It’s 4pm on Christmas Day. The presents are open. The lunch is done. The prawn shells are in the bin. The salads are wilting on the bench. The aircon’s been running flat-out for six hours.
You’re outside or you’re inside or you’re somewhere in between. The kids are in the pool or watching something or fighting. The cousins are on the deck. Your mum is asleep on the couch under the fan.
You’ve got six hours of daylight left.
The festive part of the day, the bit that everyone’s been preparing for since November, is over. What’s left is the long arvo of a hot Australian Christmas, which doesn’t have a script.
The quiet has a particular shape. It isn’t peaceful, exactly. It isn’t disappointed either. It’s a thing that arrives every year and gets noticed by every adult in the room and never quite gets named, because naming it would be a kind of churlishness that nobody wants to be guilty of on Christmas Day.
You love the day. You’re with your family. None of that cancels out the small undertow most adults in the room are also carrying, which the day doesn’t have a vocabulary for.
What the Cards Don’t Show
The festive Australian Christmas is famously not-quite-the-image. The image - the one in the cards, the one in the films, the one your subconscious has been using as the measure since you were small - is northern hemisphere. Snow. Cold. A house that’s warm against weather that isn’t warm. A fire. A roast that makes sense given the temperature outside.
Yours is on a deck in Brisbane or a backyard in Adelaide or a unit balcony in Sydney with 35°C of late-afternoon heat and a half-eaten pavlova going soft in the kitchen.
It’s a real Christmas. It’s beautiful in its own particular Australian way. The kids will remember the pool and the prawns and the long arvo with their cousins.
It’s also a Christmas that operates in a kind of unspoken parallel with a different Christmas that nobody quite gets, which is the one your nervous system was set up to expect by every Christmas advertisement, every Christmas film, every Christmas carol you ever heard as a kid. None of that imagery features 35°C. Your body, on Christmas Day, is doing a small ongoing translation that you don’t quite notice.
The other thing the day carries is the absences. The seat at the table that’s empty this year. The person you used to ring on Christmas morning who isn’t there to ring anymore. The version of your family that the day is missing, and that the festive structure of the day doesn’t quite have room to acknowledge.
You feel them anyway. Everyone does. Nobody says.
Where the Loneliness Actually Lives
You’ll have tried things over the years. The “I’m just going to enjoy the day.” The extra glass of wine to take the edge off. The phone call to the person who can’t be there. Some of it has helped at the surface. None of it has reached the layer where the day’s particular quiet is being held.
That’s not a failure of those strategies. They’re working the conscious level - about five per cent of what’s running in your head at any given moment. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious. And the subconscious on Christmas Day has been doing the running of a quiet parallel program for years.
For a lot of Australians on Christmas afternoon, the subconscious script runs something like: Don’t make it about you. Everyone’s having a nice time. Other people have it worse. Be grateful. You’re meant to be happy.
It runs as background. It shows up as the slight tension when someone says “isn’t this lovely” and you say yeah, even though some part of you is somewhere else for a second. It’s the reflex to take a third helping you didn’t want. It’s the way you find yourself at 9pm slightly heavier than you started the day, despite the fact that the day was, by every external measure, fine.
The conscious-level corrections don’t reach that script. The script is operating at the depth the body lives at, and the conscious mind has the wrong kind of access to it.
What the Method Reaches
Why does deciding to be present this year not change the afternoon? Why does the wine work for an hour and then stop? Because the undertow is operating at a layer where decisions about wine and presence don’t reach. The conscious version of approach-the-day-differently lives at one altitude. The carrying that makes the day strange lives at another.
Inner Influencing is a way of writing instructions to the altitude underneath. It does not require cooler weather, less family pressure, or a different cultural script. It updates the subconscious filing that makes Christmas afternoon feel like that, in conditions that are not going to change.
The instruction has to be structured so the subconscious treats it as an instruction and not as more conscious mental chatter. A trigger phrase signals the distinction: “Purple Cow.” Odd by design. The oddness is the part that gets through. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the small undertow I’ve been carrying through Australian Christmas Days that has nowhere to go, the held tension between the day I’m having and the day I’d been quietly told to expect, and the loneliness that arrives in the long arvo and that the day doesn’t have a vocabulary for, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that being grateful for the day means not feeling what I’m feeling on the day, that acknowledging the absences would ruin it, that other people having it harder cancels out what I’m carrying, and the conviction that the only acceptable Christmas Day mood is the one in the cards, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to be present in the Australian Christmas I actually have, to acknowledge what’s true about the day without it taking away from what’s beautiful about it, and to let the long arvo be what it is rather than what the cards said it should be, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Settled
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A bit of slack around the chest, where the Christmas undertow tends to sit. A faint sense, even small, of permission to feel what you actually feel on the day. Whatever happened, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the parallel program has been running.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the held translation between the day you have and the day you’d been told to expect, a slightly quieter version of the running undertow.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original images of Christmas you absorbed before you could weigh in, the family stories about what the day is supposed to feel like, the inheritance of a country whose Christmas has always run on a parallel calendar. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been doing the long arvo for so many years they’ve stopped distinguishing the undertow from the day.
The day is one thing. The undertow is another. The undertow is updateable.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.