Not everyone goes through it, but for those of us who are particularly keen at picking up the stress and subdued aggression of others close to us, the holidays can be a handful. This year managed to place me in a position that reminded me of the helplessness and frustrations I used to feel in my teenage years. A situation contrived and calculated from its very inception to undermine me. It shouldn’t have, but it completely caught me off guard and was absolutely successful in its intended effect of making me feel just horrible.

Emotions tell us how we are vibrating. The more intense the emotions the more certain are the future manifestations of their kind. Something important to consider is that from a Shamanic perspective, your emotions and your thoughts are not “You”. You are Illuminated Divine Essence and your existence here on Earth is based on the many levels of your wants, which will send out vibrational signals that manifest all sorts of aligned experiences. These, in turn, produce more vibrations within you that attract the corresponding emotions and thoughts. This is why it’s important to always have your goals and wishes in hand. Even in those moments of feeling quite distraught, we are focusing on that amazing future we want to bring into being. We don’t run away from the emotions or fight them, but rather allow them to flow by. In Andean Shamanism we think of them as a river and sometimes the river’s tide is more tumultuous. That is fine as long as we know how to keep its overflow under control.

Finally, once the initial flow of emotions subsides, now comes the time to reassess what happened and how it can be evolved (not avoided). People are endowed with free will and so their choices should be honored, otherwise we come into the arena of “manipulation” and that violates Universal Laws. When actions are taken against us, a wise reaction is to understand why they originated. Then we recalibrate and/or reclassify our behavior, so that whatever triggers the offensive behavior in the other party is not activated again. There is one last note I’d like to share on this, try to avoid making this personal against someone else. When this happens and affects you, in actuality it is pointing at an area in your field of manifestation that needs to be worked on. The other person is just channeling some shortcomings in your process of self actualization. This is also the reason why those closest to us generally are the only ones that can hit those trigger buttons. When understood this way, the unwanted issues with other people just become tools for our inner evolution. As a bonus, those same people that can be very challenging, later become wonderfully pleasant and undergo an evolution of their personality as well. As we say in the Andean Cosmovision: We are all connected, We are all One, We are all good!