Bless Away your Holiday Stress

Bless Away Your Holiday Stress

By Maria Mar

The tree is up. The lights are on. The music plays. The Holidays are here, full of bright colors, smiles and good spirits. So why do you feel so blah? You go along and do the deeds, but your heart is not in it.

Or perhaps you are feeling quiet the opposite, like a renegade train running so fast that it is missing the Holiday station! Could it be that you are speeding past the Holiday Spirit? Read on and find out what may be causing your Holiday Stress and how to bless it away.

There are four main sources of Holiday Blues or Stress:

• Broken Heart,
• Broken Back,
• Broken Bag or
• Broken compass.

Let’s take a quick look at each:

Broken Heart

You have experienced an emotional loss. You got divorced or you are remembering a loved one that died recently or during the Christmas season. Basically, you are grieving.

Broken Back

You are the victim of too many pressures, exhaustion or emotional stress. You are rushing around so much that you can’t catch your breath long enough to smell the scent of the Holidays.

Broken Bag

You are jobless, suffered financial cuts or in some other way are experiencing a financial crisis that makes it hard or impossible to shop, give, entertain or celebrate the Holidays as you’ve done
before.

Broken Compass

Something is askew. You can’t find your joy. You feel depleted, empty. You know you should be happy, but you can’t celebrate. You feel that you have lost your Personal Compass.

If any of this is true for you or for someone dear to you, then there is one powerful way in which you can release the burden that is keeping you from celebrating the Holidays. This path is not easy, but it is powerful enough to turn drab blue into bright red and bring the Holidays alive again. It is the path of Self-love.

Self-love is many things to many people. It is different in each situation, and it can be a tall order to tackle. But here we are going to focus on four simple self-love approaches, one for each of the problems above. Each approach has one thing in common: a blessing.

Choose the option you need:

• Solution for the Broken Heart

• Solution for the Broken Back

• Solution for the Broken Bag

• Solution for the Broken Compass

The Wounded Sacred Heart

The sacred medicine of the grieving heart is called the Sacred Wounded Heart. This is often represented by the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Wounded Healer or the Broken Heart of the Spiritual Warrior. The spiritual principle in your broken heart reminds you that new birth pushes through old obstacles, like a green shoot breaking ground. The act that allows this transformation to take place is to feel your pain from a place of courageous surrendering.

Here’s how to do this.

1. Embrace your grief during a clearly delimited time
   each day. Observe when the sadness most often overcomes you and give yourself permission to cry at that time.

2. Cry or lament fully and completely, surrendering
   to your pain. Do not hold back. Wale or howl if you need to.

3. Give yourself ample time, an hour perhaps.
   More if you need it. It will eventually decrease and you can adjust the time for your needs.

4. When the time for crying is over each day, shift
   to your Spiritual Warrior. Take a hold of your faith. Seating in the consciousness of your immortality, release the belief that you have lost this person.

5. Then recite this blessing below. (You may write it down and place it on a prominent place.)

6. Live up to this blessing for the rest of the day until the next time to grieve.

7. Do not push yourself to be happy in the way we usually define it. Rather, live from the love emanating from your soul, love for yourself and all of creation.

8. Create an altar or corner where you can each day
   honor the departed in whatever ways feel appropriate. Recognize that s/he also has an immortal soul and is still present in your life, but without the flesh dress, as a being of pure light.

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The Dance of Stillness

The reason we push ourselves to do so many things, the reason why our to-do list seems to grow and we never feel we are doing enough, is because we confuse our doing with our being. If we are not still
long enough; if we are not quiet long enough to connect to our soul and our Core Self; then we begin to live as human doings, instead of human beings.

The Medicine for this is the Dance of Stillness. There is a place within you in which you can inhabit the stillness between each movement, the silence between each sound. This place is called The Dance of Stillness.

This dance begins in what I call Sky Mind. You get there by releasing your logical, small, Ego Mind. This is the mind that holds the to-do list and identifies with what you do.

The Dance of Stillness is a way of living that requires years of discipline. But you can start right now and feel the benefits immediately. You will have to re-adjust yourself during the day, as
you forget. But each time you go back to the Dance of Stillness, you are training your mind to be Sky Mind and yourself to live from that peaceful place.

Here is a quick start-up that involves five daily actions:

1. Begin each day with 5 minutes of deep breathing
   and stilling the mind. Concentrate on the inhalation traveling to your belly and then the rest of your body and in the exhalation being as slow as possible.

2. Make a commitment to shorten your activity list by
   half, and to do things in order of priority and ease of flow. Every time you finish doing one thing, bless yourself and all people involved, receive its goodness in your heart and then release any further worry, thought or time investment on this item.

