenta: Yeah, and it can make—
Natalie Miller: We’re modeling.
Emma Magenta: It can make such a difference to see, even if it doesn’t get processed necessarily in a verbal way, just for the kids to see, OK, well—I don’t know—Auntie Jane didn’t stay in the kitchen and do the dishes, you know. My Auntie Jane actually came and sat in the parlor, and worked on her—I don’t know—read a book or—
Natalie Miller: Right. Yeah.
Emma Magenta: —I don’t know—watched the football, or went outs…or invited me to go out and take a walk, right? I totally think that that sort of thing imprints chil…like, just to see alternatives imprints children on such a deep level.
Natalie Miller: Mm-hmm. And, you know, I talk very explicitly with my kids about things like this. We had this thing this summer where I hadn’t seen my mom in a couple of years. She hadn’t seen me or the kids in a couple of years. And, so, Mom came for kind of a split visit. I got her for like five days, and then she went to my sister for a week, and then she came back for another five days, and it was great.
But it was really interesting. We’re not used to having houseguests. And when people haven’t seen one another for a long time, there—and when we’re still living in uncertainty, there can be some pressure to spend all the minutes together and to do—
Emma Magenta: Oh, my god, yeah.
Natalie Miller: —to do all the things, to have all the conversations, right?
Emma Magenta: That is such a thing.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And, so [laugh], my girls and I in the break, in the in-between, we talked about it. They were like, “I love GG so much but it felt really intense to just have, you know, people around all the time. I’m not used to that.” And, so, we really—we talked about it, and we talked about, like, you know, what are the ways that we could take space? And, also, if someone else needed space, what would make that easier for us, right?
Like, we can totally think about like that, right? Like, you could disappear without saying anything into your room for the whole afternoon, or you could say, “I love you so much, and I’m so glad you’re here, and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. I’m going to take some alone time.” Right? I honestly think that, for me anyway, that is so essential. [laugh]
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Just the ability to say, like, you know, actually—like you said earlier—I’m a sovereign being. I need a little bit of space and time. I’m going to take that for myself. I’m going to take a walk by myself. I’m going to take a nap. Thank you.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: One time, Chris and I went to Chicago for a wedding, and our whole family was going. And I said to my—my mom and my sister were there, and my sister’s family, and cousins. And I said to my sister and my mom, “Listen, Chris and I are coming. We’re going to stay in a separate hotel.” Like, I really wanted to enjoy myself on this trip.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: So, I told them, “We’re going to stay—we’re not going to stay in the same hotel that you’re staying in.” We happen to have a friend in Chicago. And I also said to them, “We’re going to be available for one meal and one family activity per day on this trip.” And I said, “Maybe we’ll do more if we feel like it, if we want to, if we’re up for it. But don’t—I just want to set expectations that we’re not going to be available. That, like, generally, that’s what we’re going to be there for is one meal together, and one activity together.”
And it’s because I did exactly what you’re talking about. Like, at the beginning, I thought about how do I want this to go? How do I want this to feel? What’s going to feel good to me? This was many years ago before I discovered coaching. I mean, I’m always a work in progress but I was even more of a work in progress at that time.
Natalie Miller: [laugh]
Emma Magenta: [laugh] And I really thought about, well, what’s—I want to enjoy the time that I do have with my family. And if I’m with them every single second, this—like, the—what’s going to happen is all the stuff that annoys me is going to come up. And I want to stay in the zone of, like, just enjoying being with them.
Natalie Miller: No, absolutely. And that, again, right, comes around to when I’m thinking in terms of “shoulds,” oh, you know, we haven’t seen them in years. We should really go to lunch and dinner, right?
Emma Magenta: Mm-hmm.
Natalie Miller: Versus, OK, what do I really want? I want high-quality time. I want to be sufficiently rested. So, you know, thanks—
Emma Magenta: Oh, it’s huge.
Natalie Miller: —for the offer. Thanks for the offer of the spare room. I’m actually going to grab an Airbnb.
