The Holidays: Request permission to retreat

Happy December everyone - you are all caring busy people, I would like to offer you the following food for thought for the holidays, and as always thanks for all you do:

Here is an excerpt article from an article (link follows below) describing the relationship between the Winter Solstice and our energy level:

In agrarian cultures, people spend the shortest, darkest days indoors by the fire, eating warm, slow-cooked, nourishing food and sharing stories with their families.

Doesn't that sound nice?

OK, snap out of it! The holidays are coming! Don't you have 100 things to do?

If the following describes your descent into the holidays, this missive is for you. (If not, congratulations! You may return to your natural Zen state):

An edgy feeling that surfaces around mid-October, grows throughout the fall until suddenly its early December and time to countdown to the holidays. A hectic Thanksgiving may kick off the season of stress, including rushed travel to attend the family dinner - a trip laden with too much food and too many emotions, the least relaxing four day weekend of the year.

For years I thought, am I just a grinch? Why don't I enjoy the holidays more? Why can't I be more "festive" like all the cute, happy shoppers in the Target ad?

This year, in spite of my ungrateful interior grumbling, for once I got an answer.

I woke up Sunday morning feeling irritable and annoyed for no specific reason, although it was definitely related to my To Do list of tasks that would ostensibly result in the spreading of cheer. My hippie church is warm and inclusive of all types, even holiday grinches, but I could not go. Even there they have resorted to circulating multiple clipboards during the service to encourage sign up for various worthy causes, each of which I "should" be supporting and guiltily pass on because my To Do cup already runneth over.

Instead I took my grinchy closed-up heart to yoga.

ah, yoga. It is the Answer precisely because it solves all the small problems. Here was the answer offered to my own little egocentric holiday bad attitude dilemma.

The instructor pointed out that with the approach of the winter solstice in this hemisphere we naturally experience winter as a time for drawing your energy in. If you look at nature it becomes so obvious it almost seems simplistic- leaves are shriveling, days are shorter, the cool air naturally leads us to fold our arms to keep warm. Our agrarian forbears (which in my case are not too many generations gone) knew this and would literally view our current holiday scramble as unstable behavior.

Mandy - the yogista - encouraged everyone to try to be more aligned with the season's natural rythym by the following general guidelines (what this looks like in practice is different for everyone):

• Guard against overstimulation.
• Protect your energy and be choosy about where you spend it.
• Disidentify from holiday tasks as a validator to help dissolve the guilt about making the shift. (this last from Kala the yogista wanna-be)
  

Below is an excerpt, (followed by a link to the rest of the article) that describes the timing of the holidays from the Eastern perspective.

The incongruity between winter's restful, introspective, yin nature and the frenetic way many Americans spend their holidays can contribute to seasonal affective disorder, depression, exhaustion, and other manifestations of what is known in TCM as shen (or spiritual) disharmony.

"Winter solstice, just three or four days before Christmas, is the darkest, most yin day of the year," says Cohen. "Instead of turning inward, we're celebrating with excess and yang activity. This artificiality creates stress, and many people dread the season as a result."

http://www.yogajournal.com/health/101

So whether you are a yoga guru or don't know your yin from your yang, the idea is that if you are subject to holiday stress you may be fighting a deeper instinct than just perverse grinchiness.

Happy holidays to you all, I know this won't make your "to do" list disappear, and you probably don't want it to anyway. Even at my grinchiest I realize many of the tasks and errands around the holidays represent celebrating love and connection. Just look at it as encouragement to be choosy about being busy and to make space for some quiet and restoration before New Years!

peace and quiet,

Kala