Give yourself the gift of presence

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This can be a challenging time of year. Whether you lean in to the festivities or not, they are being broadcast on the cultural loud speakers at full volume and that has an effect on all of us in some way or another. Maybe your contending with old familial tensions rising, or on the flip side you might be negotiating loneliness when it seems like the rest of the world is connecting. You may feel unseen, with the slew of Christmas movies, songs etc not representing who you are. Even if this time of year sets your soul on fire, it’s easy to feel frazzled, short tempered, overcommitted & overfed, or just plain blue. It’s a lot. And that’s in a “normal year” when coronavirus isn’t continuing to overshadow our social lives and climate change isn’t knocking at our doors. Sheesh I’m overwhelmed just writing this! So deep breaths. In light of all this we wanted to offer some resources that can be simple resets to help navigate this time of year.

Help Now Activities

This is such a wonderful list of simple things you can do when you are feeling overwhelmed! Accompanied with pretty pictures to make it easily digestible, it’s a great resource to print or have on hand on your phone.

Reset: a guided audio

Only 10 minutes long, this is a nice audio “go to” when you need to hit the reset button. Lock that bedroom door, put on the earbuds and come back to yourself.

4 surprisingly simple steps

Irene Lyon does a lot of teaching about nervous system health and resiliency. This is a great resource to help bring you back into your window of tolerance. Audio link is above, here is the written component if you’re interested.

A dose of self-compassion

Kristen Neff is just so fantastic at taking the mystery out of self- compassion and making it accessible. She has an amazing list of free guided audio. The full list is linked above, though I particularly like Tender Self-Compassion Break .

Resiliency Building Skills

This is another wonderful list from Heidi Hanson’s website. She has collected together such a rich assortment of healing resources on her site. This is a lovely overview of small acts that can have big effects. Very grateful for them!

Hoping that some of these are useful to you dear reader over the next few weeks and whenever you need to come back home to yourself. Much love from LCC!

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