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3 Ways to be in Financial Integrity this Holiday Seaso...
In the whirlwind of holiday parties, gift-giving, and cooking, you can lose your grip on financial integrity faster than slipping on ice. But, your integrity is essential to your happiness and your self-worth. Here are a few easy ways to regain your center and empower your choices to give from your heart instead of your wallet.
Treasure Connectivity
When your presence is truly a gift to others, you won’t find yourself needing to overspend. Practice loving presence with the little interactions you have through the day. Slow down. Listen more. Smile more. Appreciate the uniqueness of the person in front of you. When you treasure connectivity, you won’t find yourself spending money on things that aren’t in alignment with your values.
Affirm Your Unique Values & Convictions
Speaking of aligning to your values … what are YOUR values? What do you value about the holidays? About gifting? About receiving? About money? Take a minute and write down your values and your convictions about the holidays. Read your convictions before bed, and upon arising. You’ll be more likely to live up to your convictions with money. And when you don’t, you’ll be very clear exactly what value you violated. When that happens, stop. Notice. Course correct.
Gift from Your Values
Whether you’re baking cookies or filling stockings, make each an act in alignment with your convictions. At first you may be aware of how your extended family or friends have different trends, values, or convictions. That’s ok. Notice. And be YOU. Be in your integrity. Make your people paleo gingersnaps or whatever you find nourishing and delightful. Tell your people why you gift how you gift. They love you for being you. And you being you will help them find their own financial integrity.
Cate Stillman has been teaching audiences how to create health and wellness through yoga and Ayurveda since 2001. She is the author of Body Thrive, and hosts the Yogahealer Real Thrive Show, a weekly podcast featuring dozens of experts in the field. She splits her time between the Idaho border country and Mexico.
4 Ways to Practice Gratitude This Holiday Season
The holiday season can be hectic and overwhelming, with many mixed emotions, from excitement to stress. It’s the perfect time to commit to a daily practice of gratitude which will help you experience more moments of contentment and joy and give you resilience to handle the many challenges (including travel and stressful relatives). And when you share your gratitude with others, you help them feel seen, valued, elevated, and help yourself feel more closely connected to people in your life. Here are four ways to practice gratitude this holiday season.
Say Thank You and Mean It
When you thank someone, be intentional about it and put your heart and appreciation into your words. Take a moment, pause, look them in the eye, smile, and say ‘Thank you’. If there is something specific you want to thank them for, do it, go the extra step, that’s awesome.
Daily Gratitude Bookends
Begin and end your day by writing down a few things you’re grateful for. Literally bookend your day with gratitude. If you’re not a journaling type, that’s fine—how about sharing what you’re grateful for with someone else, like a family member, friend, or co-worker—in-person or via text or email. You won’t just be practicing gratitude for yourself but inspiring them to do it also. Remember to be as specific as possible and don’t neglect really small moments.
Gratitude Zoom
If you’re feeling down or caught in a negativity spiral, pause and challenge yourself to find something you can appreciate within your experience, however small. For example, if you’re sad about being sick and missing out on what you would rather be doing, can you feel grateful that you have medicine or a comfortable place to recover or people around to help care for you?
Gratitude Antidote
When something stresses you out—too much traffic, an annoying colleague, etc.—use it as a reminder to practice gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful for whatever is stressing you out, but use it as a nudge to pause, take a breath, and think of something, however small, that you are grateful for in that moment. When you do this, you prevent your brain from going into a negativity spiral, where one annoying thought brings on another, and another, and another, until you have a really rough day.
Nataly Kogan is an author (Happier Now), speaker, and the founder of Happier. Her work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TEDx Boston, SXSW, and Dr Oz. Nataly lives with her husband and daughter in Boston. For more, visit happier.com.
3 Ways to Set Clear Boundaries to Enjoy This Holiday S...
One of the things that get us so stressed out during the holiday season is the Must Do list, the unending expectations, the anxiety that comes when we feel we’ve let people down. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The holidays can literally be Holy Days, when you feel the love and light of family, friends, community and the shared gratitude of celebration.
Here are a few ways that Energy Medicine Yoga can help you this season.
