For many of us the countdown to the Christmas holidays has begun. The traffic is congesting, the queues are growing and expectations for that break are taking shape in our minds. For some this is a much-loved time of year. But for others, it's one of the most challenging - financially and emotionally not at all merry and bright. No matter which side of this fence you tend toward, here are some tips for staying mindful during this time of the year:

• Be true to how you feel - Maybe you miss your family or a grieving the loss of someone close to you. Sometimes the holidays can highlight what we feel we are missing in life, especially if we are separated from those we love.  Meeting how you feel, (the sadness, the grief, the loss) is the first step in allowing those emotions to pass through you. Whatever we ignore will persist, whether that's a task put aside for later, or an emotion buried that morphs into something larger and eventually more unwieldy. 
• Practice heartfelt listening - This is a time of year when we're often surrounded by friends and family we haven't necessarily seen for some time. This can be challenging as we come face to face with family expectations, how we want others to be around us, how they expect us to behave around them, etc. But it's also a chance to reconnect - or even truly connect for the first time. We often communicate to tell, to relate to - can we communicate to simply be with instead? Set an intention to listen wholeheartedly - observe your thoughts, judgements, beliefs as they arise. Ask others how they feel about what they're telling you and notice how they respond to you because of this. Observe the impact this has on you and your overall sense of connection. And then repeat step one.

• Ask what you most want for yourself - As the New Year approaches we naturally start to think about how we want to improve ourselves. Enter the New Year’s Resolutions, which we all know often fail. My meditation teacher, Dr. Richard Miller says, “self-improvement is a subtle form of self-hatred” because it implies you’re not good enough - that something’s wrong with you. Why not instead ask what you truly want for a fulfilling life? If you want to lose weight - what’s the real reason for that? What core value would be fulfilled by this achievement? Take time to connect to this essential mission in life (which in iRest® we call heartfelt desire). Let it light you up with purpose and influence how you interact with the people around you, even before the New Year arrives. You might be surprised to find that you’re already living it in a myriad of ways.

​Let me know how it goes!

​You know that moment at the end of a long day when you've come home from work,  you get to sit down in a comfortable chair, and let yourself relax? You take a long breath, a sigh of relief, lingering into your exhale.  

This lingering breath at the point of letting go is no coincidence. The breath and the nervous system are intimately intertwined. We know that deep diaphragmatic breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (a system that allows for rest and overall healing). In contrast, the fight or flight response of the sympathetic system becomes engaged in a highly charged situation. And in today's world, it seems we're asked to be "switched on" more than we get to switch off. This means that the sympathetic nervous system remains at a heightened level of alertness for longer and longer periods of time. Stress hormones like cortisol continually flood the body. And we see mental health issues like anxiety and depression on the rise.

An anxious mind = anxious body. A cyclical pattern of stress becomes the new norm: anxious thoughts trigger a spike in the nervous system, shallow breath, release of more stress hormones, decreased heart rate variability* (see below), less sleep, and an overall sense of less resilience until everything seems to get on your nerves, right?

All this begs the question - when do we get to reset? And how do we reset? 

Here's your breath. Have you met it yet?

Try this 5 minute meditation to befriend your breath (in any position that's comfortable for you).

• Turn attention into the breath - joining into it. 
• Feel the inhale and the exhale. Follow the breath for several cycles as it rises and falls in the body.
• More than simply noticing, feel the breath as sensation - like a tidal impulse (the inhalation a  rising, the exhalation a receding away).
• Feel into all the sensations that arise with breathing - at first perhaps gross sensation like the ribs expanding/contracting, the friction created by breath in the nostrils and in the throat. Feel the lungs themselves stretching out/shrinking back.  
• Then turn toward more subtle sensations of this rhythmic rise and fall throughout the entire body - in the fingers and palms of the hands, in the pelvis (as the diaphragm expands and contracts), tracing these feeling sensations all the way into the legs and into the feet. Let go of thinking and sense your way - perhaps asking, isn't the breath something the whole body is doing? Something the whole body participates in? In a way, the entire body and every cell within it are continually being massaged by the breath. Feel into all this as best you can.
• Every exhale, remind yourself to release, release, release. Let go of holding. Let breath dissolve into the space around you. Stay here, attending to this, as long as you'd like.
• When you're ready, slowly come back to the lungs. Feel the body and the sense of it contacting the surface it's resting upon - re-orienting yourself.
  
•  Take time to check in with the state of the nervous system now - notice how the thinking mind slows when attention is turned toward sensorial experience as we cannot think and feel at the same time. 

This simple exercise, done once a day, or even several times a day (whenever you catch yourself feeling tense, stressed out, or out of physical and emotional alignment in some way), is  a very powerful way of resetting the nervous system. Your breath is like a doorway into the energetic system of the body - it's prana, so attending to breath is a direct way of working with the energy of the body. All that's required is that you take an interest in it - spend time with your breath as you would a friend over a five minute coffee break.

What we pay attention to grows, so start attending to your breath by meeting all the sensations it creates within. This allows you to step out of the cycle of switched on, anxious thinking/anxious body  into your natural baseline of ease and well-being.

​Let me know how it goes!

I keep seeing an article from Scientific American pop up in my Facebook feed. The title says it all - "Negative Emotions are Key to Well-Being".  And here we are (in the southern hemisphere), moving into autumn when thoughts have a tendency, perhaps, to become a bit darker, emotions a bit heavier - not coincidentally morphing in this way as summer fades away.

Speaking from experience, fall and winter can be particularly challenging times of year for those who tend toward depression and for those who live with them. Over decades with chronic depression, I have often heard comments like these from people in my life: "Cheer up. You have so much to be thankful and happy for." Another favourite is something along the lines of, " Just think positively. It will get better soon." This advice, although well-intentioned, has a way of sending a different message to the listener - "You're feeling this way in life because you're not positive or grateful enough."  And so it becomes just another way that you feel you've failed and that you aren't good enough. Here's another "F" on your life's report card.

There can be tremendous pressure from friends, family and society as a whole to be positive. There seems to be a consensus that only positive thoughts are OK and only happiness is acceptable. Think about it, don't we want to help those who feel depressed by showing them how to be positive again or by showing them they have so much to live for? In other words, by changing how they are in some way?  We've somehow bought into the idea in our Western world that the negative is not to be tolerated, that it needs to be dealt with and buried once and for all. Perfection is synonymous with happiness. And it shows up in the small things, like having to put on a smile in public because only a smile will do. Or in the way that: "How are you?" must be followed by "I'm great. Thanks."

We all buy into it. We all want to be happy. This is normal human nature and there's nothing wrong with it. There's also nothing wrong with wanting the best for those we love. But, as this article is suggesting, we need to feel all of it - the dark and the light, the smooth and the rough, in order to really be here fully. We don't have to make these so called negative thoughts and emotions go away.  What I have found to be far more potent is the ability to sit with and welcome all emotion, all thought, regardless of  the ego's tendency to prefer one over another.  When I can be with ALL of this, feel all of this, experience all of life's ups and downs as the Presence it which it arises - then I am truly empowered. I am not overcome. Life is simply living itself through me, and I find that there is room here for the totality of it, just as it is. 
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