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Tag: Holiday
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A 12 Minute Meditation to Come Home to Your Heart
Jenée Johnson welcomes us home to our hearts with a guided meditation to rest, replenish, and renew.
This is a practice to usher us home for the holidays—“home” meaning to our inner selves, with love and care. In her book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, Sharon Salzberg says, “awareness and love are qualities we can rely on moment to moment…They protect us during whatever storms or blow outs we undergo.”
Awareness and love are qualities we can rely on moment to moment
Jenée Johnson, mindfulness, health, and racial healing innovator, and the founder of the Right Within Experience, guides us in this seven-minute meditation. We will explore a HeartMath practice called Quick Coherence that helps to synchronize the heart, mind, emotions, and body. This practice can help us work on being present with ourselves in an aware, kind, and loving way to take respite from the storms and renew strength and resilience.
A 12-Minute Guided Meditation to Come Home to Your Heart
1. Please be seated in a relaxed, upright position. Drop your gaze or close your eyes and sit with ease. Take a deep breath in and an audible sigh out.
2. I invite you to come home to yourself, come home to your own heart. I invite you to acknowledge any sadness, loss, or uncertainty you may be experiencing. Hold it gently, and hold it tenderly. I invite you to acknowledge your discoveries, your hopes and passions. Hold them lightly and with kindness as well.
Welcome home. Welcome to our hearts to heal, replenish, rest, and renew.
3. Focus your attention on the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart and chest area a little slower and deeper than usual. Inhale to the count of five and exhale to the count of five, or find a rhythm that is comfortable. If you would like, you can place a hand gently over your heart. This can help you center and invite inner ease and coherence.
4. Meet yourself in a compassionate and easy way with language like, “I’m so glad you’re here,” “It’s good to be with you.” Stay with slow, deep breaths through the heart or chest area. Rest here.
5. Now, let’s create an experience of renewal. On the next breath, make a sincere attempt to experience a renewing feeling such as appreciation or care for something or someone in your life. Re-experience the feeling you have for someone you love, a pet, a special place, or an accomplishment.
6. Simply focus on a feeling of calm or ease. Stay with calm easy breaths through the heart and chest area.
Welcome home for the holidays. May you have calm in the storms, ease, and grace.
A Guide to Practicing Self-Care with Mindfulness
Making sure our own needs are met is as important as taking care of those we love most. When turning your attention toward yourself feels challenging, there are simple ways to move through the discomfort. Explore our new guide for tips, practices, and reminders on how to engage in self-care.
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3 Gift-Giving Tips to Shift From Holiday Fear to Holiday Cheer
Selecting, buying, and giving gifts to people we care about is one of the most important aspects of many holiday celebrations. But here’s the open secret of this holiday season: For many of us, trying to find the “perfect” gift is an exercise in frustration and uncertainty.
This time of year comes with oodles of pressure to get our shopping done in time for all manner of holiday gatherings. At its worst, we can unintentionally get caught up in a kind of competitive gift-giving, hell-bent on outdoing or out-spending everyone else (#festive?!). On the other hand, we may decide to opt out entirely in the name of anti-consumerism—and forgo the potential delight of these gifting rituals our ancestors dreamed up and passed down.
So how do we find a balance? How can we truly relish this season of generosity? Here are three gift-giving tips, based on mindful qualities that help reduce stress and add to the joy.
3 Gift-Giving Tips for a More Mindful Holiday Season
1. Enhance Empathy: When it comes to figuring out what to buy for that hard-to-buy-for person—we all know one!—an empathic approach may help. According to Greater Good Magazine editor and writer Jill Suttie, parts of our brain have evolved “to enable emotional connection with others and the motivation to care,” and we can cultivate empathy through tiny, intentional shifts in daily life.
These days, the word empathy is often associated with feeling others’ pain or difficult emotions like our own. Yet in its broader, evolutionary form, empathy helps us understand different perspectives—to take a little walk in someone else’s shoes. This not only leads us toward other helpful qualities such as loving-kindness, it also gives us a break from our more self-focused motivations (“I don’t want to be the only one showing up to the party without gifts!” or “I’m worried someone will think badly of me if I give the wrong thing”).
2. Offer Appreciation: Consciously thinking about the reasons you appreciate someone is another great way to shift into a more relaxed, flexible mindset around gift-giving. What’s one quality, talent, or goal this person possesses that you admire about them: Their sense of humor? Their love of learning? The ways they support their community? Their courageous attempts to veganize French cuisine? Again, this makes the process less about you and more about your relationship to the recipient.
A mindful approach to gifting places less emphasis on the price tag or the “wow” factor and instead draws on a sense of connection and thoughtfulness.
A mindful approach to gifting also places less emphasis on the price tag or the “wow” factor and instead draws on a sense of connection and thoughtfulness. As Mike Rucker writes, “A gift tends to be more beneficial when it is in true alignment with the recipient’s identity and values.” We don’t have to empty the bank account in order to show someone that they’re important to us.
3. Nurture Self-Compassion: Anyone who has ever wandered the mall (or scrolled through online stores) for hours on end knows that overthinking is the enemy of a happy holiday. Mental habits like second-guessing, demanding perfection, or thinking up worst-case scenarios can take us from overthinking to full-blown anxiety. Choosing to be kind to ourselves can take the edge off some of that tension and overthinking.
“Mindfulness can become an ally, fostering a compassionate relationship with our thoughts and allowing mental clarity,” writes Ashley Fletcher. If you tend to overthink your gift-shopping (or anything else), take a deep breath, acknowledge that things are tough right now, and perhaps offer yourself some grace, the same way you’d support a stressed-out friend.
However you relate to traditions of gift-giving, this season is a fruitful time to shift our habits. Cultivating a spirit of self-compassion along with empathy and appreciation for others makes it easier for us to truly savor the most meaningful gifts: connection, laughter, and gratitude.
We hope you’ve enjoyed these mindful gift-giving tips. For even more inspiration, explore our 2024 Holiday Gift Guide—where mindfulness meets heartfelt gifting.
With this year’s Mindful Holiday Gift Guide, we’re offering countless ways to share more mindful giving and joyful living this year. Discover unique, curated gift bundles, and exclusive collaborations!
Plus, enter below for a chance to win a special prize bundle of our most beloved mindful products!
Enter the Mindful Holiday Sweepstakes!
Between November 1 and December 31, simply submit your email to be entered for a chance to win a premium Mindful gift bundle that includes: