Yoga and you this Christmas
If Christmas looks like it does in other parts of the world — sitting by the fire, woollen socks, mulled wine — you might wonder what space yoga has in your festive calendar. If, on the other hand, you’re sweltering through 30 degree days at home, racing between school holiday activities, family commitments, social catch ups, end of year deadlines and a weird cocktail of excitement, expectation and exhaustion, you’ll recognise yoga for the perfect remedy it is to this particular concoction.
Yoga for a uniquely Australian Christmas
Far from being a cute, festive quick-fix, yoga has an arsenal of no-nonsense, down-to-earth tools to help you through this physically, mentally, emotionally and socially demanding time of year. Let’s explore a few:
Cooling off when the heat’s on
December and January can be hard on the body. We over-exert ourselves with activities, cram through checklists, eat differently and sleep less routinely than usual, manage different and more demanding family dynamics and weather the sometimes-brutal Australian summer. Yoga can give the body physical tools to regulate heat, stress and emotion.
Cooling breathwork such as sitali or sheetkari, takes minutes to lower internal temperature and send waves of cooling energy through the body. Gentle sequences (lots of forward folds, hip openers, slow and smooth movement) calm down a racing nervous system instead of revving it up. Legs-up-the-wall is a perennial summer favourite to ease swelling and fatigue in the lower body after long days on your feet in heat at end-of-year events.
Restorative shapes such as Reclined Bound angle or Supported Child’s pose unwind tension in the body that emotions can lock into. The value of this to your mood often surprises people. Your body tends to let go faster than your mind.
Staying steady when the emotions run deep
Christmas isn’t all joy and simplicity, as the ads would have you believe. The holidays can bring a surprising range of emotions for many people: family relationships and old stories, unresolved grief and change, financial pressures, professional projects in the holidays and a kind of social-performance anxiety that tells you to “hold it all together”.
Five minutes of meditation in the morning can be like an anchor to keep you less reactive and less emotionally explosive. Grounding breathwork such as long exhalations or slow, quiet breathing make space to pause and choose how to respond instead of letting your emotions dictate an immediate reaction.
Yoga won’t smooth out all the season’s emotional complexity but it will make you more present, more patient and more able to respond to events rather than be overcome by them.
Slowing down when the world gets loud
The Christmas season isn’t just physically hot. It’s also mentally noisy. School terms, end-of-year work projects, gift buying and travel plans all coincide to fill up a calendar faster than you can nod your head, adding to the risk of shallow breathing and decision fatigue.
Yoga, by its very nature, quiets the mind.
The unassuming genius of it is that it invites you to focus on one thing at a time. A flow sequence demands your attention, as does holding a pose and shifting your awareness to your breath. Breathwork alone brings you out of the superficial chatter of the “thinking mind” and into a deeper, quieter place.
A micro-practice of one minute of slow, nasal breathing when you enter a shop, before you start the car or pick the kids up, walk into a social gathering or do anything else that tips your mental state off-balance is a radical tool to reclaim your calm.
Building connection — and your capacity to keep it up
The festive season is a gift when it comes to social connection — but human contact is also exhausting for the nervous system. Yoga can help you stay present and available to others while not burning out.
Practising regularly (once a week is enough) in the months of December and January can transform your social experience — calmer, more grounded, more present, less reactive and more aware of your own needs and limits. When your nervous system feels regulated it shows up. Conversations become easier, patience has more bandwidth and you have more capacity to enjoy people (instead of it depleting you).
Yoga helps you stay socially steady not by making you more extroverted, but by helping you feel more like yourself.
A less frantic, more spacious Christmas
Christmas, with its usual dose of stress, noise and exhaustion, can feel like something we simply survive. But a regular practice — even a short, regular one, using any of the tools above — will help you live it with greater steadiness and space. Yoga isn’t about reinventing the holidays or somehow “fixing” them. It’s about making it possible for you to experience them more fully while still preserving your equilibrium.
If you would like to experience private yoga classes near me or yoga in Mornington, reach out to Emily at Mount Martha Yoga. She has all the tools to help you navigate the heat and busyness of this season and to focus on what really matters: connection with loved ones, gratitude, love and just a little stillness to appreciate it all.
