by Nina

From It’s a Wonderful Life

In the West, we’ve now entered into full-blown, end of the year holiday season that
is Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa topped off by New Year’s Eve. For many of us, this time of year is very challenging. We have too much to do. We’re traveling through snow and rain and crowds and traffic to get some place and then a few days after that slogging home again. Or we have to shop and clean the whole house and prepare for a house full of visitors. And when we’re together for days at a time with family members, old behavior patterns and conflicts can raise their ugly heads. Or maybe we can’t be with family—or don’t have one—so the whole season looks nothing like at all like a Hollywood movie. And yet there are always those expectations for having a “wonderful” time. So it’s no surprise this time of year many of us experience disappointment and sadness, not to mention stress and anxiety.

Fortunately we yoga practitioners have a whole yoga toolbox at our fingertips, so we can take some steps toward surviving these challenges with a measure of equanimity and grace. Today I’m going to recommend my favorite two-part strategy. The first part is
to use the wisdom of yoga to change your attitude toward the holidays. It seems that in great part it is our plans going awry or hopes being crushed that cause so much emotional difficulty during this time. (Guess what? This year my younger child had to stay in England by themself because the day before they were supposed to fly out to meet up with us in Austin, they realized their passport was missing. So, I’ve been dealing with the plans going awry thing myself.) 

By changing your attitude—which is what I’m working on this year—you can do your best not to get stressed out in the first place. Then because, well, some amount of stress is inevitable—even when we trying our best not to let things get to us, we tend to crack once in a while—that happened to me yesterday—you can use your favorite yoga stress reduction techniques to calm yourself down and quiet your mind.

YOGA TIPS FOR SURVIVING THE HOLIDAYS

 1. Consider your attachment to your plans and hopes for the holidays.

The Yoga Sutras tells us in sutra 3.3 that attachment to pleasure and aversion to pain are two of the “afflictions” that cause human suffering.

And it seems to me that one of the pleasures we become attached to is our fantasies  about how our lives will turn out (see Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves). So start by recognizing your attachment to your plans and hopes for the holiday season. And admit to yourself that your attachment to those plans IS an affliction. (As I wrote in Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves, I sometimes think we cling to our attachments in a form of magical thinking, because we feel as if holding on to our plans and hopes will make some kind of magic that will allow us to obtain what we desire.) Then see if you can work your way to letting go of some of those attachments. 

And maybe the discomfort we feel while traveling and while witnessing—or even participating in—family conflicts is pain to which we feel aversion. Can you try to shift your thinking a bit about whether the suffering these situations causes you is inevitable? 

As the Bhagavad Gita says, “When a man has mastered himself, he is perfectly at ease in cold, in heat, in pleasure or pain, in honor or disgrace.” And speaking of family members, the Gita says this, too:

He looks impartially on all:
those who love him or hate him,
his kinsmen, his enemies, his friends
the good, and also the wicked.

2. Go ahead with your plans, but do your work with “detachment” or “skill in actions,” as the Gita recommends.

The wise man lets go of all
results, whether good or bad,
and is focused on the action alone.
Yoga is skill in actions.

So take your trip, help with all that cooking, do your last-minute shopping, spend time with your family members or your family of choice, open your home to others, or volunteer to help  those in need, all without worrying about success or failure. This is the combination of active engagement and acceptance that we’ve been writing about since the early days of the blog (see What We Need to Practice and Acceptance, Active Engagement, and the Bhagavad Gita), which is the way to achieve equanimity in your everyday life. And equanimity is definitely something we can all use a bit more during the holidays.

3. Practice yoga for stress management to quiet your nervous system and your mind.

Reducing your stress levels will support your ability to put the wisdom of yoga in to practice. After all, yoga’s relaxing practices, including meditation and pranayama, were developed specifically to help quiet the mind so a yogic approach toward life would be possible. See The Relaxation Response and Yoga. For those who are pressed for time, here are a few suggestions:

4. Let contentment lead to joy.  

Ram, Beth, and I have all written about cultivating santosha as an important part of yoga practice (see Santosha: Happiness and Longevity, Enough (my favorite article on santosha!), and Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness). Santosha means “contentment” and TKV Desikachar defines contentment as “the ability to be comfortable with what we have and what we do not have.” Of course it can be challenging to put these wise words into action, so check out Putting the Wisdom of Yoga into Practice.

The Yoga Sutras recommends meditation, pranayama (breath practices) and detachment to help you cultivate contentment. And then there’s also this:

1.33 Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.

Well, that certainly seems like a good approach for the holiday season. So I wish you joy—no matter what your plans are this year.

 

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