Beat the Holiday Crazies with Mindful Meditations
Channel: Happy Holistics
Date: 08/12/2016

Visit us at: www.happyholistics.ca

Here are 8 ways to beat the holiday crazies

1) It seems like Adult Colouring is still a trend and if you walk into any bookstore, you’ll have ample options for colouring books and colouring kits.  Here, I'm showing you supercoloring.com where you can download and print colouring pages at no cost OR colour it electronically on your device.  Colouring promotes a relaxed and calm state - but make sure you're not doing about a hundred other things at the same time or making it into an intention of “how-fast-can-i-get-this-over-with-so-i-can-get-on-with-the-rest-of-my-day”.  Unlike what I’m doing now, take the time to focus on the colouring.  I print some pages directly into my happy planner as a reminder for my-self.  

2) You can also download free podcasts from iTunes.  I enjoy ‘My Meditation Station’ with Stin Hansen.  She’s got an incredible Meditate-y voice and if you enjoy or prefer guided meditations, this might be a good option for you.

3) I also made a guided walking meditation video, which I’ll link down below.  It’s exactly what the title implies - we’re tuning in to 
* how the body feels in contact with the earth
* the movements of your body and 
* any sensations or even sounds as we walk.

4) As you can see, I prefer to walk outside.  My good friend, Trish Krause, always reminds her clients to spend time in nature as a practice.  It’s called “Shinrin Yoku”, or “Forest Bathing” and it’s an excellent way of connecting to our earth and promoting profound relaxation.

5) The Mystic Cookbook is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I’ve ever owned.  It suggested eating, cooking and if I recall correctly, even doing the dishes as meditation practices.  They say - and I agree with them - that it’s not what we do that’s important, it’s how we do them that makes it so.  
Compare the act of scarfing down our dinners over the sink to rush off to our kid’s hockey prac-tice to sitting down, enjoying the smells, the mouthfeel and the mangerie of flavours.  Like with everything else I’ve mentioned today, tune in and experience rather than operating on auto-pilot.

6) Writing or journalling is a good way to get all of our emotions and feelings out onto paper, so that we can release them from our psyche.  If you’d rather have a guided writing practice, the one in my happy planner is the Loving Kindness Meditation from the Mindfulness Meditation In-stitute.  I’ll leave the link below, and what you do is copy out a passage - this one encourages healing and compassion.  It’s about 3 pages long, but you can do a paragraph a day until you finish or whatever you feel like.  There are no hard and fast rules, just that you connect to what you’re writing.

7) If you prefer to focus on a sentence or mantra a day, you can do that as well - either written or spoken.  Sometimes I choose a self-love affirmation from You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay.  Every chapter begins with a short passage and an affirmation related to the chapter that makes you feel good.

8) Similarly, you can chant a meditation over and over again - either in your head or out loud.  Many people use mala bead necklaces that have 108 beads.  Start at the Guru Bead, in this case: the cluster of seeds with the tassel.  For every chant you do, you count it on the beads until you finish the necklace.  This gives you something tactile to focus on if you have trouble with a wandering mind.

That’s all for this video, thanks for watching and I hope these meditation practices really help you out - for the holiday season and beyond.  Comment below if you’ve tried any of them.  

References:

Free, downloadable colouring pages: supercoloring.com

Stin Hansen’s My Meditation Station: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/my-meditation-station/id123885923?mt=2

Walking Meditation YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o34LAIuM2Q8&t=8s

Trish’s website: http://bite-out-of-life.com/

The Mystic Cookbook by Denise Linn & Meadow Linn: http://themysticcookbook.com/

Loving Kindness Meditation: http://www.mindfulnessmeditationinstitute.org/what-is-writing-meditation/

You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay: http://bit.ly/2halRoV  It also come in Movie form and as a “soundtrack” - which I’m guess is an audio book.

Mala Beads - Mine is by Male Collective, but I don’t see my exact one on their website any more.  https://www.malacollective.com

Note: I am not affiliated with any of these products or companies, they’re just awesome IMO :D

Music: Eternal Hope by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution li-cense (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100238
Artist: http://incompetech.com/