Finding Warmth in a Busy Season: Practicing Mindfulness During the Holidays
As we enter the busy holiday season, it becomes increasingly important to slow down and offer yourself a gentle dose of warmth. Over the past month, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating workshops on Christian mindfulness and mindfulness practices in general—each designed to help individuals prepare emotionally and spiritually for the weeks ahead.
The purpose of these workshops is simple but deeply needed: to help people build capacity within themselves. That means learning how to value your own time, energy, and efforts while also creating the mental and emotional space necessary to navigate the holidays with clarity and compassion.
Mindfulness Helps You Choose Where Your Energy Goes
The holidays often bring joy—but they can also surface stress, complicated relationships, and old family dynamics. Many people find that around the Thanksgiving or Christmas table, they are surrounded by both the people they love and the people they struggle with. Mindfulness gives you the internal grounding to meet each moment with steadiness.
With greater awareness, the holiday table can become:
A table of reconnection
A table of healing conversations
A table of understanding and healthy boundaries
Mindfulness helps you discern where to put your time and emotional energy—whether with people who nourish you, people you’re growing with, or people who may require more patience, distance, or grace.
Balancing What You Give With What You Need
Christian mindfulness invites us to honor our limits, acknowledge our humanity, and remember that rest is a spiritual discipline. That might look like:
Becoming more aware of your schedule and balancing work demands with restorative time
Taking a quiet, uninterrupted drive without multitasking
Turning on music while you cook to bring yourself gently back to the present moment
Stepping outside for fresh air to reset your body and mind
Listening to an audiobook that inspires or settles you
Whatever helps you cultivate inner warmth becomes a source you can draw from. When you feel more grounded inwardly, it becomes easier to extend kindness, patience, and intentionality outwardly.
Warmth Makes Connection Possible
As you deepen your sense of internal warmth and spaciousness, you also expand your capacity to:
Think more positively about relationships. The script and narratives rooted in past wounds may not fit now. Give your relationship with a sibling, family member, or old friend room to breathe.
Show up with authenticity around people you often find yourself masking around
Create emotional warmth that others can safely enter. Smile, offer hugs, provide a genuine compliment to put others at ease
Extend grace to people who may also be struggling this season. Be kind when your time is pressed. Offer a short open to small-talk with a stranger while at the store. Ask the cashier how their day is going. Sometimes people just need to feel seen by one when they encounter cranky or unkind others.
This is the heart of Christian mindfulness—creating room for the Holy Spirit to soften, guide, and renew your inner world so your outer world becomes more compassionate.
A Holiday Invitation
As you gather around the table this holiday season, may this be a time of welcoming all emotions—joy, sadness, gratitude, confusion, or hope.
And may you extend grace and warmth not only to others but also to yourself.
Because the warmth you cultivate within is the very warmth that transforms relationships, restores connection, and helps you move through the season with peace.
Hi! I’m Regina Chow Trammel, PhD, LCSW, and I have successfully treated hundreds of clients throughout my 18+ years of practice using mindfulness, existential, cognitive, and process-based interventions—all with a trauma-and-evidence-informed framework.
The therapy process can help you gain insight, heal, and make appropriate changes. I can help you navigate the unique cultural & systemic factors that impact mental health, and I can integrate faith and spirituality in sessions, if so desired.
I am licensed in the states of California and Illinois. I provide tele-therapy with an easy to use video-based app. I have limited in-person therapy in Azusa, CA with ample parking. My office is safe & comforting.
Text, or call today: 626-765-7602 or book a free consultation (click on the button ).