Showing Up Whole

Claiming Inner Peace During The Holiday Rush (and Perimenopause)

• Christina Fletcher • Season 5 • Episode 17

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In this episode of Showing Up Whole, Christina dives into holiday stress, perimenopause, nervous system regulation, and what it really means to claim inner peace, especially during the busiest season of the year.

Stress shows up in all of our lives, but during perimenopause it hits differently. Christina shares her personal journey of navigating emotional waves, hormonal shifts, and the surprising discovery that inner peace becomes possible when you consciously choose to turn down stress rather than simply endure it.

You’ll hear her explore:
• Why stress isn’t just a feeling, it can be an emotional indicator of spiritual connection OR an emotional indicator of hormonal imbalance!
• How perimenopause amplifies emotional sensitivity and creates a deep invitation to rediscover yourself
• The connection between stress, survival mode, and disconnection from your soul’s alignment
• Why claiming inner peace is both radical and necessary

Christina also walks you through three practical, holistic ways to reduce stress right now:

  1. Reshaping your schedule — creating space, shortening to-do lists, and building in “phone-off” days
  2. Eliminating unnecessary drama — observing without absorbing, releasing old patterns of emotional entanglement
  3. Letting go of control — working with the flow rather than forcing outcomes, and co-creating with the universe

She shares real examples from her life, including how releasing control around family expectations and holiday traditions has brought more joy, spaciousness, and ease.

You’ll also learn how simple practices; herbal teas, lowering sugar, grounding rituals, small daily resets, and supportive self-observation, help regulate the nervous system and bring the body back into balance.

As we move into the holiday season, this episode invites you to become your own compassionate observer. To slow down. To choose presence over pressure. And to anchor into the inner peace that’s always available when you listen to what your body, mind, and spirit truly need.

 Free Gift: Download Christina’s Three Practices for a Calm Holiday Season including a bonus 7-minute guided medi

Christina Fletcher is a Spiritual Alignment coach, energy worker, author, speaker and host of the podcast Showing Up Whole.
She specialises in practical spirituality and integrating inner work with outer living, so you can get self development off of the hobby shelf and integrated as a powerful fuel to your life.

Through mindset, spiritual connection, intuitive guidance, manifestation, and mindfulness techniques Christina helps her clients overcome overwhelm and shame to find a place of flow, ease, and deep heart-centered connection.
Christina has been a spiritual alignment coach, healer and spiritually aware parent coach for 7 years and trained in Therapeutic Touch 8 years ago. She is also a meditation teacher and speaker.
For more information please visit her website www.spirituallyawareliving.com

Want to uncover where you need the most energy alignment?
Take her new Energy Alignment Quiz to identify which of your energetic worlds (mind, body, heart or spirit) needs aligning the most!

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Christina:

