Hey friends, I’m so excited to be back after an unintentional break. We had some serious germs around here and then we went to Disneyland and I thought about you all so much. How have your holidays been? How have your family and friends treated you? Was it better than you thought? Was it worse? Are you experiencing a grief hangover or are you fully energized and ready to go?

I got to visit, uh, my little girly Lauren at the cemetery and it was really heartwarming to see all the decorations and people and there were candles lit for everyone who had passed on. And I think it’s so funny that the cemetery at night is so far from scary to me now. It’s one of my favorite places.

I know that’s not everyone’s experience, but I love it. Um, during this past little while, my cycle was at its lowest, um, my hormones, all through my trip and the holidays. So now that I’m back in my spring season of my cycle, I’m feeling so ready to get back to work and I want to clean all the things and it’s just, it’s a good time.

As I record this for you, it is just a few days until the new year. Most of the messages we get turn immediately from like, buy,buy,buy you know, get ready for the holidays, all the hustle and bustle to diet, diet, diet, join a gym, organize your house. Um, and all this stuff you just bought and organize your money, aka face what you charged on your credit cards.

Most of those come with an undertone or outright messaging that there is something wrong with you. You’re disorganized. You’re bad with money. You are overweight. You have no self control. You’re always late or you’re too uptight about time. You don’t travel enough. You promised you’d do this last year and look at you.

Uh, like you have the same goals every year and it never, nothing ever changes or you started and you failed. Yeah, are you feeling me? And, and so we get these messages and we also say these things to ourselves internally. So I want to ask you, what is your inner critic stuck on right now, what are you thinking about you and your life and your home, and your body and all of these things?

WHat came up when you went to your childhood home? Or you had people in your house? When we’re grieving, all of this can be extra sensitive as well. So not only are you looking at what needs to change, you might have zero motivation to do anything.

Life looks pretty bleak. Going into another year without your baby is paralyzing. And not knowing if you can have what you want makes you feel hopeless.

It can be super tough, so please be gentle with yourself. Today I’m going to share some of my best tips for starting the new year in a different way. I want you to stop listening to all this messaging that really doesn’t help us, like we know it doesn’t help us and yet every year we just keep trying to do it and we know that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.

Well, I want you to slow down, listen. I’m going to share some of my best tips for starting the new year in a different way. And I am going to go much more into depth with these practices if you come into the cozy place. It’s my New Year’s program where we will start your year off in a calm, quiet, warm, and cozy way.

It’s a group that will be full of like minded people that you can truly bond with. And I know so many of us are just missing that right now. I’ll be teaching and guiding discussions to help us feel supported and hopeful for the future. There’s going to be a link in the show notes or you can go to smoothstonescoaching.

com and click get support to get all the details. So let’s talk about the new year. We just passed the winter solstice, which is the shortest. day of the year. It’s dark depending where you live. It’s cold. Birds have mostly flown south. The leaves are off of the trees. Everything is just a little bit harder, like getting going in the morning, in the cold, in the dark, and like if you have to scrape windshields or shovel snow.

You know what I’m talking about. And then someone arbitrarily decided we should have huge celebrations and lots of hustle and bustle and events and pack it all into this season. Also, this should be the new year, the time to get moving and start new things and fix all our problems and rah rah rah. Like what?

This? It’s all made up, my friends. If it’s not working for you, it might just be because we’re going against what the Earth is saying in winter. Let’s try listening. What is nature telling us? What is it telling you? What do you naturally gravitate to this time of year? For me, it’s soft blankets, warm herbal tea, staying in bed a little bit longer, slowing down, and I especially love my sweaters this time of year.

It might be putting on a little cushion of fat to keep me insulated. What if instead of berating ourselves for this, we allowed it and we embraced it? What if there is literally nothing wrong at all with this? Here’s what I think will help you embrace this season. I love that the Swedish have a word for it.

And I had to look it up multiple times to see how you pronounce it. I’m still probably going to pronounce it wrong. It is not what I thought. I thought it was haigi, but it’s hygge. And hygge is about taking time away from the daily rush to be together with people you care about, or even by yourself to relax and enjoy life’s quieter pleasures.

