#45. Radiant Holidays, How To Stay Sovereign

# 45 Ever notice how family gatherings can make the most grounded version of you vanish in seconds? We dive into why that happens and how to protect your peace without shutting down your heart. explore how to stay sovereign and loving when family dynamics trigger old roles, and how to stop shrinking to soothe. We share three simple practices, journal prompts, affirmations, and a calming guided moment to help you hold your light through the holidays.
Perfect for anyone seeking personal growth emotional healing, confidence, and healthier relationships during the holidays. 
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Transcript

Welcome And Show Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes, but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers, and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said, When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change, and that is exactly what this podcast is about. Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose, and passion. Each week I'm going to bring you 30-minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies, and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in. Hit subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. Hey, happy Thanksgiving week and welcome back to Transform Your Life. Just Count Me In. This is Sari Stone and I'll be your host. To be honest, I'm doing something a little different this week because something in my life cracked open a much bigger conversation. It's one that I know that so many of you are walking through right now, especially with the holidays coming. I ended up coaching, I hadn't planned on it, but I ended up coaching this weekend. And one of my students had a moment with a family member where she felt completely unseen, second-guessed, misunderstood, and before she knew it, she fell right into that old pattern of trying to smooth things over, make everything okay, over-explain, didn't get any sleep the night before we met. And really nothing was okay. This person in her family has labeled her, and she hasn't given her a chance to see who my student has really become. She's living a life in a very high vibrational level. She's living a very love-centered, aligned life right now, and sometimes that makes other people around you uncomfortable. And they revert back when they get nervous to try to distance you so they can try to say something that might that maybe used to pull your trigger, or they definitely trigger you because those areas are still a little bit sensitive. They say when a wound heals, you know, you've got scar tissue, but also that area is a little bit more sensitive. And she thought, man, am I just gonna start the season like this? Uh do I need to just detach from this person? Like, how am I gonna deal with it? Because I actually was doing okay. And I said, You are doing okay. I know that she's not alone. Holidays have a funny way of pressing on old bruises like family expectations, old roles, people who interpret everything through the lens of fear or conflict or scarcity or anxiety. Sometimes it feels like you're walking into a room where there's kerosene all over the floor, and you just hope no spark flies. And somehow a spark always seems to fly. Today's episode is for anyone who finds themselves sometimes shrinking, smoothing things over, over-explaining, or toning it down just to keep peace with people who simply aren't at the same place and aren't able at this point in their development to meet you where you are. Now, there you are no better or worse than anybody else, but some people are just vibrating at a different level. That's all just a different frequency. And in this case, she has worked really hard to see people as just God coming through them and was upset that there was such a disconnection, and she wants to still have a relationship with them. I'm not sure that she will, but the first thing that we talked about was why am I still attracting this? She said, Why do I keep attracting this? Because we know that it's and I get frustrated too, and it's not new age guilt like I created this, but in a way, there's something in some way you're lined up with that, or you would not be attracting it. Maybe you just wish things were different, like if that person would just change, my life would be better, everything would be okay. Why don't they just change? And they're probably saying the same thing about you, right? And that does not work. So she was saying, Why did I even attract this experience? Not really in a self-blaming way. By the time we talked, she was looking at it as an observer, um, being honest, like a self-honest way. And what the energy in her must, somewhere in there, must have still been believing was I have to be small for someone else to feel comfortable. I threaten people with my power and my strength. I need to explain myself in 12 different ways to be understood. People don't get me. Peace is my responsibility alone. My worth is tied to being agreeable or easy. My worth is tied, and my safety is tied to everybody being calm around me. So here's the truth: you don't attract people who break you. You don't. You attract people who reveal that you're still breakable. They reveal your pain points, they reveal your areas for growth. It's AFGO, another freaking growth opportunity, my yoga teacher used to say. And family with all their beloved patterns, wounds, and fears are always going to be the clearest mirror. So there's also a pattern specifically that women carry, although I have seen it in men too, and it's called Men Didn't Attend. This episode was partly inspired because what I did was after I got off the uh phone with my student, I realized that my daughter Ava had an incredible podcast episode about not shrinking to Sooth. And that really inspired me to make sure I said this today, too. So, um, and that's on the Live Radiant podcast, and I did ask my student to listen to it, and we talked about that, and it was just a brilliant, brilliant episode. I've replayed it myself many times. Ava said something