Healing Your Holiday Spirit – Part One

Having seen the photographs, I began to imagine the layers of luscious tastes tempting my tastebuds.  In addition, thoughts of multi-layered gifts within gifts have drifted through my consciousness in the past several days.  Ah…..layers of deliciously sweet on the outside surrounding satisfyingly savory morsels hidden in the middle.

And so, I got the idea to come bearing gifts within a gift–all created to help heal your holiday spirit, especially if you’re finding yourself sick of holiday stress. A sort of stresswell™ holiday truffle–disguised as a 4-part series of blog posts–each with tasty audio surprises hidden deep inside.

Holiday stress.

For most of us, stress is an everyday part of our lives. When the holidays come, they often arrive with added activities and responsibilities, which then pile on more feelings of stress. It’s often these little stresses that begin piling up that cause us to get sick and lessen the overall quality of our lives.

Instead of giving you a list of generic “do’s and don’ts”—that may or may not be useful in your own life, I hope this discussion will offer you a little different way of thinking about stress and how to be with yourself amidst the stress. I’ll also provide some tools to help you discover (or create) your own tips—that will be meaningful and useful for you to incorporate into your own life.

Yippee/Yuck©.

First, let’s take a look at something I call the “Yippee-Yuck© Scale”.   That is, on a scale of +5 (which means “Yippee!”) to -5 (which means “Yuck!”), with 0 being neutral.  There is no right or wrong answer.  Just how you feel at this moment about whatever is happening. 

For example, as you read the word “snow”, notice for a moment what happens inside. Go with your first reaction and how you feel right now about “snow.”   If you were to mark a spot somewhere between Yippee! and Yuck!, which would you choose?

Next, take a moment to imagine that you are with a group of people, each assigning their own number ranking for their current experience of the word “snow.”  Isn’t it interesting that a single word could evoke so many different reactions?

If we were to explain this using a mathematical formula, it would look something like this:

Snow + Your Reaction =Yippee/Yuck© Rating.

A more general way of looking at this equation would be as follows:

Event + Your Response = Outcome.

In other words, every outcome we experience is a direct result of how we respond to an individual event that occurs.

Does this mean that we have to like everything that happens to us? No, of course not. Nor does it mean that we are to blame if something bad happens to us.  It simply means that no matter what happens to us (whether good, bad or indifferent), it is our response to that event that will determine the outcome we experience.

I Have a Choice.

In turn, this means that we have a choice on how to respond to whatever happens in our lives.  [Wayne Moore has written a lovely song entitled "I Have a Choice", which you can preview here.]

Now, let’s repeat the Yippee/Yuck© exercise–this time with the word “holidays.”  Notice what happens inside and  prompts you to select a particular Yippee! or Yuck! score.  Notice too, whether you’re satisfied with the number you chose, or whether you would really prefer it to have rank a bit higher on the Yippee! side of the scale.

In my next blog post, we’ll take a look at something I call the Yea-But© Scale–and how it can help you sort through something that has multiple layers – like holidays. 

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.  Perhaps you would share your own sense of the holidays, and/or what you noticed as you did this exercise.

Image credits:  06_layers by wiccked  (Flickr (cc) Some Rights Reserved)