Celebrate Mindfully With This Blissful Holiday Recipe

By Cate Stillman

Do you find yourself emotionally overwhelmed during the holidays? If you are living in the USA, your holiday season may look something like this: eating, feasting, and most likely consuming more calories at each meal than you typically need for a week. The emotional overwhelm of the holidays causes many of us to over-indulge with wine, spirits, food- or all three! This year, try inviting a mindfulness-based practice to your holiday cooking and celebrations.

Meditation and mindfulness practices help buffer the gap between holiday emotional triggers and our ability to make intelligent food choices. Eating and preparing food with high-quality ingredients and from a place of mindfulness allows you to deeply appreciate every gram of nourishment and every pulse of nourishing subtle energy offered by those you are eating with. Cooking and eating mindfully gives you the potential to deepen your understanding of your body, your needs, and the sensations within. This will help you feel into how much food you need to eat to feel satiated and even-minded, without over-eating from an emotional experience.

Appreciate Your Blessings

My favorite mindfulness practice has helped me tremendously in times of situational uncertainty. It is based on identifying and appreciating my blessings. I do this both when preparing food and when sitting down to eat. Appreciation opens the door to the experience of gratitude, opening your heart to give and receive to your highest potential. Why not share that openness with your family and friends?

When you feed your family’s mind, body and spirit high-quality ingredients prepared with presence and attention, you may notice a deeper sense of connection and nourishment among everyone. When the body is nourished, the mind and emotions can feel supported, facilitating the potential for deeper connectivity with friends and family. This helps to create a deeply nourishing environment for everyone involved.

So here is a recipe that is nourishing, satisfying, and won’t be overly taxing on your digestive energy bank account. Prepare it mindfully, with love, for best results.

Grateful Roots Healthy Holiday Stuffing Recipe

Serves 4 – 6 as a side dish

Ingredients:

1 medium size winter squash – kabocha, butternut and delicata work great!
2 parsnips
4 purple carrots (or whichever variety is available)
3 stalk celery
1 rutabaga
1 Tbs fresh sage chopped
1 Tbs fresh rosemary chopped
2 Tbs melted ghee or olive oil
2 tsp salt
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 cloves of garlic chopped
1 Tbs balsamic vinegar
A healthy dose of mindfulness

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Wash, peel, and chop the carrots, parsnips and squash into 1 inch pieces.
Wash and chop celery and rutabaga into 1 inch pieces.
In a mixing bowl combine and stir olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sage, rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper.
Add chopped vegetables and mix until evenly coated.
Spread coated vegetables evenly on the baking sheet.
Roast 45 minutes or until golden brown, stirring the vegetables at 25 minutes.
Serve as a side dish to accompany your deeply nourishing holiday feast!

Remember that sharing is caring. When the responsibilities of preparing food for gatherings is shared, much more loving energy is infused into each bite. Preparing food together- and doing it from a place of mindfulness- will uplevel the subtle energy in your dish. This subtle energy is the glue that builds the container for a supportive environment and stronger connections. Who wouldn’t want more of that this season?

About the Yoga Health Coaching Blogger

Alec Hurley is a yoga teacher in the San Diego area and a life long surfer. He is the founder of Higher Self Wellness and an avid practitioner of ancient wisdom and spiritual practices which he infuses into his public yoga classes and group program “The Art of Connection”. He is professionally trained as a Chef and incorporates the ancient wisdom of “food as medicine” into his culinary creations. Currently enrolled in the Yoga Health Coaching program, Alec is adding the practices of personal and planetary alignment into his modern healthy lifestyle toolkit to help shift the collective into deeper states of connection. You can download a Free guided meditation here to get a deeper sense of what he is all about. Connect with Alec on his website and facebook page.