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    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace, A Mamaguru Guide
    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace, A Mamaguru Guide
    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace, A Mamaguru Guide
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace, A Mamaguru Guide

    By Rebecca Cofiño

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    About this ebook

    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace is a smart guide to help you recapture the magic of the holiday season. For many of us the holidays have turned into a season of stress which maxes out our credit cards, monopolizes our time, and drains our energy. Every year we hope to experience the joy we felt as children, but somehow we unwittingly board the Holiday Express and wind up with our lives spinning out of control. This book explains how to incorporate mindfulness into holiday celebrations, as well as offering a host of practical tips and holiday hacks to make the season run smoothly. Included in this book are The Great Holiday To Do List, a doable diet plan to avoid seasonal weight gain, and even a primer on meditation. It addresses budgets, health, perfectionism, family life, stress, organization, and infusing meaning into the holidays. It's promise is simple, but vital: to bring joy back into the holidays by cultivating a bit of inner peace.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRebecca Cofiño
    Release dateNov 2, 2015
    ISBN9781311654472
    Stress Free Holidays: Bring Back Joy & Peace, A Mamaguru Guide
    Author

    Rebecca Cofiño

    Rebecca Cofiño is a mindfulness expert who specializes in everyday spirituality and family life. She is the founder of mamaguru.com, a website devoted to helping people create meaningful happiness. She is both an author and public speaker. Her first book, "Enjoy the Holidays: Turn Holiday Stress Into Holiday Cheer," is a smart guide to recapture the joy and magic of the holidays, rather than succumbing to the de facto stress that permeates the season. She offers insights and practical tips to incorporate mindfulness into the holidays. Rebecca Cofiño grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but spent her twenties traveling the world, visiting four continents and living in three different countries. She studied yoga in India and has been a certified yoga instructor and meditation teacher for fifteen years. She currently lives in Miami with her husband and two sons.

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      Book preview

      Stress Free Holidays - Rebecca Cofiño

      Stress Free Holidays:

      Bring Back Joy & Peace

      By Rebecca Cofiño

      © 2016 Rebecca Cofiño

      License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailers. Thank you for your support.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: The Holiday Express

      Chapter 2: Budgeting Joy

      including The Great Holiday To Do List

      Chapter 3: The Polarity of Holiday Math

      Chapter 4: Too Much Stuff

      Chapter 5: Two Lessons from the Little Red Hen

      Chapter 6: Make Holidays HolyDays

      including How to Meditate

      Chapter 7: Be Good to Your Body

      including The Smoothie/Salad Sanity Diet

      Chapter 8: The Black Mark on The Holidays

      Conclusion

      Bonus: Holiday Baking Guide

      A Word of Thanks

      Three Free Gifts!

      About the Author

      Connect

      Sample Chapter from Live a Deliberate Life: 8 Steps to a Life You Love

      Introduction

      The moment I placed the Sweet Potato Puree with Maple Meringue on our Thanksgiving table, I knew I was done. Done with Thanksgiving before I took a single bite, before I uttered a word of thanks. I was already stuffed.

      It wasn’t just the cook’s tasting privileges throughout the day that filled me up. It was the entire holiday, no, the entire holiday season. I was just done with it, before it even started.

      I am a person who loves holidays! I love everything about them: the decorations, the food, being together, the spiritual gifts, the physical gifts, the music, the twinkling lights.

      In short, the magic.

      But something happened along the way. Despite my best efforts to keep stress and commercialism at bay, they had wiggled their way into my home. I was exhausted at the beginning.

      I drew in a deep breath.

      I smiled. I lead our family in saying grace, cheered a toast, and ate my pie with a smile plastered on my face. It wasn’t my family’s fault that I felt this way, and it wouldn’t be fair to dampen their joy.

      But something had to give.

      I just knew it.

      Chapter 1

      The Holiday Express

      I’ve always thought that an electric train circling the bottom of a Christmas tree was charming, but a bit odd. What in the world do trains have to do with Christmas?

      They aren’t connected to Jesus, of course. We all know Mary rode a donkey to Bethlehem. But they don’t seem connected to Santa either. He has a sleigh with reindeer, so he doesn’t need a train. How in the world does the train motif fit into any sort of Christmas story, either religious or secular?

      But holiday trains are everywhere.

      The Polar Express! Movies! Books! Those miniature ceramic villages of jolly old England. Santa’s Express. Big trains. Little trains. Kids wait in lines for hours to ride the Holiday Choo Choo at the mall. In fact I even own a train ornament which I bought the year my son loved Thomas the Tank Engine. Trains are everywhere at Christmas, going round and round. They never stop.

      Hmm… isn’t that exactly how The Holidays feel?

      Like we hop on board a train in mid-November, and keep going without any stops, until we are dropped into the second week of January, and then we desperately scramble to get back on track?

      A week later the holiday bills arrive, and we cringe. We wonder: where did the money go?

      Where did we go?

      The answer to that question is obvious: we got on the Holiday Express which took us round and round in circles, until we were dizzy and disoriented, exhausted and expended.

      Each year we keep getting on that train without ever questioning our destination. We hope it will feel as thrilling as it did when we were children, or we hope to at least give our own kids their turn on the joy ride.

      But every year a little more magic is lost.

      We notice the paint peeling on the train, so we break the bank to gild it. We notice it getting a bit boring, so we add flashing lights and inflated Santas on choppers. We feel it getting overcrowded, so we add another car. But nothing seems to work.

      Nothing works, because trains don’t belong in Christmas. They are out of place, and we are misplaced when we jump on board for 17% of our lives.

      Where did that number come from?

      17% is the amount of your life spent on the Holiday Express if you generally celebrate from mid-November and finally get the house back in order by mid-January. If you start celebrating earlier, or if you add an extravagant Halloween into the mix, the percentage of your life that you spend on The Holidays is higher, 25-30%.

      That’s a big enough number to garner some attention. Are The Holidays worthy of 17-30% of your life’s energy, time, and focus?

      You may have noticed that I refer to The Holidays as a single entity. Isn’t that what they feel like?

      Rather than unique, individual celebrations, a whole group of occasions have blurred into one massive event I simply call The Holidays. Take down a jack-o-lantern, put up a turkey. Take down a turkey, put up a tree. Pop some bubbly before you throw out the tree in the new year. It’s a formula we follow year after year.

      Every year it seems to get longer. We bemoan the arrival of store decorations earlier and earlier in the season. In fact this year I saw Christmas merchandise on sale in early September. September! It was technically still summer. Back to School displays were literally replaced by Christmas paraphernalia. Our outrage at this insane time frame is a clue that our culture has taken a huge misstep.

      Now, 17% is not an unreasonable amount of time to celebrate the Divine, but it’s a huge chunk of life to just toss away in the whatever pile. It is an enormous amount of time to feel stressed out, burdened, overwhelmed, and taken for granted. It is an enormous amount of time to feel disconnected from your real life, your goals, and your values.

      Most Americans gain 10 pounds over The Holidays and our number one New Year’s Resolution is always to lose 10 pounds. Does that make any sense?

      Most of us want our children to be less materialistic. We don’t want to raise entitled, selfish people, and yet we spoil them rotten during The Holidays. Why? Somewhere along the line our little angels morph into greedy minions with high expectations we grow to resent. Again, why do we do this?

      Why are we allowing our lives, our goals, and our values to be derailed every single year, all in the name of The Holidays?

      A train ride is fun, for sure, but if you are going to spend up

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