3. Go straight to the source of love. If you have a physical or emotional “broken back” –meaning that you are sick, depressed, injured, physically challenged or overwhelmed, release the to-do list completely. Meditate on how you can flow your love easily, effortlessly, and to whom you want to direct it, and then focus on that, disregarding the cosmetic details that we so often confuse with love.

4. Take a nap after lunch or when you get home.
   Take a 15 minute nap in the middle of the day. Lay down. You don’t have to fall asleep. Simply close your eyes, let go of worry and breathe deeply, surrendering your burden, your stress and even the task of keeping your body upright to Earth Mother.

5. Every night, release the obsession with controlling everything, and hand it over to God. Ask Divine Will to carry your burden for you. Say this blessing:

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The Alchemist Touch

This recession is to our national being as a crisis is to our personal being. A crisis is that moment when a door that had been hidden, its iron hinges rusting, its paint blending with the frame, until we saw no door, only a wall –suddenly opens.

That creaking, trembling door opening looks like the wall is crumbling down or there’s an earthquake. But it’s really a new path
opening to us.

The earth-shaking change may seem to be an external circumstance that is happening TO you, something life is doing to you, without your consent. But it is something that happens deeply and firstly in your psyche.

When the hinges begin to move against the rust and the old, closed door pulls back from the frame, it cries.You get scared. You feel like your life is breaking.

This recession may have left you penniless, jobless or in a very tight –even scary– financial situation. Still, the best question is not “how much I can afford to spend?”

The best questions are:

• “What values can I activate to scrub off the rust from the hinges of this old door?(the old hidden limitations)
  
• How is this old door opening an opportunity for me now?, and
• Where could this opening door lead?”

As long as you keep trying to spend as you’ve done before or as you think you have to, you will feel deprived and disempowered. You will see the crisis as a thief, not a door. You are placing your attention on the lack. You are insisting on keeping things as they were.

But crisis is a demand and a bridge to change. The Universe is no longer asking you to change. It is demanding that you do. If you trust that the Universe is your ally, that it is your Cosmic Self, then this demand is a bridge to a new, better life. What to do? Become an Alchemist. Use this alchemical formula.

1. Release this stress by recognizing the gold in
   this leaden situation. What seems like a financial crisis may be a golden opportunity to reclaim the true spirit of Christmas. Make this holiday a time of adventure, deep love and genuine giving, re-focusing from the material to the emotional and spiritual.

2. Search for ways to return Christmas values into
   your life, instead of focusing on spending.

3. Find out more about volunteering to help others in
   Volunteering for Christmas. (This link goes to my Holiday
   2009 Newsletter edition, where I offer links to resources.)

4. Give Experiential Gifts. This practice allows
   you to give of yourself with little or no spending while creating unforgettable moments with your loved ones. Read about Experiential Gifts.

5. Recite the Alchemical Blessing below every morning
   and evening for the duration of the Holidays, and

6. Have a blast of a Holiday!

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Holy Days Retreat

If the Holiday Spirit eludes you, no matter how hard you try, then your Soul is crying for time out.

There are essential things in your life that you need to recalibrate and you can not pretend. Christmas is not a time for pretending happiness, but for experiencing genuine joy.

Joy is often bubbly, exciting and expansive. But sometimes joy is not about merrymaking, but about entering deep silence and listening to your soul. This insight, or inward looking, can unlock the dam that is stifling your emotions. This, in turn, restores your Personal Compass.

As your soul feels listened and loved, and can once again guide you towards your True Infinite Self and your life’s purpose, it
returns to genuine joy, one that is not dependent on festivities and external trimmings.

You need a Holy Days Retreat. Here’s what to do:

1. Find or prepare a peaceful, quiet, uninterrupted
   place for your Holy Days Retreat. It can be a place in nature, a spiritual institution or a room in your own home. You can even open a tent in a corner of the house and ask everyone not to interrupt you while you are there.

2. Prepare yourself to enter this retreat for a
   specific time. If you can, make it at least three days. If you can’t, then assign a specific number of hours each day to that retreat. You can do a sleep-in retreat in your tent. Call upon your Native American Spiritual Guides to teach you how to use this tent as a Ceremonial Tepee.

3. Choose carefully a few basic Holiday activities
   and release the others. This is not Christmas or New Year as usual. This is a life-changing transition. Acknowledge this and give yourself permission to experience it. Receive the gift that this Holy Days are bringing and trust that it will expand your consciousness and enrich your life.

4. Create a ceremony or Inward Journey to hear and
   follow your Personal Compass. For an excellent guide, see the Roadmap Home: Your GPS to Inner Peace. (When you click on this link you will go to the Resource section in my Holiday 2009 Newsletter.)

5. Recite the Holy Day Compass Blessing below every morning and night during the Holidays.

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I hope that these tips and affirmations
help you to bless away your holiday stress!

Have a great Christmas!