Hi, and welcome back to Showing Up Hole, the place where we discuss alignment in mind, body, heart, and spirit in every aspect of our lives. Today I want to talk to you about stress. It's an aspect of our lives that, quite frankly, appears often. And yet, over this year, I have really dived into how to claim inner peace. And hi, welcome back. I want to talk to you a little bit about something that I have been playing around with for, well, quite some time, honestly. Stress has been something that has been in my awareness ever since I heard Abraham Hicks talk about how stressed was your spirit's way of saying, I can't go in there with you. I find it a fascinating thing when you dive into the idea of emotional guidance systems, the idea that our emotions are our heart's language of what we are experiencing and how we are, whether we are close to our soul's light or whether we have disconnected from our whole selves. I find it fascinating to actually lean into that emotional guidance system. And then this year, I had my world blown apart, let's just say, as I rediscovered emotions via the wonderful world of perimenopause. It's a funny thing because I think a huge I've I've watched in my community how many women are experiencing perimenopause at the same time as me. And I thought that before the end of the year, I would come and talk a little bit about what this looks like for me in my world through my lens, as well as how claiming your inner peace is such an important part of this. So last year, last year was kind of my introduction to parimenopause, even though I think I'd probably been tiptoeing around it for a little while. Suddenly I was just feeling this strange disconnect. I was feeling like my thoughts weren't necessarily my own. I would feel waves of emotion. I was feeling all sorts of different things. And then suddenly I went, haha, I think I do know what this is. And I think it comes to every woman in a different way. And also, of course, everyone has different lifestyles. Something that I often talk about with my community of the energy reset circle, which is my paid community. Um, and we are all often talking about parametopause in there. Something I often do point out to them is that due to me working at home, having my own business, um, having older children, there's a lot of elements in my life that means I can maneuver things slightly differently than other people can. And that is something that I deeply appreciate. And it is potentially slightly a privilege in some many ways. And at the same time, it's not something that I take lightly. So it is important to put that as a little caveat in all of this. As I talk about this, if you are going through paramenopause, if you are experiencing a range of different things, I encourage you to listen to me talk about my own experiences. I encourage you to take into consideration some of the things I've been exploring. And at the same time, this is your journey. Everyone's journey is different, and everyone's needs are different. So it's really important. If there's one thing about this journey of perimenopause, it's the fact that this is your journey. I see this whole experience as an unfolding of ourselves. It's an unfolding of who we are and who we are becoming. I was I was talking to someone there talking about the the shift from you know the mother to the crone. Or even if you don't have children, there's still that mothering energy, that one certain period of time of learning and gathering and expressing. And then there's the claiming and the crone period of really stepping into your knowing and into your wisdom and to who you really are. It's an exciting, exciting time if we can just get all the ducks in a row. So let me just talk a little bit about what I mean about inner peace and claiming the stress card, because to me, this is the piece that has surprised me the most. And yet here we are at the beginning of December. We are, you know, in this time of building of holidays, seasons. It's awfully a very it's often a very stressful time. It's often a very pressurized time. It's often a time where our needs get put on the sideline. And so I wanted to come in and do this episode. Um, I've actually kind of switched things around to make sure that I got this episode in rather soon because I wanted to make sure that you were aware of your inner peace and why this is so important. So let's just talk a little bit. And I gotta say, you know, you know me. I am not a scientific person. I'm not a medical person. My knowledge of science is minuscule. I only talk about and take what I need. So I'm this is gonna sound very layman, and I do apologize. But let's just take the wonderful stress hormone of cortisol for a moment. Cortisol is what I have found and learned and observed within my own self of this experience is that cortisol is that hormone that when we get stressed, that's what spikes. Now, when your cortisol spikes, what ends up happening to all your other hormones, I see them as ships along the water. And when your cortisol spikes, you're throwing a cannonball in the water, and all the other ships are bouncing up and down, and they can't stabilize. So we experience stress, we spike. We experience survival mode, we spike, we experience a sugar rush, we spike. There's various things in our lives that spike our stress hormones. And therefore, then everything can feel very unstable, and everything is up and down and all around. We don't talk about stress hormones enough, aside from parameters pause, aside from anything else. We don't talk about stress and what it actually does to us. Okay, we might actually talk a little bit about the the the damage it does to our health, the fact that, you know, it stress is a component that has a range of different side effects, but we don't actually talk about prioritizing not getting stressed. We sort of take stress as something for granted. And when you actually take a deep breath and say, I will actually minimize my stress, you're truly claiming your inner peace. It's almost like inner peace becomes a byproduct of actually saying, no more stress. I've literally told my entire family over this year, sorry, can't get stressed. And it's been an interesting thing where sometimes that boundary has been crossed, and I have felt the wave of emotion come, and now I can actually feel the cortisol kind of get pumped into my body. And I know that whereas, you know, a few years ago I'd be able to regulate in like a couple hours. Now it's like, oh, it's gonna be, I'm gonna be regulating that for like a few days now. Maybe not that bad. So self-awareness to how your stress hormones feel and what this feels like for you, how it affects you is of the utmost importance. Again, I'm gonna stress this everybody has different feelings for this. It affects everybody totally differently. So I want to start with that. Be aware of how your stress feels in your body. And I invite you to start poking around how it would feel to make the choice to claim your inner peace instead. What would it feel like if you could actually say that what you get stressed about is less important than your inner balance? Give it a thought because really, this is a really important thing for us to do. Something shifts when you actually say, I actually don't like the person I am when I'm overly stressed. I'm not, let's I am not talking about well-earned, stressful moments. Your kid goes to leave your hand and you start to and starts to rush off into the street. That's stressful. I remember that feeling really well. You you you can feel the stress and you get the child's hand and then you feel it calm down. There's a natural flow with that. There's a natural flow when you know you're running a little bit late and you need to kind of build things up and you kind of feel that stress build within you, and then you arrive, when you arrive, and you watch as that stress hormone shifts. But we, as a species nowadays, get chronically stressed. There's the worry, there's the anxiety, there's the build, and what that's doing is it's that cannonball into the water, throwing all your hormones off. Whether you're in perimenopause or not, there is a momentum that builds from stress. Like Abraham Hicks says, it's your spirit's way of telling you, I can't go in there with you. So it's not aligned to your true self, it's not being present within yourself. And being true to yourself and being within yourself is the equivalent of inner peace. So now I can hear you, I can hear you listening to this, going, Christina, be real. Life is really stressful right now. Um, there are so many things that can stress me out. What are you even saying? So I want to go through three steps that I'm taking to minimize my stress. And I'm going to do that just after this drink of water. Just let me take a break. With the holidays fast approaching, you might already feel that familiar pull, the pressure, the expectations, the list that only seems to grow. And that old story of, I'll just take care of myself later. Well, let's be honest. Later never really comes. You find yourself drained out by the end of the year and starting the new year on the wrong foot. Sacrificing yourself for the sake of the season never creates the joy you're actually craving and feeling called to. I get it. When life gets busy out there, it feels harder to stay grounded within yourself. That's exactly why I created the three practices for a calm holiday season. A simple self-nourishing guide to tools that help you hold center within yourself. And guess what? I'm gifting it to you. Inside, you'll find three grounding practices that helps you come back to your center in under a minute, wherever, however, whenever. Plus, there's also a bonus seven-minute meditation to reconnect to yourself when everything feels really loud and busy. Because when you can quiet the noise around you, you can hear what's truly yours. You show up more present, you feel spacious, you move through the season with energy instead of always feeling depleted.

