Make It a Lifestyle!

While mulling ideas for a theme for my first-ever New Year’s Day yoga class, I came across a number of New Year’s superstitions and traditions, including the following gems:

• The New Year’s midnight smooch helps ensure that your loving relationships will stay with you through the coming year.
• Lucky New Year’s Day foods include lentils, pork, and black-eyed peas. In some Latin American traditions, eating 12 grapes in a row at midnight can also be a good omen: each will bring a month of happiness.
  
  

  Want to get rid of a creepy ghost boyfriend? Make lotsa noise!

• Also good luck: Making noise (hence the worldwide traditions of noisemakers and fireworks) scares away bad energy  and evil spirits (including, for all you American Horror Story fans, creepy basement-dwelling Frankenbabies and even creepier ghost boyfriends).

What’s no so lucky? Lending money or paying back loans on New Year’s Day is a no-no; it guarantees you’ll be shelling out simoleons all year long.

• Even more unlucky: Breaking things on January 1st may wreak wreckage down the road–so be extra careful when handling your Hummel collection.
• Terribly unlucky: Lock up your laundry detergent, because doing the wash on New Year’s Day means that someone you love may “wash away” in the new year. According to Chinese superstition, sweeping the floor on New Year’s Day is also a bad choice, as you may sweep away your good luck along with the crumbs.

I could use a lucky year, so I’m planning to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day while listening to my Black Eyed Peas “Energy Never Dies” CD–at top volume–thereby doubling my chances for a fortunate start. And to be on the safe side, I might skip doing the laundry for a week.

Next, I’m going to practice my New Year’s resolution of cultivating the fine art of unitasking. We often pride ourselves on our multitasking abilities: We juggle work deadlines, doctor appointments, and child care with one hand, while vacuuming with the other. Yet at the end of the day, we often feel that we haven’t done enough. Sound familiar?

If your “to-do” list never gets done, consider making it shorter to begin with. (Setting the bar high is one thing, setting it “stupid high” is another.) And allow yourself some time each day to “unitask”–do one thing only: relax. Make doing nothing, in a sense, your focus. Turn off your busy mind, swing your legs up on the couch or chair, and close your eyes.

• To keep your mind off the “gotta dos,” focus on your breath.
• Notice the inhale: how does your belly or chest move with the inhalation? Does the breath make any sound? Do you feel any sensation in the nose?
• Likewise, observe the exhale. What sensations do you feel in the belly, chest, or shoulders? Can you hear the breath leaving the body? Can you feel movement of air around the nose or mouth?

As you focus on your breath, you will quiet your mind. That, in turn, will soothe your overstimulated nervous system. Even five minutes of this multitask-free timeout will help relieve fatigue and frustration. The laundry can wait. Let the machine answer the phone. And maybe you don’t have to work quite so hard.

Give yourself a gift in 2012–make time for you. Don’t let it be a cliche; rather, make it part of your lifestyle.

Happy New Year!

Tags: American Horror Story, New Year's resolutions, unitasking

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2011 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Blog, Stress management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.