It has a cozy quality that makes a person feel content and comfortable. Or another definition is Invoking or fostering a sense of coziness, contentment, and well being. I love this, and I feel like if you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen things about Hygge, and about, and it was really like, soft things, and soft colors, and soft blankets, and warm.

Things and more of like creating an atmosphere, but I loved when I read these definitions, how much it included people, um, or being by yourself. If you’re like me, I’m an introvert. My most favorite thing is to like be with a book, maybe not a whole bunch of people. But I think it can be both, right?

So finding a group of people that you are comfortable with, which is what it said, right? We want people we’re comfortable with, not just people. People we can connect with. That’s what we’re creating in The Cozy Place as well, and I’m so excited about that.

So, let’s talk about nestling in and creating this for ourselves. I envision a sweet puppy moving blankets around on their little bed, turning around three times and collapsing into the softness. Or a pile of bears inside their den just snuggling together for warmth. I want to ask you, how can you snuggle and nestle into this season?

What do you envision? What’s that picture you want to create? What’s that environment you want to create? Create it. Many animals hibernate this time of year. Some of us might say, we want to sleep through the season, but we know we can’t. Why? What messages do you get about slowing down and resting? We don’t want to be lazy, or watch too much TV.

We have to be productive, we should be motivated this time of year, right? But where does all that get you? Usually on the couch, watching a show, and just feeling terrible about everything. Why not be intentional about your hibernation, whatever that looks like? It could be giving yourself a few days. Or much longer to hibernate.

After Lauren died, I purposely decided to give myself a year of grace where I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. I didn’t need to wear makeup or pretend to be fine when I wasn’t. I would do what I felt like was the minimum I felt good about and then let the rest go. You can do that too, anytime, for any reason.

How would you feel if you chose to hibernate as a gift to yourself and your family? Because I know the automatic next question is always, Well, what about my partner, my mother in law, my living kids, the PTA president? They are going to expect me to be doing all the things. Yes, they will. And they might say things, and it might be uncomfortable for all of you.

You just have to be confident in your choices anyway. Can you, slowing down, be a gift to everyone around you? How can you be an example? How can you use your energy for things you want to say yes to so you can really say yes 100%? Oh, one of my friends, Amanda Louder, she is an intimacy coach, and she always says if you can’t say no, you really can’t say yes.

Right. And so she talks about that with intimacy. Like if no, isn’t an option, then you’re never really saying yes, fully. And I think this goes with the things we do. Cause even as I talk about this and I talk about slowing down, I’m not saying you stop living your life and you stop being who you want to be.

Like you can still show up. You can still be an amazing person that you are. You can still fully be in to all the things you’re into. But I just want you to be purposeful about it. I just want you to give yourself the gift of really directing your energy where you want to go and then letting the rest of it go on the back burner or go away for a while while you’re in this hibernating season.

But as you’re figuring this out, I really want to encourage you to do what animals and plants do in winter, which is. Use what you have stored. Now, you may feel really depleted right now. I get it, but if you take another look, you can find some assets that you’ve stored up. We know that creatures harvest in fall and use it in winter.

We as humans can freeze and bottle foods in their prime to eat during winter. Plants store nutrients from summer in their roots to live another day and another season or they break down and become fertilizer for next spring seeds, right? They kind of lay themselves down for the, for the new, um, annual plants.

Whatever way it happens, we can use what we’ve harvested throughout the year or from different seasons in our lives to help us through dark and cold times. So what have you stored up? What do you have going for you? Be really open about this, get curious, ask yourself these questions, do some journaling, and see what you find.

What are all these little acorns you’ve been storing all along that prepared you for this moment in your life? They are there, I promise. You may have picked them up during other challenging times, you may have read something in a book, you may have felt prompted to do something randomly that you are now reaping the benefits from.

Once you start looking, you’re gonna find these little gems, these little acorns everywhere. I hope that even this podcast is one of your little nuts that will sustain you. Use it. Use what I’m giving you freely here. Take the next step and get support. Use what you have available. I am available. I am very honestly available.

You can DM me. You can email me. I am here for you. Like, I’m not just saying that. I really am. Um, and a little different than hibernation is rest. I want you to go into this new year and the rest of the winter season and keep this thought in your mind. Rest is productive. How can you rest emotionally, physically, mentally?