in her episode that I want to bring into this conversation because it's not talked about enough. We always hear about fight, flight, freeze, fawn, but there's another survival response that many women especially have, and it's called men didn't attend. You know when you're doing it, when you're acting or demonstrating with your behavior or thinking, let me fix this, let me smooth this over. Can we just please have some peace here? Let me make myself a little smaller so you don't explode. I don't want you to get angry. Let me keep the peace so that I stay safe. And even when we're grown adults, even when we're very spiritually work, when we're spiritually working on ourselves a lot, and when we're doing the work, this pattern shows up because it's ancient. It's in the body, it's in not just in your mind. This week we really felt it. She could feel herself just like collapsing inward, not because she believed her family's version of the story, but because her nervous system was still wired to soothe, to regulate, to make sure everyone else was okay so that the relationship doesn't rupture. Well, the fact is it already was ruptured, and it's like putting a can of fix-a-flat in a flat tire. It only gets you so far. It'll fix the tire for a while, long enough to run on it for a certain amount of miles. But if you don't fix the problem, if you don't repair the tire, or better yet, replace the tire, you're still gonna have a problem. And here's the wake-up call. That's not connection, that's just survival. Making things better at the expense of your own well-being is not peace. That's self-abandonment. We are just not here to do that. And if a relationship calls for you to do that for it to work, you know you're in the wrong place. So, how can you actually stay in, as Ava would put it, your radiance? And I love the way she phrases that, without becoming defensive or frozen or ego, or those survival responses coming up. Like it's more important, and I talk to people about this all the time, because right now, to be honest with you, I had years of it being more important for me to be right, and then I had years of it being more important for me to be kind, and now I just find it important for me to feel good. I figure out a way to make myself feel good about it and bring those thoughts around so that I can get back in alignment with my own best vibration, so that I can make good decisions, and so I'm acting out of myself, out of my highest self. So Ava talked about being energetically sovereign, not controlling, not withdrawing, not judging, not fixing, just sovereign. Meaning your peace belongs to you, your clarity belongs to you, your intuition belongs to you, your knowing belongs to you, and nobody, not a partner, not a child, not a parent. No one gets to pull you out of your center unless you hand them the leash. So here's three things that we decided she would practice. Number one, she reclaims her field. So be reclaiming your field. When someone else's stress or anger or fear arises, pause and ask, is this even mine? Because most of the time it isn't. Look beyond what's going on, look beyond the person you're dealing with or their inner two-year-old at that time. And it becomes especially amplified if there's alcohol in the picture. Alcohol is a huge amplifier. I think that's why there's so many more fights around the holidays, too. So if you find this happening, okay, remember, resist the urge to just make yourself right. Try to stay in a non-judgmental place and a place of peace, so that you just let the other person be. Just let them, as Mel Robbins would say. Because even if you've got a little bit of judgment going on, they're gonna feel it. They're gonna feel if you're coming from ego, and that's not even a place for this relationship to live at all. The other part of it is to, you know, a lot of times these people are gonna be in your life and they're probably gonna stay in your life, so just hold the vision of what you want, hold the vision of the feeling of you being you. And remember, if it's not yours, you can put your hand over your heart and just say, my knowing is not dangerous, my peace threatens no one, and my light is not something that I need to dim. You are not responsible for other people's peace. You are not responsible for other people to stay in balance. You are not responsible to calm people down or to get people back into their center of selves. You are responsible for yours. You can't do it if you go there, you can only do it if you yourself are balanced. So this one shift alone can actually prevent 80%, I think, of, and this is not data that you can Google, of emotional spirals. I'll say it's probably four out of five. You can stop stabilizing dysfunction. So reclaiming your field is important. Stop stabilizing dysfunction, and this one was so hard for me. You're not responsible for other people's storms. You're not here to hold the panic, you are not here to regulate their mood, you're not getting a paycheck if you match their energy or clean up their emotional spills. You are here to live from your truth. You are here to respond, not collapse, to stay open, not entangled. We don't need to shrink, we just need to stay in the love. So, step three is keep the portal of love open only through love. Sovereignty does not mean shutting down your heart, which sometimes can be your first instinct, like I don't need this at all, the heck with this. I don't need this in my life. If it's a casual acquaintance, I'm with you. If it's your family, unless it's a very toxic or abusive relationship, that's a different story. But if it's just family drama, family stuff that you think you can work through and still be in some type of relationship with them, as long as you stay in integrity with yourself. The more you stay in integrity, one of two things happens. Either you're able to stay in integrity and people stop engaging with you that way, they sometimes shift, or the relationship falls away. And that also happens because you're just not aligned anymore, and you don't have to create a fight for that to happen, you