Dear ,

Last week I was stuck in holiday traffic. Horns were blaring, voices rising, and beside me sat a man in a yellow sports car, clearly at boiling point.

When everything came to a standstill, our cars ended up side by side—windows down, his roof open, his face flushed and tense, hands gripping the wheel. I caught his eye and said quietly, “Hope it clears soon… rough day?”

Something shifted. “Try the whole year,” he said. I nodded to let him know I heard him. That was all it took. The charge in the air softened, his shoulders dropped, and when the traffic finally moved, he gave me a small, grateful wave as he pulled in ahead.

Moments like this remind me how little it can take to reach someone who’s in pain—a calm tone, a witnessing look, one line of recognition. When a person is right on the edge, even the smallest gesture can restore a bit of balance.

The Emotional Weather of the Holidays

Extreme emotions can flare at any time, but the holiday season is especially charged. Beneath the surface of joy and celebration, many people struggle. Studies show that three in five Americans report their emotional issues increase during the holidays. Among those with mental illness, that number rises to 64%. One in four of us feels more stressed this year than last, with financial worries, grief, and family dynamics piling up.

In Australia, Lifeline, our crisis call line, expects over 125,000 people to reach out this month. One in three Australians worries holiday expenses will affect their mental health; among those aged 18 to 49, it’s nearly one in two.

What helps most is simple: Connection works. Support works. When we meet ourselves and each other with calm presence, the pressure can ease and the situation can shift.

Real Time Yoga

In that challenging moment, I could feel the pull to react. We all know it. I took a conscious breath and allowed the energy to settle.

This is the practice of yoga in real time — to restore balance to the situation whenever possible. 

This is about how the mind behaves under strain, how emotions can intensify, narrow perception, and pull a person into dark territory. And what genuinely helps when someone is in pain. With even a basic understanding of mental health, you begin to notice early signs of imbalance in yourself and others. You can sense the emotions and energies as they rise, and you can respond before they harden. When this awareness is nourished by holistic traditions like yoga therapy, integrating body, breath, intellect, and insight, it becomes far more potent. You learn to apply emotional regulation in real time, to steady yourself when everything feels chaotic, and to recognize when someone’s anger is really a cry for help. Your inner state begins to ripple outward, shaping the space around you.

In fact, the connection between personal practice and collective wellbeing runs deeper than we often realize. Perhaps this is why this article on how individual consciousness shapes our shared world resonates with so many. We intuitively know the work we do on ourselves genuinely matters beyond ourselves.

Jayne Stevenson

Your Invitation

This season, we invite you to deepen your awareness of your mental health so you can become a positive force in the world. Use your energy and consciousness to uplift yourself and others in the moments when they are most needed. By understanding how the mind works and adopting or deepening daily regulation practices, you'll have real tools for those times when traffic stalls, family tensions rise, and overwhelm threatens equilibrium.

For yourself. For the people you love. For strangers in yellow sports cars who need someone to see beneath the bluster.

“Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render to the world." - Sri Ramana Maharshi

Reflection

This season is a good time to firm up your practice:

✨ Return to one regulating technique and make it second nature.

✨ Revise your mental health education so you can recognize signs of accumulating stress early.

✨ Match your spiritual study with lived experiments in daily life.

✨ Stay accountable to a teacher, group, or partner so the work keeps its shape.

✨ Practise in moments of pressure— traffic, family, stress — so the teachings live in real time.

In yoga therapy and spiritual study, every day offers opportunities to live what we study. Practices, teachings, and philosophy only reach their potential when they are felt in the body, breath, and mind. When we apply them to a real situation—our experience of anxiety, conflict, fatigue, grief—the teaching becomes medicine. This is how yoga theory becomes sadhana, and how sadhana becomes healing.