Slowing Down For The Holidays

The holiday season can be hectic, and maintaining a wellness routine is an ultimate testament to self-care and self-love. It requires diligence and patience, but the outcomes are nothing but beneficial to both body and mind. A good wellness routine will allow you to relax, calm your mind, support your body, and prepare yourself for essential rest before last-minute gift shopping, holiday dinner parties, and anything else this season throws your way.

Your wellness routine can be a combination of wholesome eating or drinking, soothing movement, and any activity that you truly enjoy. Here’s a peek into my evening wellness routine – feel free to try these rituals out for yourself.

Movement

My wellness routine is a multi-step process that prepares my body for rest and rejuvenation. Most evenings I transition with movement, specifically yoga. As well as being good for the muscles and circulatory system, an evening hatha routine can also calm the body and ease the mind for restful sleep. If you do not have the time, or are too restless for a full yoga sequence, incorporating some deep twists and breathing can help power you down in a way no sleeping pill can.

Herbal Tea

Preparing a warm mug of herbal tea is a wonderful way to end a cold winter day. It will calm the body and help you transition from being active to settling down. Many companies offer a wide variety of healthy medicinal teas with sustainable business models to boot.

Coffee Enema

Coffee enemas can also be incorporated into your evening wellness routine. The practice of enemas encourages a cleansing of the digestive tract, ensuring successful digestion and bowel movements. Along with this, enemas can help reduce bloat and make the body feel more comfortable and regular. A coffee enema specifically helps relieve constipation and increases antioxidant activity in the body. This can increase energy levels and help your body run at full capacity. Coffee enemas are also wonderful for the liver. Your liver is your body’s natural detoxifier, and a regular coffee enema can help the body release the toxins that build up from its day-to-day functioning. Detoxifying the liver results in clearer skin, better concentration, and a faster metabolism. Giving your liver’s natural power a little boost encourages your body to run better and establish a healthy equilibrium.

Castor Oil Packs

Castor oil packs are a wonderful complement to coffee enemas. While castor oil ingestion is encouraged for things like detoxification and inducing labor, it also has other beneficial qualities that you can take advantage of through topical application. Laying a castor oil pack and a hot pack on top of specific parts of the body for 45 to 60 minutes can help detox the body, improve circulation, and mend equilibrium in the body. I use castor oil packs on my abdomen to support my gut and on my neck to support my thyroid.

Reading

My evening routine is best when I get in a little reading. This is all about pleasure reading—I save all work-related reading for daytime hours. Reading helps relieve insomnia symptoms by slowing down racing thoughts related to your daily life. Make sure you’re reading from a real book though; the light from an e-reader can keep you up and disrupt your sleep cycle.

It’s easy to let our work hours bleed into the evening, utilizing technology to extend our daylight hours to get more done. But when we begin to adjust our daily routine to the seasons and what is naturally occurring around us, we find our awake state to be much more productive and our lives much more balanced. Take time this holiday season to create your own evening wellness routine. Try some of the practices I use and see if they are beneficial to you.

Written by Cristin Smith in collaboration with Enrou, a favorite destination for socially conscious products and gifts.