can just allow it. It means saying, I'm here, I love you. The only place I'm ever gonna meet you is in the frequency of love, not in your fear, not in anger, not in scarcity, not in our drama. You don't need to disconnect, you don't need to argue, and you don't need to defend. You simply need to take a deep breath and maintain your vibration at where it is. You don't need to lower yourself down to a lower vibration to meet somebody in a place that you have already outgrown, period. So here's some holiday season guidance. When families activate old patterns, holidays are like spiritual marathons, right? It's like a 5K or a 26K. So you're seeing the same people who knew older versions of you. This is understandable, right? Versions that you've long outgrown. And maybe they haven't done any growing, or maybe they've grown a completely different direction. Who knows? None of it is your problem. It only becomes your problem when they start reacting to you in a way that triggers something in either of you. So people may react to your growth because it disrupts familiar family roles. You're not the fixer anymore. Oh my gosh. You're not the peacekeeper anymore. Oops. You're not the one who absorbs their uncomfortable emotions, which means they're left sitting with them. Nobody can hand you anything. They are left sitting with them if you don't take them. You're not the one who tiptoes around other people's fragile egos. That can really tick people off because a lot of people might have felt better when you shrunk yourself. This year, you are not shrinking, you are staying rooted, you are staying steady, and you are, as Ava would say, staying radiant. You're staying compassionate, staying centered in love, and not collapsing. So here's your mantra for this season. I meet you in love. I will not meet you in fear. Let that be your standard and let that be the boundary you set. Let that be your peace. We have some affirmations for you and some journaling prompts, and there's also a guide that you can download. Please, if you're enjoying this, I'm not done yet, but I wanted to remind you to please, please like, subscribe, and download this episode because it helps the podcast. And I would love comments because I really appreciate your feedback. It hasn't even been a year yet, so I'm new at this, and I really do like it when people give me feedback. I do listen to it. Here are some journaling prompts. Where in my life do I still shrink or soften myself to keep the peace? And why? Whose approval would I like right now, even if it's unconscious that I'm trying to earn this? When did I first learn that harmony was my responsibility? And how can I tell in my body when somebody misunderstands or misinterprets me? What would staying in my light look like in this specific family relationship? And what is my responsibility? What's not mine to carry? If love is my bottom line, that includes me. What does love toward me require this moment? What do I need? What new boundary is asking to be born in my life right now? And who am I when I no longer collapse to soothe? What if my holidays were radiant? What would my most radiant self do during holiday gatherings? So here are some affirmations you can try for before and after family interactions. Um, she actually has some of these on her phone and she's got a screensaver on her computer. So I honor my truth without shrinking. My peace is not a threat to anyone. I am safe being fully myself. I release the need to fix what's not mine. I meet others in love, not fear. I stay centered, I stay grounded, I stay sovereign. I stay open without abandoning myself. I stay in love. I'm allowed to walk into any room, any situation to be my whole self. You don't have to shrink. You don't have to shape shift. You don't have to be an emotional firefighter in a room that's soaked in kerosene. Your light is needed as is. I choose love, and that includes love for me. I don't collapse, I rise. Others will meet you in love when they're ready. Until then you hold the field for them. You're no longer the fixer. If this episode stirred something in you good, that means you're ready for a new level of belonging. Start with belonging to yourself, subscribe to yourself. So feel if you have a couple minutes, this mindful moment, and just return to the light. Return to your light. Take a slow breath in and let it fall out gently. Place a hand on your heart. Feel the truth of you. Feel that steady, beautiful, radiant center that no misunderstanding, no old pattern, no family dynamic can ever erase. Now imagine a soft light around the center of your chest. Warm, steady, unapologetic. This is your true field. This is your home frequency. With every breath, allow this light to expand. Let it fill your chest, let it fill your shoulders, let it fill your spine, your whole body. Notice how this light doesn't push, it doesn't shrink, it doesn't harden, it just flows strong, steady, and clear. Now think of the person that's bothering you and say to yourself silently, I meet you in love, but I will not meet you in fear. I stay rooted in my life. Your emotions are yours, and my peace is mine. Feel the boundary, feel the clarity, feel the freedom. Now inhale love and exhale release. Inhale light and exhale heaviness. Place both hands over your heart and whisper: I am safe, I am sovereign, I am whole, I am love. I stay radiant. And when you're ready, gently return to the room. I wanted to share this roomy quote before we close. Out beyond ideas and wrongdoing and right doing, there's a field. I'll meet you there when the soul lies down in that grass. The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Until next time, choose you, choose love, have a radiant holiday season and count me in. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you like this episode, please let me know. Stop by at social media on Instagram or my Facebook page, just count me in and please leave a comment. If there's anybody that you think could benefit from this episode, please forward it to them. And I look forward to seeing you next time. We're all in this together.