5 Tips to Replace Manic with Mindful
Be Mindful – Enjoy a Calm and Joyous Holiday Season
By Cindy Griffith-Bennett
I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in a picturesque town called Skaneateles, where we celebrate the holidays by having Dickens characters roam the village streets singing Christmas Carols and handing out free roasted chestnuts! We love the holiday season! Nevertheless, when I was driving through town a week before Halloween and I saw Christmas decorations in a village home’s window, I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy; I felt panic! Christmas??? I’m not ready!!
The television is even starting the hype! This year there are only three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the stores are already getting ready for the mad rush! Good for the stores, but what about for us? We need signs posted: Warning! Manic, Mindless Shoppers Ahead! I doubt that will happen, so here are a few things you can do to bring more mindfulness into your life and help you to avoid getting caught up in this year’s manic holiday season rush.
5 Tips to Replace Manic with Mindful
Mindful Tip #1. Remain calm with an Attitude Adjuster Meditation– Before you go into a crowded place or start your shopping list, check in with yourself. Are you calm? Relaxed? Harried? Stressed? If you are not in the headspace you want to be, take a moment to remember a time that you were calm and relaxed. Remember how that felt. Feel that way now. As you go forward in your day, keep bringing back that feeling of calm and relaxed. Then as you go through your day, keep checking in. If you find you have lost your calm, take a moment to go back to that memory of calm and relaxed. Feel it again and allow yourself to shift back to calm and relaxed. This will keep you in the headspace you want to be without taking on the energy of everyone around you.
Mindful Tip #2. Stay in the Moment with a Walking Meditation – As you go from your car to the store, to work, or to the house, focus on the sensation of your feet touching the ground. When you start thinking of what you need to do when you get where you are going, don’t judge, simply switch your focus back to the sensation of your feet touching the ground. If you can get time alone to do some walking and practice the walking meditation, that is another way to bring some peace into the holiday season. Whether walking to the store or on the nature trail, walking meditation will help you stay in the present moment and not get caught up in stressful thinking.
Mindful Tip #3. Bless your event with a Blessing Meditation – Whether it is a family get-together or an office party, holiday events can be especially stressful! You can give yourself and others a boost by sending blessings to the event before you even arrive. When you are getting ready, imagine a time in your life when you felt or received love. Feel that love in your heart and focus on that loving feeling, allowing it to grow until you feel your heart will burst! Imagine that the love you are feeling rises to form a ball of golden loving light. Now imagine the event you are going to in your mind’s eye and with the intention that the love and blessings you are sending only goes where it is wanted, send that golden ball of light to your event. As you bless the event, see the whole room filling up with golden loving light and know that the love will be available for you and anyone else who, on a soul level, wants to be able to access that extra loving vibration! This helps set the energy of the event before you even arrive!
Mindful Tip #4. Shift your headspace with a Mantra Meditation – Sometimes we get caught up with the manic, mindless shoppers before we realize it. It’s not to late to shift your headspace. Try a Mantra. A Mantra is a word or phrase that you say over and over again. Spoken aloud or silently, words are sounds and sounds have energy. You keep repeating your mantra until you start to resonate with the energy associated with the word or phrase. I like using simple mantras like “Calm,” “Release,” and “Cooperation.” When you figure out that you have been taken over by the manic, mindless, shopper syndrome, pick a mantra that reflects the mindset you want to be in. Repeat the word or phrase over and over again. I recommend silently if you are in public. A mantra will help you to be back in your chosen headspace in no time!
Mindful Tip #5. Stop the knee-jerk reactions with a Review Meditation – Family events can be the hardest for us when we are working on patience, love, and compassion. Our patterns of reaction to family drama are so ingrained by the time we are grown that it is a struggle to choose new ways of reacting. One way to change this is to run past events where you haven’t reacted in the way you wanted to while doing the Review Meditation. Take a situation where you know you could of handled it better. With out beating yourself up, imagine the situation and this time react the way you wish you had. An example might be when your brother makes a comment about your outfit being a little tight. Usually you say something snarky back or just stomp out of the room. This time, as you run the scenario in your mind, you may choose to acknowledge to your brother that you have put on a little weight and tell him that you are working on not eating when you are stressed, but that you are struggling right now. It would be great if he could be supportive. Maybe that is a little unrealistic for your brother, so you could imagine yourself smiling at him and instead of being snarky, release judgment, say a quick mantra, send him a golden light blessings and offer a prayer asking that he find a better way to communicate. The goal of the Review Mediation is to offer your memory a different way to react. This might take a few times to actually stick, yet it is effective in forgiving yourself as well as giving your memory a new way to handle an old situation.
The goal is not a perfect holiday; that is unrealistic. The goal is to bring mindfulness to an otherwise manic time in your life by becoming aware of how other people’s energy affects you. Then by forgiving of yourself and of others because is so easy to get caught up in the manic energy of the holiday season. The biggest gift you can give yourself this year is to bring mindfulness into your day, be kind to yourself when you find you have lost that mindfulness, give your self some you time, and when you have done everything you can to make the holiday as stress free as possible, let the stress of it all go and enjoy!
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About the Author
Cindy Griffith-Bennett, author of Soul Soothers: Mini Meditations for Busy Lives and two guided Meditation CDs, all published by Findhorn Press, blogs for Huffington Post and teaches Spiritual Development and her meditation technique across the country. Living with her husband in Skaneateles, NY, Cindy has just completed her Masters in Consciousness Development where she found a common non-religious specific Mystic’s journey. For more information about Cindy and her publications, visit SpiritualSimplicityBooks.com.