Knowing the right way to say “No”
You know you want to say No, but you don’t know how. Before you say Yes, and add one more thing to an already full plate, take a moment in silence. Tune in and see what you really want to do. Then take one hand and draw big figure 8’s all along your throat. This is the home of the 5th chakra, where you speak your truth. The figure 8’s will help you find more clarity and ease with what can be a difficult answer.
Keep your own energies intact with the Zip Up
When you’re around a lot of people, you can take on the energies of everyone around you and start to feel like you’re losing your own self. Bring your hands in front of your pubic bone, set an intention to stay calm and true to yourself, and sweep your hands up your body and over your head. Do this two more times.
Calm down your stress response with this ‘hug’
Holidays can be stressful, and your body will respond to that. You can balance the stress response with the ‘inner mom’ by doing the Spleen hug. Hug one hand around your waist, hug the other hand around the opposite elbow. You can stand like this around the punch bowl, and feel calm and grounded so you can enjoy the holiday chaos!
Lauren Walker is the author of The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription (Sounds True, Sept 2017) and Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice (Sounds True, 2014). She’s been teaching yoga and meditation since 1997 and created Energy Medicine Yoga while teaching at Norwich University. She teaches EMYoga across the US and internationally and has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Yoga + Healing, Yoga Digest, and The New York Times. She was recently named one of the top 100 most influential yoga teachers in America by Sonima. For more information, visit EMYoga.net.
The community here at Sounds True wishes you a lovely holiday season! We are happy to collaborate with some of our Sounds True authors to offer you wisdom and practices as we move into this time together; please enjoy this blog series for your holiday season.
To help encourage you and your loved ones to explore new possibilities this holiday season, we’re offering 40% off nearly all of our programs, books, and courses sitewide. May you find the wisdom to light your way.
Customer Favorites
Father Thomas Keating: Inviting the Presence of the Di...
Tami Simon speaks with Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk in the Cistercian Order who has served as abbot of Saint Joseph’s Abbey Monastery in Spencer, MA, for 20 years. He now resides at Saint Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO. He is the author 20 books, as well as the Sounds True audio-learning course The Contemplative Journey. Father Keating is one of the architects of the contemporary Centering Prayer movement. In the first of a two-part series, Father Keating discusses his personal monastic path, prayer, doubt, and how he has dealt with both little deaths and big deaths in his own life. (28 minutes)
Yung Pueblo: Becoming Lighter Through a Strong Determi...
If you meditate on the truth of change, your life can start to flow like a river, with opportunities for healing at every bend. This spirit of liberation infuses Yung Pueblo’s newest book, Lighter, in which he shares healing wisdom accumulated over his years of devoted meditation practice. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Diego Perez (who writes as Yung Pueblo) about his inspiring new book and the potential we each have to be part of “the healing generation.”
Listen in to Tami and Diego’s heartening conversation, in which they discuss the shift from focusing on survival to sitting with the truth, having a strong determination to heal, the difference between satisfying cravings and following your intuition, why power makes the ego so dense, how meditation can open up the concept of self, “structural compassion,” and much more.
This episode first aired live and on video on Sounds True One. To watch Insights at the Edge episodes live and on video, and to access additional bonus Q&A, please visit join.soundstrue.com to learn more.
The Art of Holding Space
Matt Kahn is a spiritual teacher and highly attuned empathic healer who has become a YouTube sensation with his healing and often humorous videos. More than 20 million YouTube channel viewers are finding comfort, inspiration, and relief from the challenges of daily life through his intuitive updates and helpful, uplifting, heart-centered messages. Matt is the author of the books Whatever Arises, Love That: A Love Revolution That Begins with You, Everything Is Here to Help You: Finding the Gift in Life’s Greatest Challenges, The Universe Always Has a Plan: The 10 Golden Rules of Letting Go, and most recently, All for Love: The Transformative Power of Holding Space.
In this podcast, Sounds True’s founder, Tami Simon, speaks with Matt Kahn about his new book and how it emerged as part of his own journey of healing and integration. Tami and Matt discuss heart-centered consciousness and “how truth moves,” the healing work of processing our past, how we are at once human and divine beings, gratitude for all of our experiences, speaking from a place of wholeness, the power of mercy, validating our own feelings, dialoguing with our fear, the practice of dynamic listening, a challenge for “advice-givers,” the difference between holding space and spacing out, and more.
