Christmas and the holiday season can be a time of great joy, great stress, or a combination of both. For many people it consists of a roller coaster of emotions and the upheaval of everyday routines. But the idea is that this is supposed to be a time of happiness and celebration, so let’s talk about how best to keep the experience entirely positive.

I’m going to focus on Christmas, but you can apply this to any holiday, no matter what you are celebrating. How can we truly enjoy ourselves and benefit from this magical time of year, with as little stress as possible?

I’m going to divide this into six possible situations, and then offer ideas and suggestions to improve each one of them. Of course, you are free to mix and match any of these suggestions, according to what works best for you.

We are each made to experience a continuous flow of divine energy throughout our being. This energy supports us, sustains us, and provides us with an ongoing sense of inner peace and clarity of mind. The beauty of this divine force of energy and love is that it perfectly matches the individuality of each person’s unique, divine expression and personality.

So all would be well in our lives if this beautiful flow of energy and love were to remain uninterrupted. But with the ego around, that is not the case. The ego literally acts as an interrupter to this amazing energetic flow of divinity.

Creativity is perhaps the single most important capability that you possess as a human being. Unfortunately, in our society, the idea of it has been reduced to such a level of insignificance, that many people have dismissed it as something recreational and entirely optional.

Creativity is not arts and crafts. Nor is it music, dance, or any of the other fine arts. Those things are merely expressions of our creative power. Such things are important in their own right, but we should never limit ourselves to the idea that this is all there is to it.

The word creativity stems from the word creator. At its highest level, creator refers to what we call God. Since we are the intelligent extensions of that which has created us, we, too, are creators. Creation is the outcome of that which creates. Because we are creators, we are also meant to create. We are meant to consciously create the outcomes in our lives.

Lately I have noticed that some people are promoting the idea that the ego is your friend. According to some, we can make friends with our egos, work with them, and have a much better life. Really? Wow! Let’s examine this idea more closely.

Firstly, we must identify what the ego is. And we know for a fact that it is not divine, nor is it a product of our highest self. How do we know this? Because the ego never speaks from love. The fundamental matrix upon which the ego bases all of its logic is mathematical. It is ultimately sourced in division. The ego thrives in the duality of contrast, in the form of this or that, right or wrong, and good or bad.

The next thing that we must note about the ego is that it is fundamentally negative. Even if it says something good about you, it will always be at the expense of someone else. The ego never says anything that can stand on its own as a self-sustaining truth. It must point out a contrast somewhere about everything it says.

We often think of gratitude as a nice thing to feel because it’s always good to appreciate things. But there is a power that underlies gratitude that affects the very fabric of our entire life’s experience.

The deepest form of gratitude is directly connected to our experience of time and our ability to live in the now. Without it, we are forever caught in a past – future experience, which gravely compromises our ability to create a meaningful life.

There is far more to living in a state of gratitude than you may have realized. In fact, gratitude and appreciation are directly connected to how conscious we can be overall.

In order to understand the importance of beauty, we must first define what beauty is. In short, beauty is the manifestation of love in form.

There are many subjective forms of beauty, but none of those definitions reach the core truth of what beauty really is and why it should matter to us. In fact, if you want to look at the subjective versions, you could say that anything is “beautiful”, even ugliness.

Let’s stick to something that exists as a universal truth about beauty. Beauty and love go hand in hand. In fact, one begets the other. Love begets beauty and true beauty inspires love. The two together have the potential to create an upward spiral of joy and consciousness. The two things together can bring forth a deep sense of peace. A sense that all is right in the world.

Have you ever felt discouraged, tired, and run-down when trying to produce positive change in your life? You might be overlooking the single, most important thing that you need to have the courage and energy to accomplish the changes you want. It’s called the power to be yourself.

This power is something that we are all born with. The problem is that we are encouraged from a very early age to snuff this power out as quickly as possible. Why? So we can fit in with the larger, uniform group called society.

These attempts at uniformity come at a very high cost to the individual. The result is that we each become very insecure and confused about who we are. We learn to be afraid to take risks. We come to believe that it’s safer to blend in with the crowd.

The most important thing in overcoming procrastination is to understand what it is and learn how to recognize it. Let’s begin by taking note of where procrastination always shows up. It always occurs related to something positive that you intend to do in your life. Notice that you will never find yourself procrastinating about doing something harmful.

Here is a common example. Imagine you are starting a healthy diet to lose weight. Let’s say that a bag of potato chips sitting in your cupboard is just beckoning you to finish it off. Would you ever find yourself procrastinating about eating the whole bag? Of course not. The only thing you’d be procrastinating about is embarking on the new, healthy diet. It would go something like this: “Well, I can wait one more day to start my new diet. What’s one more day? Besides, I don’t want those yummy chips to go to waste. That would be wrong!” No procrastination problem when it comes to those chips, right?

Procrastination always acts as an impediment to bettering your life in some way. It does not seem to have any problem staying out of your way when you are in the process of making things worse.

Prosperity can include many things, but it is fundamentally a lifestyle and a mindset. Most people have prosperity associated with money. But thinking about money alone is never enough. If you see yourself as a poor person who is desperately in need of money, this is not likely to lead to a dramatic change in your situation. And feeling financially poor is relative. You could be making $100,000 a year and still be unable to pay your bills.

On the other hand, there are people making far less money than that who are perfectly content with their situation. It’s all about balance in your life and what is important to you. There are no rights or wrongs. It simply has to do with how you see things for yourself, and what kind of life you want to experience.

These days it seems like the world can be an incredibly unstable place. It is so important not to let events that seem out of control completely take over our consciousness. This is a case where it is helpful for each of us to remember that we are individuals. There is so much that could be said here, but let me start with a paradigm shift. First of all, we are all infinite beings. That is not philosophy. It is indelible fact. We might be living in finite bodies, but each of us knows that we have no beginning and no end. This is, of course, why we naturally want to live forever. This is why we never run out of desire to go on and on and on with our lives.

So knowing this fact, it behooves us to take the truth of who we are into account when we find ourselves dealing with world events that seem to destabilize all of our lives. We stand on absolutely firm footing when we come from our infinite selves. We can take our physical lives into account by being completely centered in this fact. That is the place from which to start. If you doubt that you are an infinite being, you have only to be honest about your experience to know this for yourself. Look in the mirror. Look into your own eyes. Accept the fact that what you see there is eternal youth and eternal potentiality. There is simply no end to all of the things that you would love to do!