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3 Ways to Overcome Overwhelm This Holiday Season
The holiday season can be a joyous and fun time for many, and a sad or lonely time for others. But regardless of how this season sits, it is almost always a time of increased stress and overwhelm.
With these simple steps, you can cut down your own stress and find peace of mind.
Get crystal clear on what is MOST important to you
With clarity about your values, you will be able to decide what you are going to say ‘yes’ to and what you are going to say ‘no’ to with greater ease and grace. If you want to feel peaceful? Say no to the four parties on one day. If you want to feel energetic? Put your phone down and go to bed on time. If you want to keep your immune system healthy? Go easy on the sugar and alcohol and make healthy food choices.
Volunteer!
Studies show that volunteering is good for your own stress level—as long as your motivation is for the benefit of others and not yourself. Find an organization you think is doing great work and carve out some time to help.
Set clear boundaries
With the onslaught of parties and events, visitors and responsibilities, it’s easy to get into more than we can reasonably handle. Don’t be afraid to say ‘no.’ My favorite tip for this is to tell people, when they ask me for something, is to say that “I’m not 100% sure if that can work for me; I’ll send you an email by tomorrow end of day to let you know.” That gives you a chance to actually consider whether it is something you really want to do, and also makes it a little easier to let people down gently.
Dr. Samantha Brody, author of Overcoming Overwhelm, is a naturopathic physician and acupuncturist and founder of Evergreen Natural Health Center in Portland, Oregon. Licensed as a primary care provider with extensive training and experience in both complementary and Western medicine, she has worked with over 30,000 patients and clients in the past twenty years. Her mission is to empower people to address the stress in their lives and help them to make changes that are in alignment with their personal health goals and values. She holds a doctoral degree in naturopathic medicine and a master’s degree in oriental medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine. She is a sought-after international speaker who educates lay and professional audiences on the issues of stress and health. Dr. Samantha writes for a variety of publications and has been quoted extensively in books and media outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and Shape. Learn more at drsamantha.com.
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.
3 Ways To Be Present This Holiday Season
Holidays are a mixed blessing … they’re times when we take a pause from our daily routines and share more personal time with family and friends—some who we love unconditionally, and those that we love “almost” unconditionally (as long as we don’t talk about politics, the environment, the world, etc.).
Here are a few easy suggestions to help show up in all holiday situations, while maintaining full presence and a sense of calm.
Seek Moments of Stillness
Look ahead to your holiday social events, then plan for intermittent moments to be by yourself for creating stillness, physically and mentally, away from the hustle and bustle of family activities (or the TV). It’s easier than you think, especially if you are truthful about its importance for your health with those around you. If they are curious what it does for you, encourage them to try it too. And after, be curious about their experience as a conversation-starter when you’re together again.
Seek Moments of Silliness
Calm is not easy when our mind is preoccupied and struggling with the chaos often found during the holidays. Luckily the human species is bestowed with the gift of humor and light-heartedness, which research shows is capable of overriding the mind’s obsessive or compulsive tendencies to overwhelm our emotions, and take us out of the present. Engaging in a bit of silliness is literally child’s play and an elixir to bring us back to the present that helps strengthen connection and community.
Breathe Slow and Soft
Awareness of breath is one of the most common techniques for staying present in our “moments” during the holidays. By simply making the sound of our breath soft and the breath’s rhythm slow, we create a more naturally conscious state of being that stimulates our body’s parasympathetic response. This releases the tension and stress our sympathetic nervous system naturally creates during times of anxiety or distress. Remembering this during the upcoming season is truly the best gift you can give!
Peter Sterios, author of Gravity and Grace, is a popular yoga teacher and trainer with over four decades experience. He’s the founder of LEVITYoGA™ and MANDUKA™, as well as KarmaNICA™, a charitable organization for underprivileged children in rural Nicaragua. Sterios taught yoga at the White House for Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiatives for three years, and in 2018 he was invited to the Pentagon to share yoga’s therapeutic effects with the US Marine Corps. He resides in San Luis Obispo, CA. For more, visit LEVITYoGA.com.
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.
4 Ways to Stay Healthy This Holiday Season
In the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, it can be difficult to keep your health in check. There are so many holiday parties, family gatherings and opportunities to overextend yourself. However, if you can follow these 4 simple tips, it will help you stay on track!
