Christmas is coming. Deal with it! Your yogi strategy.

Get your yogi mindset here.

Yep, we are officially in the rapids that are hurtling us towards Christmas and New Year, question is will you sink or will you swim? Ho Ho Ho… yeah, I know, not the most positive of seasons’ greetings (especially coming from a yogi). But let’s not kid ourselves…this time of year can be a STRESSSS FESSST.

Whether you’ll ride the yule tide rapids and reach calmer water has little to do with if you’ve got the buoyancy aid or a lifesavers’ certificate and everything to do with the answer to this question.

 Have you got the mindset?

Today’s blog is all about learning how to deal with ‘it’ and get out of white waters when then they threaten to drown you.

Want to know how…?

Thought you might. Follow me.

Before we get deeper into this, it’s helpful to know, and most of us get this by now (don’t we?) that just like girls have a time of the month, we can all naturally suffer from ‘time of the year’.

This should not come as a big surprise. Us humans are made from nature in nature – and need to get over this idea that we can extrapolate ourselves from that – as much as we give it our best shot with 24/7 non-stop living.

Your Body Will Give The Game Away

But regardless if you think you’re a separate object to your environment, fixed and solid (which you’re not, by the way, but that’s for another time) your body will give the truth of it away.

Here’s the  BIG CLUES  it throws up when winter sets in.

• Your mood darkens as your internal clocks adjust to the shorter days
• You feel mentally drained and less able to cope with setbacks and obstacles.
• You feel down, maybe disillusioned.
• Physically you are exhausted and struggle to do simple tasks or get out of bed.
• You naturally want to withdraw from life and hunker down.

Throw that in with negative emotions such as a sense of being unfulfilled, wondering what the hell you’ve done with your year, and whether next year will be any better… eek.

Oh, and don’t forget to load on pressures of family commitments, office parties, gift giving, and general people pleasing that this season delivers.

Not The Best Christmas Cocktail

No surprises that’s not a Christmas cocktail that’s necessarily going to warm your heart this winter…. Sad to say.

So, you need a strategy to cope with uncomfortable feelings, negative emotions, sadness and even the depression that comes with the onset of Winter? Here it is…my gift to you.

Yogi Xmas Stress Strategy: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Yoga brings us into a relationship with ourselves it connects the mind and the body through the breath which makes us way more aware of what’s going on inside for us.

The flip side of that is that sometimes we take a ‘look see’ on the inside and don’t like what’s going on.

We don’t feel good about who are, the course our lives have taken, or choices we’ve made and we ignore how that’s making us feel – stressed, sad, angry, irritated, frustrated – or all these things.

It’s probable that you’ve taken great pains to deny negative emotions in the past. In fact, you may have dedicated your whole life to supressing them (it’s fingers in the ears time – la la la).

Have you Built A Donald Trump Wall?

What I believe is true, and what I believe you know also if you stop and ask, is that the energy you use avoiding how you feel sucks away at your life force and prevents you from being your best self.

And my experience is that you can build a ‘Donald Trump’ wall around your feelings so the problem is not visible … but when you do your problem just lives within you… festering and toxifying all the systems in your body and creating little seeds of disease that are going to manifest in a very physical way, some day.

This simply won’t do. You have got to knock that right off. Agreed?

So, let’s knock down the walls you’ve built, take a good look at what might be ugly and move those feelings along baby.

Healer, David Simon M.D, is one of the teachers I was introduced to during my Perfect Health Training at the Chopra Centre for Wellbeing. I encourage you to check out his book Vital Energy which goes much deeper into this topic.

In the meantime, I’ve distilled some of his strategies and some of my own that can help you get comfortable with being uncomfortable and DEAL WITH ‘IT’. Your happiness and your right to feeling, vital energetic and alive are yours to reclaim, in every moment. Get to it and truly have your merriest of Christmasses.

Here’s your strategy.

1. Get still and ask yourself how you are feeling. You can do this in meditation, or as you practice your yoga.
2. Listen for messages of comfort and discomfort that your body sends you.
3. Identify the feeling and where it’s coming from. Use your physiology to bring the feelings up, and see them for what they truly are, feelings.
4. Understand you have choices. 1. To change the feeling. 2. Release it . 3. Continue to suffer. (Once you make your choices conscious, it just seems plain daft to stay suffering).
5. Visualise releasing these feelings as you move through your practice. Twists are great for detoxifying the body. Make yourself big and expansive and ask yourself how big can I get to hold all that I feel. Find spaces in the poses.
6. Create a ritual release. Write a letter, draw a picture, take a photo and empower that with the authority to get rid of the feelings that came up. Burn the object, flush it down the toilet, tie it to a rock and chuck it in a lake.

When you start to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and releasing feelings that don’t serve you, you increase your ability to deal with all kinds of situations and challenges. You find ways to turn your own frowns upside down, and stop waiting for life to give you a happy pill. You are your own best medicine, and you can give yourself a dose of vitality and do yoga (and meditate).

I hope you enjoyed this training. If you need more help with shifting negative emotions check out my Perfect Health Programme here (a possible gift to yourself or someone you love perhaps). Feel free to call me with questions.

I’ll be back with more yoga practices, tips and tools next week but keep checking out my Facebook page @yogalocal and Instagram @yogalocaluk for more insights and inspiration on warding off the winter blues.

Thanks for showing up, keep doing the work.

Until next time. Namaste

Josie x