To say that it’s a busy time of year for most of us might be an understatement. The holidays can bring a special kind of stress with them. For myself, the combination of busy-ness and the short, dark days that kick off my seasonal depression can be fairly devastating to my mental health. Each year I get better at proactively handling the emotional toll of the holiday season, with a combination of exercise, vitamins, sun therapy, and meditation. I have learned to expect that I will experience some emotional struggles this time of year, and that self-knowledge has helped me to better accept my inner cycles; to allow them to come and allow them to go with a bit more grace and self-awareness.
This year I am trying to more deeply contemplate this dip in my energy cycle, to get to the root of why these feelings exist and how I can better live with them. During my journal write and meditation today, I came to the realization that part of the issue with me this time of year is that I am the least mindful in December. Most of the year, with fewer demands on my time, I am able to spend quite a bit of my days in that beautiful but tiny sliver of space that exists between no longer and not yet; right now. During the holidays, I am required to spend a lot of time in the “not yet.” I am planning meals, checking grocery lists, managing a busy calendar, planning out the gifts, wrapping, decorating, parties, dinners, and events… like most moms, I take on the lion’s share of the planning for the holidays. All of these things bring me joy. I like buying gifts and wrapping them, and I enjoy all of the special social times with my family and my friends. But being prepared for all of these fun events requires me to spend a lot of this month with my mind living in the “not yet,” constantly having to think about the next thing, tomorrow, this weekend, and beyond.
One of the best ways to quickly come back to the right now is to drop into your body. If you think about it, the term “mindful” is actually a bit misleading because the mind is quite often NOT in the moment, but rather somewhere else on the linear timeline. The mind moves from the past to the present and beyond into the future with such ease that it’s almost too difficult to pin it down into the current moment and stay there. However, the body is ALWAYS right now. The body, as a system, is constantly receiving sensation and processing it as it arrives. When a sensation goes away, it is simply gone. The body does not and cannot exist ten minutes ago or ten minutes from now; it only understands what is happening right at this second. So, in order to escape the constantly time-traveling brain with all of its attached anxieties, what we really need to do is become more “body-ful.”
Try this: stop what you’re doing. Sit still. Close your eyes. And try to feel what the air feels like on your skin. Is it moving or still? Is it warm or cold? What body parts feel the air the most? Feel the air as it moves in and out through your nostrils, as it fills your lungs, and then depresses them as it leaves the same way it came. Air does have a feeling, and it does move, ever so slightly sometimes. But you can feel the air, especially as breath. After a few minutes of feeling the air, open your eyes. Now, while you were feeling the air, did you think about anything? If you did notice thoughts, it means that you stopped feeling the air to have a thought, because it is impossible to focus fully on the breath and still have thoughts. See where I’m going with this?
Try another one: this time, with your eyes closed, gently rub your hands together. Let the hands feel each other. Is your skin soft or rough, warm or cold, tight or loose? Does the movement make any sound? Are there parts of the hands that are more sensitive and feel good? Feel every ridge and crease, as if you are trying to memorize the landscape of your own hands. Bring every ounce of focus to this sensation of touching and feeling. Do this for as long as you’d like. When you’re done, check in with yourself; did you have any thoughts while you were feeling your hands? If you did, you would have had to let go of feeling in order to do thinking.
This is where yoga comes in. Hatha yoga, in particular, is all about providing you with “forces” that pull you into mindfulness. Asana (physical poses and movement), pranayama (breathwork), mudra (hand signs), mantra (chanting or repeating affirmations) and meditation all come together as embodied ways to “force” you into the right now. But the term yoga actually means union, where you unite with your natural state, and while traditionally yoga is the practice of distracting the mind from its thoughts with asana and other physical practices, what if we could instead simply give up control to the body, surrender to the breath, and release into physical sensation? Instead of beating the mind into submission with a strict physical practice, we should recognize that being in and of the body is actually your natural state, and simply allow that natural state to occur anytime throughout our daily lives.
Buddhist artwork often portrays enlightenment as something that happens in the mind; beams of light shooting out of your skull, a thousand petaled lotus hovering over your crown chakra, waves of golden energy emanating from your forehead. However, I fail to see how staying in and of the mind, with its thoughts that so easily sweep us away, is the trick, especially when we have been given this already perfectly enlightened body; all we have to do is exist in it. Observing our physical form and listening to physical sensation is a direct route to mindfulness. This is why, traditionally, in yoga class we practice a series of physical movements before savasana (the end of class meditation), like cranking the dial on the radio through all of the static and tuning in to just the right bandwidth to receive our favorite radio station. Once we get to that sweet spot, the music comes in loud and clear.
My plan for the busy holiday season is to recognize when I am starting to feel out of control or overwhelmed, and ask myself one simple question; “how does my body feel right now?” I will use my body like a magnet, reeling me back in from the chaos of thought, and I will let go of control long enough to allow my body to pull me back down into my natural state. Even if I can only stay there for 30 seconds, and even if I have to do it a thousand times each day.
The reason wild animals don’t have anxiety and depression is because they don’t live in the mind; animals exist solely in the body, in their natural state at all times. While instinct may play a role in helping them store food for the winter or survive an attack, animals do not lie sleepless in their nests and burrows at night worrying about Christmas Eve dinner with their families, or what to wear to the faculty holiday party. I recognize that while planning for an event may be something I need to do, living in that event in my mind for weeks before it occurs is not healthy. I will make sure I set aside a portion of each day to sit and listen to my body’s wisdom, and be right here, right now, in this body, with this breath.
You are such a gifted writer! I love getting a glimpse into your thoughts and LOVE that you share with all of us.