A Mettā Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve as I write this. - That moment when so many of us are about to be pressed together. Around tables, into homes, into family systems and friendship groups. It can be beautiful. Tender. A genuine remembering of love and care and shared history. And it can also be the place where things rub. Where old dynamics surface. Where we feel unseen, disappointed, excluded, or raw in ways we didn’t quite anticipate.

I alway feel this time of year very poignantly.

Like a lot of us, Christmas has always been complicated for me. I can feel myself tip quite easily into the maudlin if I’m not paying attention. Over-sentimental. Over-raw. A little prickly around the edges. Everything seems to get turned up a notch, the love, the longing, the grief, the expectations, the quiet comparisons.

This year has been no exception.

I’ve been sitting with some hurt. Some disappointment. Some moments where things haven’t unfolded in the way I hoped they might. And rather than closing around that, or performing my way through it, I’ve been trying to meet it honestly. Not publicly. Not performatively. But truthfully.

Which is where practice comes in. At the beginning of this year, I offered a couple of sādhanas rooted in the Buddhist teachings of the Brahmavihāras, the Divine Abodes. It felt like a quiet inner nudge that had been gathering for a while. I can see now that I’d been being gently steered in this direction for a couple of years already. That nudge has pulled me into much deeper investigation. Back into the Recognition Sūtras. Back into the heart of Tantra. Back into this rich container of the Brahmavihāras, which has quietly become the through-line of this entire year. And I can feel it continuing to shape my work, my teaching, and my practice moving forward.

What’s become clearer to me is why mettā matters so much.

Mettā is often translated as loving-kindness or friendliness, but it’s not a mood, and it’s not an innate state. The Brahmavihāras are not things we simply fall into because we’re good people. They are cultivated. Practised. Remembered again and again. And the remembering they ask of us is this, we are not separate.

The reason we cultivate open-heartedness, well-wishing, and friendliness is not because it makes us nicer or more palatable. It’s because there is a fundamental understanding underneath it all that you are not other than me. That we are part of the same unfolding. That when I offer friendliness to you, I am offering it to myself. And when I withhold it from you, I am also withholding it from myself. This is the part that feels most alive for me right now.

Mettā does not deny disappointment.

It does not bypass hurt.

It does not ask us to pretend things are fine when they’re not.

It asks us to remember interconnectedness even in the midst of pain. To hold someone in the shared human and divine experience, even when their choices land heavily. Even when we wish it had been different.

That doesn’t remove boundaries.

It doesn’t erase discernment.

It doesn’t mean staying where we are not well met.

But it does change the quality of how we meet what’s happening. Alongside this, like many people this year, I’ve also been engaging with the idea of Let Them. I’ve found it helpful, and I’ve also noticed where it can feel sharp. The phrase itself carries energy. Sometimes anger. Sometimes force. Sometimes a tight, clenched kind of permission.

Without mettā, “let them” can easily become a defence. A way of hardening. A way of cutting ourselves off while telling ourselves we’re being empowered. But when mettā is present, letting changes. Because it’s not about saying, this has nothing to do with me.

It does have something to do with me.

It’s about remembering that we all move through the world from the centre of our own awareness. That I am not the centre of someone else’s life. I am not the reference point around which their story unfolds.

And at the same time, I carry something miraculous.

I walk this world as a unique expression of the universe having taken form. All the wonder, complexity, and mystery of existence has unfolded into me in this body, in this life. Just as it has unfolded into you. Remembering that is not about inflating my importance. It’s about remembering my own innate divinity without projecting it outward, without making myself the measure of someone else’s experience. Both truths must be held.

When I forget my own inherent worth, I collapse.

When I forget that others are sovereign centres of their own lives, I overreach.

Mettā helps me hold both.

So when I let someone be who they are from this place, I’m not dismissing my pain. I’m choosing not to calcify around it. I’m choosing to stay connected to myself and to the deeper truth of shared being. And this feels especially relevant at this time of year, when we gather, when expectations meet reality, when love and grief sit side by side at the table.

For me, this season becomes an inquiry it isn’t about becoming nicer, It isn’t about spiritualising the hard bits away, it isn’t about detachment dressed up as wisdom.

It’s about integration.

Mettā says, may you be well, because I remember we are not separate.

Let Them says, you are allowed to be who you are, and so am I.

Held together, they offer a way of moving through this season with honesty and softness. Open-hearted without self-betrayal. Boundaried without resentment. Connected without being entangled.

As this year closes, this is the practice I’m leaning into. Gently. Imperfectly. Humanly. Through Grace.