By Lily Allen-Duenas
The wheel has turned. The year is coming to a close. The holiday season is upon us. This certainly doesn’t feel like “just another year,” but instead a year that has precipitated enormous change and has offered up seemingly endless challenges. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: 2020 has been a doozy.
While I won’t enumerate all of the difficulties and uncertainties this year has brought us, we can begin by acknowledging that we, as a global society, are exhausted. This fatigue probably started to set in months ago. Remember May? Remember August? I sure thought things would get a little brighter in the summer months, and hoped that they would be less bleak over the winter. Yet here we are. And it’s time to give ourselves a little credit. We’ve worked hard to keep and maintain harmony with our changing world. Coping, breathing, treating ourselves and others with kindness has brought us here, today, and will carry us all on to the other side of the pandemic and into the new year.
Until then, we have the holidays to get through.
“In our age of isolation, it’s more critical than ever to actively seek out social groups and work hard to build close relationships, especially because many traditional forms of community are dissolving.” —Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning
While we need to maintain safe practices to ensure everyone’s health and safety, make sure that you are reaching out to others during the holiday season. While we may be socially or physically distanced, we don’t have to be distant in any other sense of the word.
And then, there is mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness is the art of being present, letting go of the tugs, pulls and itches—metaphorical or literal—and staying present in the here and the now. Those of us who practice mindfulness know that this is a great challenge!
“There is a deep-seated tendency, it’s almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we’re not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There’s a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness.” —Pema Chodron in Taking the Leap
While this background hum can be a multitude of feelings, they all serve to pull us from the present moment. Here, during this holiday season, may we all make an effort to be more mindful. To go about things with more intention. To move more slowly and speak more kindly. To seek fewer distractions. To stay more present.
The concrete, actionable advice on how to stay mindful is to take deep breaths and to come back to your breath whenever your mind wanders, to be conscious and aware of your thoughts, your inner dialogue, and of your body as well. If you are doing something, do it fully. Whether you are washing the dishes, cutting vegetables, or brushing your teeth, stay fully in the act of doing these tasks. You can always put an alarm reminder on your phone, set it to ring or buzz every 30 minutes, and let that alarm bring you back to your breath. Smile and breathe each time you hear it. These little tips, while they seem small, are great daily challenges. I offer them up to you as an opportunity to practice mindfulness throughout the holiday season, and on into the new year.
Best wishes for peace, happiness, and harmony through 2021 and beyond.
Lily Allen-Duenas is the founder of the Wild Yoga Tribe. She is a yoga teacher, meditation instructor, writer, and storyteller. To learn more about her journey visit wildyogatribe.com or for professional inquiries visit lilyallenduenas.com. Get social @wildyogatribe
