Seasonal Greetings & Message of Peace

Celebrations and special occasions often have positive aspects that are of great importance. They carry with themselves symbols and reasons for celebrating. It is always nice and inspiring to think about the motivations behind any celebration, find the core meaning, and remind ourselves about those purposes. This approach is beneficial because it helps us find more joy in the celebrations and holidays, but it also helps us have a more peaceful and meaningful life with serenity and positivity.

Therefore the focus of this article is to give suggestions about some meaningful ways of celebrating a peaceful Christmas holiday; inspired by the work of Deepak Chopra, MD, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, founder of Chopra Global, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism.

Appreciation

Holidays, especially Christmas-Holidays are the time of gathering families, friends, and communities; indeed, most people are aware of it and grateful for these events. As mentioned earlier, for the celebration of Independence Day in Finland on 6th December, the power of gratitude is significant and affects our health and well-being to a great extent. Therefore, simply lifting our appreciation during holidays and doing actions even if modestly offering generous smiles to people by saying kindly ‘’Happy Holidays’’ makes us feel good and brings us more peace.

Empathy

We know some people might be in isolation or feeling lonely during holidays. Altruism, thinking more about others, and practicing empathy helps us to create peace and emotional union, increase the sense of belonging, and remove most of the heavy feelings of loneliness and depression.

Renew and evolve

Christmas holidays also mean hearing and listening to beautiful songs and stories of Jesus, no matter if we are believers or not. Death and resurrection are part of these stories that we are aware of. As mentioned before in the introduction section, celebrations and festivities also carry symbols. Therefore, we can also look at it symbolically as the death of conditioned negative attitudes and the re-birth of new positive ones, renewing ourselves with more unconditional love. Some examples are putting away older unhealthy habits and opening up to new life opportunities. Start to see more good and positive parts of people, and learning values from each other. Stop repeating our past mistakes and give ‘death’ to negative ‘toxic’ thoughts and renew ourselves by taking new positive actions in our life towards evolving and growing more, and commit towards those actions.

Emotional lift

Whether we are believers or not in Jesus, we can always look at the meanings, symbols, reasons, and motivations behind any event or festivity and discover inspiration, beauty, and valuable things to do to improve our lives, especially finding more peace and harmony. Therefore an excellent lesson to learn from Christmas time is to concentrate more on the emotional and uplifting side of things by finding inspiring and encouraging things in other people, in different events and moments, in poetry, art, music, nature, etc. Indeed, we all know the many essential benefits of emotional lift and inspiration: humanity and beauty.

Peace consciousness

Finding peace is always essential, but it is even more pronounced at this time of the year. As described by Deepak Chopra, we can always start from ourselves and develop our peace consciousness with necessary habits such as being calm and focused. Avoid heavy arguing, blaming, and gossip. Instead, experience kindness and compassion by sharing and helping others. All these acts of giving and receiving affection and peace are beneficial for both sides.