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Right? I’m going to get a little bit of extra space for myself. It’s huge.
Emma Magenta: I think one other thing that I wanted to make sure that we talked about on this episode was what a difference it can make when you think about it in advance versus going into it kind of blindly, and then allowing it to go on too long, like, feeling uncomfortable, and not really saying anything about it, and not taking a step back and reassessing the situation, and then having an explosion, right? Do you recognize this pattern?
Natalie Miller: Totally.
Emma Magenta: I’m sure you do [laugh], where you don’t really think about it in advance. You don’t know what your boundaries are. You get into the situation. Shit starts to go down. You bite the inside of your mouth. You bite your lip, and you’re like just go to get through this next 10 minutes, and then at minute 8, you’re like—you have an explosion.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: You—and then, of course, you feel bad about it. You feel like shit about it.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: So, I think that one of the key things about—one of the key things that we’re saying in this conversation is the idea that, like, the pre-thought is really worth it, and then being aware in the moment when it starts to feel bad so that you can really make some decisions about who do I want to be when I set this boundary?
Natalie Miller: Yeah, I love that. And, you know, that pre-thought, I mean, for me in my everyday life, that happens literally every morning. I sit down, and I decide, OK, how do I want to feel today? OK. So, what do I need to prioritize? What do I need to believe?
How do I need to think about myself, about my day, the things on my calendar, about the world? If I want to feel this way, how do I need to think, and what do I need to prioritize? And that can happen, you know. You can do that as a family in the car on the way to the dinner. You can say, “Hey, how do you want to feel?”
Emma Magenta: Beautiful.
Natalie Miller: Right? “How do you want to feel in this dinner?” [laugh] And we can do that on our own, and we can also do that, you know, semi-collectively. Can you imagine just how much more resourced you will feel if you give yourself that bit of time to just answer those questions?
Emma Magenta: Sovereign, how much more sovereign?
Natalie Miller: How much more sovereign, right? And as we all know, family dynamics, they’re so—it’s like in those dirt roads of Kansas when it’s been rainy, and a truck’s driven through several times, it gets ruts. There’s ruts in the road. There are a lot of ruts in the road where family dynamics are concerned. I know a lot of times it’s like, how did I—I thought I was not the oldest sister who always has to—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —take care of everyone. But, suddenly, I’m looking around [laugh]—
Emma Magenta: Here I am again.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: I’m the youngest sister, so I’m like, oh, I thought I wasn’t the youngest sister whose feelings get hurt during the board game, you know.
Natalie Miller: Yes.
Emma Magenta: Still in there.
Natalie Miller: Still in there, right?
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: And, so, it’s just like, you know, being able to hold the both and there, OK, that dynamic still exists, and, also, I’m still evolving. I’m still growing. I’m still moving beyond it. And I can do it in this really responsive way with integrity. I just—I love that.
So, OK, so let’s—oh, you know, one more thing though, Emma, I bet someone listening to this podcast is like, “I’m not seeing anyone. In fact, I’m—I opt out of holiday shenanigan. I do my own thing. I stay on my own.”
Let’s be sure we attend to that too, because we’ve been talking a lot about creating boundaries around family, and family dynamics. But there are maybe other boundaries that these folks can make as well. What do you think?
Emma Magenta: Yeah, there are totally folks in that circumstance, either by choice or by circumstance that they find themselves in a situation like that.
Natalie Miller: You know, it’s funny, I used to—when I was a yoga studio owner, we would have really reduced classes over this time of year because, of course, a lot of people are traveling and having celebrations, and there’s not as many people coming to the yoga studio. And I remember starting a series called Keeping Spirits Bright just to acknowledge that—and this is when I was really becoming an adult, and realizing, oh, the holidays are actually really hard [laugh] for some people.
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: And I remember those Keeping Spirits Bright classes would have dozens and dozens of people in them, right, people who were on their own or for people for whom the holidays are a very melancholy time.
Emma Magenta: Yeah, totally.
Natalie Miller: You know, so—but I think the same questions will still apply in this case.
