July 2022 | Wright Foundation

Learn how to take a vacation so that you return completely invigorated.

The word “vacation” comes from the word “vacate”—to be empty, to free.

The ancient Greeks defined the purpose of vacation as one of healing, gaining perspective, and re-focusing our life’s efforts.

Epidaurus was one of the most famous Ancient Greek seaside resorts. Vacationers would ask their gods for healing, life-directing dreams, then sleep in dream auditoriums until they received such a dream to guide them in returning to everyday life.

Um, how many of us take vacations that fit THAT description?

NOTE: I meditate, so I am always seeking mini-vacations during the day to tend to and be with myself. But that is another blog.

Taking a truly successful vacation that leaves you feeling refreshed, renewed, and re-focused (even if you don’t get a life-directing dream!) is a creative activity with three phases: Preparation, Vacation, and Re-Entry.

Prepare, and You Won’t Despair

One of our staff just took a vacation with a triple purpose. He wanted to prepare for his state licensing, personally recharge, and decide on whether to get married. When he returned, he said it was the most restful, rejuvenating vacation he can remember taking.

What did he do? Follow these steps:

Think about the purpose of your vacation well ahead of time. Why are you going where you’re going and doing what you’re going to be doing? “To get away” or “Escape” is not a sufficient reason. Be specific. “To enhance my relationship with my family,” “to get a new perspective on my career” – are sufficient reasons.
Set specific goals to fulfill your purpose. Our staff person had time goals with his girlfriend, his books, and himself. He also set content goals. He identified subjects he wanted to discuss with her, topics to review for his exam, and concerns to consider for himself.
Discuss your schedule and come to alignment with anyone traveling with you. Share your desired outcomes and see how they can fit together.
Anticipate problems and make contingency plans in case things don’t go as planned. This is crucial! It can be the difference between a new adventure and a ruined trip.

Vacation-planning mindfulness is the difference between coming back stressed out and coming back completely invigorated.

While You’re Away….

Smile, relax, and focus on the goals and purpose you already determined. You’ve done the work. Now you can reap the rewards. Remember to review with your travel companions regularly. Does everyone feel satisfied? Do you need to revise anything?

Also, make a point to talk about how you would like things to feel when you get back. What feelings and inspirations do you want to bring back with you?

And don’t over plan! This will NOT be the only vacation you’re ever going to take. Everyone needs some unstructured, dreamy time to rejuvenate (and get that dream from the gods.) Balance activity and rest. Engage in new experiences, unusual sights and sounds, thoughts, foods, etc.

One of the reasons people like to camp, hike, and canoe is because it’s stimulating without evoking a lot of our unfinished business back home. It allows us to approach our world with awe. It lets us escape the person we were in the city and discover the person we could be.

Engage in some activities that will add to your life skills. For example, I used to wonder at my wife’s ability to sunbathe and read for hours on end. Then I dedicated one vacation to learning to relax. That vacation has stayed with me ever since and has served me well.

Anticipate your re-entry with relaxed determination to carry all that felt good from your vacation into your daily routine. Pick easy behavior changes you can make. Let these changes flow from your original vacation purposes and goals. That staff member I mentioned earlier? He returned more rested than ever, asked his girlfriend to marry him, and aced his test.

Re-Energize Your Re-Entry

Let’s say I’m going to go on a two-week canoe trip into the Boundary Waters. For me, the purpose of that trip would be to experience a little bit of fear—the challenge of using a topographical map to portage in and navigate the area, and the excitement of experiencing myself doing exactly that!

How much of that trip can I keep living when I come back so that I’m a little more adventuresome AND a little more mindful?

Do I have a topographical re-entry map to help me recognize the rapids and the places that are dangerous and where I need to pay special attention? What would that look like?

When we pay attention to our re-entry into our day-to-day life, we honor our purpose for going on vacation in the first place. As a result, we re-enter with renewed inspiration, rejuvenation, and an expanded sense of ourselves. And we can bring that to our co-workers, partners, and all our relationships.

No one wants to come back from a vacation filled with resentment for our life, exhaustion from an over-booked trip, or finding ourselves in victim mode for having to go back to work. We all know what that feels like.

Next time you are on your way home from an extended trip, try this instead:

Ease back in. Don’t let fear drive you to try and catch up on a week’s worth of work in your first hour at your desk. You don’t have to “pay the price” for taking a vacation. If you must, take an extra vacation day or come back early to ensure that the first day is not over-scheduled!
Allow yourself to focus on the rest and relaxation you got. Rest is the natural balance to work. Feel your gratitude for it. Share your gratitude.
Spend some time thinking about the successes and failures of this vacation. This way, you can plan an even better vacation next time!

Re-entry is about being able to be present with yourself, reflecting, and celebrating your life as it is, even though vacation is over.

To take an even bigger view, think of vacation as a metaphor for a period of time when you are more consciously and more fully present with yourself. Which is the opposite of how many of us think of it.

Instead of getting away, use your vacation to dive deeper into you.

You may be surprised how refreshing that can be!

We’ve all had moments in a relationship when we silently stew about something our spouse says. But does the silent treatment really work in relationships? Are we “showing” the other person how we feel, or are we just creating more of a divide. Here’s why the silent treatment isn’t the answer–why you should speak up and engage, even if it gets messy!

