How To Overcome The Holiday Stress Cycle With Meditation
I’m thrilled to share that an interview I recently had with Forbes Magazine is now live!
In this interview, we dive into strategies and tactics for managing the stress of the holiday season.
The last six weeks of the calendar year can feel like being on a hamster wheel of never-ending activity and busyness.
THRIVING THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS
“Between work events, social gatherings, school functions, and family obligations, our calendars are booked from morning to evening. We move from one commitment to the next with barely a moment to catch a breath.
Time not only feels extra short during the holidays…our days feel like they belong to everyone else but us.”
And when we do have a spare moment in our day, we play catch up, making our way through holiday shopping crowds also looking for last-minute gifts, quickly throwing together a dish for a potluck, navigating the challenges of travel logistics during the holidays, and bracing for challenging interpersonal dynamics that inevitably come up during this time of year.
One of the benefits of regular meditation practice is that we can get ahead of potentially stressful situations in our day and avoid them together.
Daily Meditator vs. Crisis Meditator
With a regular meditation practice like Vedic Meditation, one can more easily adapt to change instead of being reactive to change.
We also get prospective about changes or challenges, shift our approach, and co-create solutions even before small issues turn into full-blown problems.
Sitting down to meditate after we’ve had a full-blown stress attack or fight or flight response, or as I like to call it, a crisis meditation can help. However, it doesn’t eliminate the actual stress and all the negative emotions that come with it to have occurred in our day.
We are after a preventative solution, and that’s what Vedic Meditation offers.
Strategy for Meditating During the Holidays
With a regular meditation practice like Vedic Meditation, one can more easily adapt to change instead of being reactive to change.
For this reason, our strategy is always to be non-negotiable with our twice-daily meditation practice. In the Forbes article, I give a few ways to integrate it even during a busy holiday season.
Your Holiday Tactic: Catch as catch can
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If you have 10 minutes to meditate, we honor that and go for it. During the holiday season, we give ourselves free rein to meditate late at night, on a full stomach, with lots of people around. Whatever it takes to get our daily practice in, we do that.
If you don’t yet practice Vedic Meditation and would like to feel even more resilient and adaptable through the holidays and beyond, click here to join me for an Introductory Talk.
I’ll be happy to share more about what I practice and teach.