Hydrate
Drink plenty of water all day long. Choose water over sugary drinks and alcohol whenever possible. Keeping your body hydrated is a key ingredient in keeping your body balanced and in a state of homeostasis. Think of drinking water as bathing your cells in nourishment. If you’re at a party and everyone is drinking, just get a pretty glass and fill it with water and add a slice of lime or lemon. No one will know the difference.
Don’t Overeat
Only eat until you’re full. Did you know it takes 20 minutes for your belly to signal to your brain that you’re full? Eat slowly, mindfully and consciously, only choosing healthy options. You can treat yourself to dessert but try to keep the portion small and opt towards the healthier options.
Get Plenty of Sleep
Sleep is when your body rejuvenates and restores itself, so don’t skimp on rest during this fun (but often stressful) time of year. Keep electronics out of the bedroom and try to stay off screens for at least an hour before you go to bed. Instead, take a nice warm bath with bath salts and a drop of lavender oil. Read your favorite book or do a quiet meditation. Also, try not to eat 2-3 hours before bed.
Move Your Body
Exercise is another extremely important ingredient in staying healthy throughout the holiday season, as well as the rest of the year. Exercise brings oxygen to your cells and making you feel more awake and energized. If you can start your day with a yoga class (or even 20 minutes on your yoga mat in your home), it will set the tone for the day, helping you choose healthier options along the way. Even if all you can squeeze in is a short walk, you will feel so much better and less stressed.
Victoria Dodge is a cofounder of Yoga Salt, coauthor of The Yoga Plate, professional photographer, and cooking expert who has worked with companies such as Lululemon, Forbes, and Apple, as well as celebrity clients, models, and Hollywood figures like Shaquille O’Neal, James Cameron, and Sterling K. Brown. The Dodges live in North Carolina with their two children.
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. Use promo code HOLIDAY10 and receive an additional 10% off your order.
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Topophilia: A Love and Appreciation for Where We Live
Topophilia
Rewilding allows you to see your environment with new eyes, sometimes as if for the very first time. You become more intimate with all its life-forms and sometimes see beyond the visible, connecting with a greater spirit, or presence. In his book The Nature Principle, Richard Louv discusses “place blindness,” which afflicts people who live so much of their lives indoors or in front of screens that they do not look up to see the land they live on. As with a psychological state such as inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness, these people do not perceive what is right in front of them, whether that is a horizon, a rock, a landscape, or a tree. Whether they are overwhelmed, overstressed, or preoccupied by other stimuli, in effect they become sealed off from the elements, the seasons, and the real world of the living earth, and they lose out on the benefits of a vibrant and reciprocal relationship with nature.
Because place blindness inevitably leads to a disconnection with the living earth, it also leads to a lack of caring and interest in the planet’s well-being. Future generations will not value and care for the earth if they have little or no actual relationship with it. People will not work to reverse climate change if they are so rarely outside that they have no embodied experience of its reality. So how do we overcome place blindness? We embrace mindfulness and take it outside with us. The more time we spend out on the land, exploring and learning about the different plants and animals, the natural history and ecology, and simply enjoying and getting to know the contours of the living earth, the more bonded we’ll feel to the places we call home. The more intimate we become with the land, the more we’ll grow to love and cherish it. The word land can be a vague, general term, but as you get to know a place, you discover its individuality, its individual trees, stones, birds, and landmarks. Walking along a favorite trail as the months and years go by, I watch little saplings grow. As you walk, I encourage you to bring your full, penetrating awareness to the reality of life as it is. This kind of intimacy with place is as natural as can be. We’ve lost it only in the last hundred or so years. But we can get it back and be enriched again.
Some call this love of land topophilia. Every spot on a map has a unique quality and personality. Bioregionalism is a movement that seeks to understand the watersheds, geography, ecology, natural history, human history, and other layers of knowledge that make up the richness of a place. Climate change compels us to become more bioregional so that we can address some of the nasty repercussions of a society crumbling under the compounding costs of extreme weather events, food production problems, mass migrations, rampant pollution, and social strife.
Stewardship begins with you and me.
Tips for Overcoming Place Blindness
- Walk outside. Whether you live in a populated neighborhood or in a more isolated area, walk outside every day. While you walk, open your senses, connect with your breath, and pay attention to movement on the land and in the sky.
