The Meditation Guide for Spending the Holiday with Your Family

If you think you’re so enlightened, go spend a week with your family.

— Ram Dass

Unlike your religious community, your book club, or your friend group, you don’t get to pick which family you participate in. You’re born into it and it’s yours until the moment you die. Some of us couldn’t imagine not speaking with our family every week, while others are far removed from engaging them. The extent to which we want to interact with our family, and how we define it, is up to each of us, but it’s a group we can’t really avoid participating in, one way or another.

There’s a popular television show called Modern Family. It depicts the antics of one large family that consists of a number of iterations: the grandfather/father who is on his second marriage and has a stepson and a son in that second marriage, in addition to a daughter, who is part of the stereotypical “nuclear family,” as she is married to a man and they have three children together, and a son, who is married to another man and has adopted a child.

The basic premise of the show (and my long-winded explanation of it) shows that these days family is what we make of it; it’s not all who came out of whose vagina but is more fluid than that. The etiquette expert Millicent Fenwick, way back in 1948, defined the word household as “a unit, a group of people joined together, living under the same roof.” I like this way of thinking of a household, because some of us may consider our…