For many people, the holiday season carries a bittersweet quality—moments of warmth mixed with pressure, expectation, and emotional strain. The weight of family expectations, financial stress, loneliness, old patterns, and the year-end reckoning with what has or hasn’t happened can make December one of the most difficult stretches of the year. Disrupted routines and the cultural insistence on togetherness often amplify feelings of stress, sadness, or disconnection. Instead of ease, the season can feel like a convergence of emotional weather systems.
In “What to Do About Christmas?” Ken uses the three marks of existence—impermanence, suffering, and non-self—to illuminate the emotional turbulence of the season. He begins with impermanence, noting how seasonal cycles prompt reflection, self-evaluation, regret, and disappointment. Ken offers guided meditations on both regret and accomplishment, emphasising that fully experiencing sensations, emotions, and stories in the body allows these experiences to complete themselves instead of lingering.
Turning to suffering, he reframes it as the universal struggle to get emotional needs met—and the futility of trying to control what we feel. Emotional freedom arises not through control but through experiencing emotions directly. Ken introduces taking and sending (tonglen) as a practice well-suited to family tensions: breathing in others’ painful feelings as black smoke and breathing out one’s own ease as moonlight. This practice undermines self-cherishing and opens us to the full complexity of shared emotional life.
NOTE: Since visualisation is not a part of my experience, on the in-breath, I feel the weight, tightness, or contraction of difficult emotions. On the out-breath, I sense whatever ease, warmth, or clarity is present and feel it radiating outwards. A simple phrase can help: in-breath: “feeling this”; out-breath: “offering ease.” This is tonglen without imagery—direct, embodied, and complete.
Finally, addressing non-self, Ken suggests entering challenging holiday situations with a clear intention, because without intention, reactivity easily sweeps us away. Ken encourages us to dig beneath surface motivations until we find a deeply felt, honest intention. This clarity shifts experience from “something happening to me” to “I am in this,” enabling genuine presence and connection to arise.
Listen to the whole talk if you can. It's a great way to spend 40 mins.