- Become an amateur naturalist. Learn about the trees, plants, animals, insects, and other features of the land where you live. Use field guides to learn what trees grow near your home. Learn about the wild edibles that grow near you. Pay attention to the birds. Are there watersheds nearby? Where does the water flow from? Where does it flow to?
- Join local organizations that support the land. Make friends with local conservation, land management, and other environmental organizations that are active in your area. Perhaps there are walking or hiking groups, foraging clubs, craftspeople, or other groups you can learn and explore with.
- Limit your screen time. When you are outdoors, set a strong intention to experience the earth directly through your own senses. Silence your phone and put it away. Resist the urge to capture everything with a picture and instead take mental pictures of what you see. Practice letting go of the need to document every experience. See if you can reconnect with what it is like to experience life. Slow down and notice, as if for the very first time.
This is an excerpt from Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature by Micah Mortali.
Embrace the Hustle & Bustle with this “Shake it...
Sometimes life is complicated, especially during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. We may be able to cope with everyday stresses, but when we have multiple traumatic events happening at once, we can feel frozen by fear and uncertainty, stuck in our painful circumstances. We may feel victimized and incapable of making a move. As our modern age speeds up, this feeling can intensify to the point that we make ourselves sick. What can we do when we feel so confused and empty that we become immobilized and exhausted?
This kundalini meditation is designed to help center your consciousness and channel all your confusion out of your psyche. You give your feelings of uncertainty, pain, and blame to the universe and replace them with the pure, clear light of your soul, accessing what was actually there all along.
- Sit up with your spine straight. Center yourself with your breath.
- Interlace your fingers in front of your heart with the index fingers pressed together pointing up. Close your eyes, focusing internally on the third eye point.
- Begin chanting the mantra “Wahe Guru, Wahe Guru, Wahe Guru, Wahe Jio” (pronounced “wah-hey guh-roo, wah-hey guh-roo, wah-hey guh-roo, wah-hey jee-oh”). Our translation of this mantra is: “As in amazement, here and now, all darkness is transformed to illuminating light in my soul.” Practice doing this chant with the following visualization:
- On the syllable of “wah,” feel the sound vibrating at your navel.
- On the syllable of “hey,” feel the sound vibrating at your heart.
- On the syllables of “gur-roo” and “jee-oh,” feel the sounds vibrating at your lips.
- Continue chanting the mantra for up to 11 minutes.
- Inhale deeply and hold your breath in. Feel the echo of the sounds still vibrating in your navel, heart, and lips. Suspend your breath for as long as you comfortably can and then exhale very consciously.
- Inhale a second time and again suspend your breath. Release the feeling of being trapped by circumstances. Surrender it to the universe. Surrender your pain and feelings of blame. Release your stress and your uncertainty. Give it all to God. Hold the breath for as long as you comfortably can and then exhale, still holding your concentration.
- Inhale a third time and give your life to God. Surrender. Whatever God means to you, offer your existence to that. Allow yourself to feel the purification this action creates in your psyche. When you are ready, exhale and sit for a while with the whole experience of this powerful meditation.
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from Essential Kundalini Yoga by Karena Virginia & Dharm Khalsa.
Karena Virginia brings 20 years of experience as a certified healer and registered instructor in the kundalini and hatha schools. Before her teaching career, she worked in the entertainment industry as an actress and model. She lives in the New York City area. For more information, visit karenavirginia.com.
Dharm Khalsa is a board member of the Siri Singh Sahib Corporation, the nonprofit overseeing kundalini yoga in the US since founder Yogi Bhajan’s passing. Trained directly by Yogi Bhajan, for whom he was a personal assistant for nearly a decade, Dharm has taught kundalini yoga since 1980. He lives in New Mexico.
Writing as Spiritual Practice
Tami Simon speaks with Natalie Goldberg, a writer and teacher and a painter. She has studied Zen Buddhism for nearly four decades, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh. Her audio programs include Old Friend from Far Away, Long Quiet Highway, Thunder and Lightning, The Great Failure, and Writing Down the Bones. She’s also created an audio program with Julia Cameron, available through Sounds True, called The Writing Life. Natalie discusses writing as a spiritual practice, what it means to meet your mind in writing practice, and her recent experience of beginning to stand in the role of being a Zen teacher. (51 minutes)