Emma Magenta: I totally do. Like, one of the things I think about a lot in my own life is that I—so, like you, I’m a life coach, and I work from home, and my work is a solitary kind of work, right? Like, I don’t have coworkers. And I’m an introvert, generally, as well, even though I love public speaking and I—I’m not shy. I’m an introverted person. I tend to be more restored by time alone.
So, one of the things I think about all the time for myself is even though at this moment, maybe I feel I’m enjoying being by myself, I need to look ahead, and do some strategizing about making some plans to socialize with other people because I know cognitively, even though I’m not feeling it right now in my body, I know that if I don’t make some kind of a plan for checking in with people, that I—it’s like that tank runs dry all of a sudden. Like, I’ll go from being like happy alone, happy alone, happy alone, to suddenly being like, oh, I’m lonely.
Natalie Miller: Right.
Emma Magenta: Right? I’m lonely. And one of the ways that I’ve learned to work with that—not around the holidays but just in my regular day-to-day life—is that I will make—I make more play dates with friends than I necessarily think I’m going to need at the moment. But I recognize that even if I’m looking ahead, and I’m like, well, right now, I feel fine, I try to account for the fact that, in the future, it might not feel that way. Right?
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: So, there’s this thing, first of all, where I’m always checking in with myself about what my needs are in the moment, and I’m also planning for what future me might need.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, I love that. And I think that, you know, the questions that we recommended for people in family situations, you can use these to have boundaries with holiday culture, right? [laugh] You can—
Emma Magenta: Love that.
Natalie Miller: You can decide to say, like, OK, wait, how do I want to feel? What are my values? Who do I want to be? So, it’s not necessarily aversive. Like, I’m not avoiding all of the holiday culture. It is appetitive. It is—I have an appetite for being different. I have an appetite for saying, look, I’m really glad to have this time off, and here’s how I would like to feel, and what I would like to do with it, right?
Emma Magenta: Oh, I love that.
Natalie Miller: Yeah.
Emma Magenta: I love that.
Natalie Miller: So, all of this, my dear listener, presupposes that you’ve got enough battery charge to do it [laugh], right?
Emma Magenta: Yeah.
Natalie Miller: Here we are, we’re like, OK, this is what you got to do. Just, you know, get your journal out—
Emma Magenta: [laugh]
Natalie Miller: —in the morning, and decide how you want to be and who you want to be, and it’s like—
Emma Magenta: Do some deep thinking.
Natalie Miller: [laugh] Exactly.
Emma Magenta: Do some thinking with that one bar you have left on your phone. [laugh]
Natalie Miller: Exactly. And the reality is you might show up having been on I95 for seven and a half hours with kids that are complaining [laugh], and you might not have the wherewithal to do that. And, so, priority number one always is before I can ask myself to show up in this much integrity, let me charge my battery.
If it’s sleep, if it’s alone time, if it’s pleasure, if it’s clearing out your schedule a little bit when the holiday train—when you start to hear it in the background, chugga, chugga, chugga [laugh], right, oh, let me clear a little extra space in my schedule because I already know that it’s going to get—like you said, right. Let me think ahead. I already know it’s going to get wild that week that we’re traveling, so let me in advance say no to a couple of deliverables, or clear my calendar, a little bit of extra space on my calendar.
Always such a delight to talk with you, Emma, whether it is in our daily Vox-ing or here on the podcast. Thank you so much for being here, and let our dear listener know where can they find you.
Emma Magenta: You can find me at hangwithemma.com—hangwithemma.com—or on Facebook or Instagram, emmamagenta is my handle.
Natalie Miller: All right, my friends, I was going to say “happy holidays,” but that’s kneejerk, isn’t it? What I really mean is fill-in-the-blank holidays for you. How do you want them to be? How do you want them to feel? Deciding that is the first step to showing up on purpose, and showing up on purpose is a huge contribution to cocreating the family that you really want. All right, thanks for listening. Bye for now.
[Music]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.
Like all good things, this podcast is cocreated by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.
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