I remember one night when my husband and I had fought. I was SO mad, I stomped out of the bedroom and slammed the door.

There. That will show him, I thought!

It was winter, cold, and here I was pacing around the icy living room. But I was showing him, right? So, I kept pacing and fuming and freezing, all while he was warm and snug in bed.

But as I thought about our big pillows and cozy comforter, I got even madder. What was happening? Here I was trying to punish him, and there he was all cozy in the nice warm bed and I was the one who was freezing!

So, I shifted. That is the power of the social and emotional intelligence training we do at the Wright Foundation, and which my husband and I have been studying and practicing for years. I started to orient toward our shared vision for our relationship: to go deeper, talk about what’s bothering us, tell deeper truths, and work to understand ourselves and each other– and grow closer as a result.

Fortunately for me, our vision for US was, and still is, bigger than my foolish pride. I didn’t need to “save face” by continuing to stomp and fume in the freezing cold. I could simply go back in and talk about what had gotten me so upset in the first place.

What a gift!

Vision Helps You See Your Relationship Clearly

When I would give him the silent treatment, he said it was one of the things that would hurt him the most. I was punishing him without telling him what I was punishing him for! And in my heart of hearts, he was the person I wanted to hurt the least!

If I didn’t have my vision to orient myself towards every time I got angry, then stomping, fuming, and door slamming would have been all I had. And, I would have been too “proud” to back down and actually talk things through without a compelling higher vision to orient toward.

Every journey begins with a vision. When we want to achieve something, we often envision the outcome and work toward that idea, whether it’s buying a house, getting a promotion at work, or raising children. Nothing happens without first having a picture of the desired end in our minds.

When we begin the journey of a partnership, we can explore each other’s individual visions, AS WELL AS the shared vision of the relationship. When we align our yearnings and our hearts’ deep desires, we stack the odds in favor of the relationship growing positively in love.

For most couples, yearnings and unmet yearnings are at the heart of every fight. We often say that meeting yearnings make couples tick, and unmet yearnings tick couples off.

We all want to make our relationships tick as much as possible, right? No one wants a fight, but the truth is, seeking conflict SHOULD be a regular occurrence in relationships. Let’s not shy away from being ticked off!

Am I actually saying that we should get mad at our partners? Yes! Because we’re going to get mad at them anyway. Life IS conflict. So let’s get mad purposefully.

Being angry is simply an opportunity to speak our yearnings, our visions for ourselves, and our relationships out loud. To remember what is at the center of our hearts, individually and together.

When we can do that, our path brings us right back to love. And each other.

Is Silence Ever Acceptable?

The silent treatment is non-productive and hurtful. Think about it. You’re coldly punishing someone. You’re withdrawing your affection without telling them why.

The silent treatment, also known as stonewalling, is NOT a tool you want in your relationship toolbox.

Drs. John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute, talk about stonewalling as one of the “four horsemen” that can rip apart a relationship. In the New Testament, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a metaphor depicting the end of times: conquest, war, hunger, and death. The Gottman’s use that metaphor by naming the four horsemen that represent the end of a relationship: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

Not sure if you’re stonewalling or being stonewalled?

Stonewalling happens anytime the listener withdraws from the conversation and tunes out, turns away, acts busy, or engages in obsessive or distracting behaviors.

It’s important to recognize that when you are tempted to stonewall, you might be in a triggered psychological state and unable to discuss anything rationally. Think about it—you’re trying to get another person to feel as bad as you do by acting passively-aggressively.

What can you do instead of slamming the door and walking out? Have a Time Out! Ask for a 20-minute reprieve and take care of YOU. Love yourself. Go deeper inside yourself to know what is triggering you, what you are really feeling. Do whatever helps you feel more connected to your heart. Take a walk, read a favorite book, listen to a favorite song, hug a beloved pet. But make sure you go back to the fight or the topic within a certain amount of time–don’t use the time out as a stonewalling tactic!

This is SO important. Once you start, stonewalling can be a habit that’s hard to stop. Having an alternate plan to intervene with your triggered behavior is crucial.

But can silence in a relationship ever be acceptable?

When Silence Speaks Volumes

There is a way to use silence that CAN be productive.

This kind of silence occurs when we’re present. When we’re there to be a witness. To be witnessed. To allow our presence to speak and hear volumes.

When we use silence like that, we are saying that we’re delighted to have the privilege to be there just to listen. That we know that we, too, will be heard.

We are saying that we trust that each of us has everything we need to solve our own problems.

Marina Abramovich is a performance artist who spent seven hundred hours exploring this at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Seven hundred hours of sitting in a chair just being. Each day, she was present and silent while people came one after another to sit in the chair across from her. In this profound encounter of someone just being with them, beholding and seeing them, their faces filled with emotion–many spontaneously bursting into tears, others beaming with deep joy.

We don’t have to be silent for 700 hours. But if we could be willing to sit across from the ones we love for one minute of silence now and then, and take in everything about them without trying to change anything, just imagine what we might hear.

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Month: July 2022

How to Go on Vacation, and More Importantly, How to Come Back from Vacation