SPEAKER_00:

This year, let's choose a calm. We need it. Let's choose alignment. That's what we came for. And let's choose to be blessed, not stressed.

Christina:

So grab your free guide and the meditation in the link in the show notes. And let's make this the season we really remember. Okay, so we're ditching stress. But I hope you've actually, like, you know, in the middle of this break, I hope you're actually just taking this place of going, that's it. You're right, inner peace. I'm going to claim my inner peace. I want you to observe what comes up for you if we say that. Do you get a sense of guilt? Do you sense um, well, who am I to get rid of my stress when other people are stressed? Do you get a feeling of that then that's gonna put the stress on other people because this stress is a thing that you kind of like a ball that you pass around? What comes up for you if you actually decide to minimize the stress? And now I'm gonna give you three simple steps or three things to observe of how you can turn down the stress. You're literally turning it down. You're you're literally decreasing volume on stress and increasing inner peace. So here's the three ways I've done this, okay? First of all, I've observed my scheduling. I am notorious for long to-do lists. I can squeeze a little thing in here and a little thing there, and I often forget to schedule in time of dropping. I've also forgotten to give myself space at times to do things that I just love, like blending teas or reading a book, or taking time to um uh just rest or go for a walk. I've been notorious for that because I love my work, I love what I do, so why wouldn't I just do more of it? So scheduling and being aware of my scheduling has been something that I've been really exploring all year long. I minimize my to-do list to what I believe I actually can manage. And I'm also making sure that I listen to my body. And if all of a sudden I look at my list that I've made the day before and go, mm, that ain't so that's not gonna fit. That's not gonna feel so good, then I do give myself permission to not get anything done without feeling bad about it. I also have taken up scheduling phone off days. So Sunday, especially from till about seven o'clock at night, unless my kids are way off doing something and I need to be in touch with them, I do keep my phone off from that period of time. If I do need to be in touch with them, I just turn my phone on periodically. It's not a question of just keeping it on as some excuse. I just turn it off. Because I've realized that I really need that space. It's too easy to just grab a phone. And whereas I can't keep it off every day of the week, I can name one day. And that little scheduling tool has really been a sense of claiming my personal peace and really claiming my space. And it's so interesting because so many people say, Yeah, but what if someone needs to get in touch with you? And I go, Yeah, you know what? Growing up, I walked out of the house knowing that the phone was attached to a wall inside. It was okay. By the time we got answering machines, it was really comforting because I knew that there would be a message. We live in that same space, but we've trained ourselves out of it. So it's okay to turn off your phone. If you're gonna be really worried and stressed about having it off, minimize the stress. Acknowledge where it is. Okay, so scheduling is a big one. I also do my best to not be late. So I really like to give a good space between. So it's better to be waiting somewhere than rushing. And rushing is just a drain. If I'm gonna be late for something, I contact the people, I lighten up on it, I let people know so I'm not under stress. Next step. Hmm, this one's hard. I this one was actually at the very beginning of the year, my daughter and I looked at each other and went, this has to be done. And it has made a huge difference in my stress. I've eliminated drama. As a theater major, this is something that wrankles me, but it's the truth. The truth is that I've had to eliminate the drama. And I don't mean real emergencies, and I don't mean real people, things in need. I mean the petty little gossips about things, which honestly, I'm here to tell you. I've been notorious for my entire life. Growing up, my whole family was notorious at talking gossip. And it was never malicious, it was just there. I have had to take a step back from the drama. The, oh my goodness, did you see what that store had up for sale? Or oh my goodness, did you read about this? I've had to turn it down. And some of my family might be like, Really, did you? Uh, this is a work in progress. Okay. I'm not gonna tell you. This is a work in progress. We've all been talking about three eye atlas, okay? But I've been attempting to observe and not get emotionally charged. I don't need to get emotionally involved with things. I can observe. And that's that's been my main focus. At the beginning of the year, I knew that last year one of my biggest stresses was getting caught up in everybody's stuff. So even my daughters who are now older, I might like talking about their relationships with them, but I'm not invested. They're not in my head