Instead of trying to fix yourself to be better, what if you can set your life up to serve you better right where you are? How can you automate things? How can you make tasks easier? How can you delegate? Rest is so important in Hygge.

How can you enjoy peaceful times with good people when you have a thousand things on your mind, when your heart is worried or heavy, when your body has been overworked? There’s no right formula that will work for everyone. For me, I had been walking and doing yoga really consistently this fall, and it was amazing.

I loved it. Then everyone got sick, and so did I, and I haven’t been able to get out and do those things. So for me, actually getting outside again would be restful. It quiets my mind, it blesses my body, I feel so much better. But I’m not doing it because I hate myself and how lazy I’ve been. I’m not telling myself that.

I’m doing it as a gift to myself. Your home is also a place that you can make more restful. Maybe you do have a lot of clutter and clearing some of it will help you rest. If you want to organize, do it from love. If you want to leave it, do it from love. You can rest in what I’ve heard of being called maximalism.

It’s a choice. There’s no shame needed. I loved, if you listened to my episode with Alison Faulkner, she said she can handle a lot of chaos in her life and that’s why she can create. Um, and that’s something you can develop. That shift is really the key to all of this. As we move into a new year or whatever you’re listening to this, you can make goals from love.

You can redefine what a goal is. I like to call it a shift. We, We aren’t trying to accomplish something outside of ourselves, like a number on a scale or dollars in the bank. We’re really just becoming a new version of ourselves. And we’re not trying to become the opposite of ourselves or pull a 180.

We’re just trying to shift a little bit. If you just change your direction a little bit, where you end up is going to be so much different. If you start knowing deep down that you are already worthy and whole, then making shifts is just fun. Humans do love a challenge and it can be enjoyable to push yourself.

I think pushing yourself to slow down is one of the best shifts we can make. You want to become more aligned and closer to you. You want to integrate your grief journey, not fight it. You want to find your rhythm. Not make a whole new one that doesn’t feel right to you. And as these shifts happen, I want to speak a little bit to hope.

For a lot of people, going into a new year without your baby can be really hard. Going into a new year not knowing if you’ll get a rainbow baby or if you’ll find what you’ve been missing can feel hopeless. I get it. I want to push you a little bit though. And I have some questions that I’ll leave you with.

And a reminder that everything I’m teaching you today, we are going to dive into so much more depth in the cozy place. You will work alongside me and other loss moms to truly integrate all of it. We’ll practice, we’ll fail, we’ll try again. All of it with the most exquisite support you’ve ever experienced.

I made this group very affordable. For weekly calls all of January and February, it’s only 200 and you can break that into two payments. Plus, I added a bonus of unlimited Voxer access to me for support in between our meetings and a one on one coaching session to use at any point during our time together.

Those two things alone are worth the price, but you’re also going to get lasting friendships, real connection, and so much peace, warmth, and comfort. You will come out of this season. A more rested, calm, confident version of yourself. You deserve it. Come into the cozy place. Okay, we are going to talk about reigniting hope during the new year.

I want you to ask yourself, what story are you telling? We all tell stories about our lives and we think that they’re just true because our brain sees things a certain way and it’s why two kids can be raised by the same parents and have totally different experiences or you know, I was just at Disneyland and And say there’s the roller coaster, there’s Incredicoaster.

It’s the big roller coaster that does a loop de loop and goes really fast. Two people could ride that roller coaster. One comes off grinning from ear to ear. One comes off looking for the nearest garbage can to throw up, right? It’s not the things that happen. It’s the story we tell. And so one person is gonna say that was the most fun and another person is gonna say that was horrible.

Right, but it’s the same rollercoaster. So what story are you telling? You have to take a step back and recognize that what’s going through your brain isn’t necessarily true. It’s just your version of the truth. What story are you telling about last year? What story are you telling about this year coming up?

And what story are you telling about you? And your ability to get the things you want and to find the happiness and the peace that you want. We don’t have control of everything that happens to us, but we do have control of how we look at it. Even in the deepest griefs, you can still tell a story that serves you and helps you.

That’s how you start the year in a different way. You focus on aligning with the season. You nestle in, you rest. You create shifts that come from love. You believe in good things to come, even if you can’t see them yet. They are coming. And they are here now. I believe that with all of my heart. All you need to do is find them.

I would love to help you do that. I’ll see you next time.