when they're not around. It's not something I'm sitting thinking about all the time. I'm not allowing myself to worry about them or getting caught up in the what-ifs of things. I'm in the present. I don't need the drama. If they need help, I know my kids will always come and tell me. I know that there are ways that I am present for them, and at the same time, I'm living my life and they're living theirs. Again, younger children, that's not necessarily the same case, and that's why I really want to make sure everyone's aware. This is your journey. I'm inviting you to look at where your stresses lie. It's not a question of repeating how I'm doing it. Last one. This too is hard. Last one. I've had to let go of control. I have let go of again, work in progress. I am letting go of how I believe things need to be done, unless it's for my own personal thing. So, for instance, hey, recently we decorated outside. It was a joyful, wonderful thing to watch my husband and son take over the lights for this year. It was always Christmas decoration was always my thing. I was passionate about hanging up the lights and making everything as pretty as I could. It was something that I felt I was doing for the family. It was a joyful thing to create this magical experience for everyone. And this year, everyone else got involved. And I went, go for it. That's fantastic. It's exciting. And you know what? It this felt so much more joyful than so many previous years to witness everyone getting involved and everyone buying different things and putting them up. And it's a light show. But because of that, I watched as I was able to enjoy the witnessing, the observing, the holding space for, the celebrating, the laughing rather than getting caught up in, but I wanted it this way. I wanted it my way. The same two thing too comes in different outings. I have released practicing a releasing control of when we go out or how we do things. It doesn't mean that I'm not standing up for what I really need. I will do that. I will say what I actually need, but I don't need to push. I don't need to clench. I don't need to enforce things. Rather, it's a question of making sure I'm listening to the flow of things. My son came out to me the other day and he was just like, I love working in flow. And it was such a wonderful thing to hear coming out of his mouth. Because that to me is the pinnacle of released control. Releasing control means that you are listening to the flow of things. Sometimes the flow goes against what you actually really want. Sometimes you're like, I really wanted to do this and this and this today. And then all of a sudden it just doesn't work out. And you actually have to sit back and go, I guess that wasn't meant to be. That's fine. Rather than trying to push and make sure that you eke out what you were wanting to do as if you need to control all of the pieces. Letting go of control also does mean handing over control to the universe. It's not handing control over to other people, it's handing control back to the universe. It's actually saying, you know what, actually, I don't know how that's supposed to work out. This is what I actually need to get done. Light it up. To me, that is a sense of freedom. It's relying and co-creating with the universal forces. And as you well know, that is the most important thing to me. That is, that is my joy. It's my comfort space. It's my passion in life is to make sure that I'm working with the universe in that way. So releasing control can feel scary when you first embark upon it. And then all of a sudden it clicks in and it feels just like freedom. So those are the three ways that I'm diminishing my stress. And again, like I said, there are times that I will still get stressed out and I will feel my shoulders clench or my jaw clenches. I'm taking care of my nervous system in a far more stable way. I'm listening to my body. I'm drinking a lot of really amazing herbal teas with a lot of motherwart. I am exploring a lot of, again, cutting out sugar because that sugar spikes your cortisol. Christmas baking's a challenge this year. I'm making sure that I have a lot of more protein. I'm putting things in place. And at the same time, I'm not getting stressed about it. But it's a question of leaning in to listening what you need and observing how you're feeling so that then you can shift to a space of flow and ease and ultimately embellish and savor and nurture your own inner peace. All right, we are headed into a busy season and it's started already. So I invite you to just put in things, small things in place for this coming month. Just start exploring how you can give yourselves moments of inner peace. Everything from evening books and cups of herbal tea to time without your phone, um, to walking outside, to listening deeply to what you need. And knowing that I always say these types of times of our lives are like becoming our own guinea pigs. Observe yourself, get curious, be deeply compassionate with yourself, love yourself deeply and know that everything is a season and we get to celebrate the seasons. I'm sending you all my love and light for the least amount of stress in your life. Be welcome.