Celebration Archives - Inspirited Living

Purple is the New Red: Help Calm Your Christmas Woes

For many of us, the Christmas season is just as maddening as it is joyful.

From the rush to purchase the rights gifts, to the stress involved with making plans with loved ones, the hustle and bustle of the holidays can overwhelm us with negativity. A time for celebration, peace, and harmony, some years seems to be everything but.

How can we truly enjoy the magic of Christmas when a wall of stress and anxiety is constantly being constructed around us?

It’s time to break through that wall.

Only you truly know how to best succeed at this incredibly difficult task, but we have a tool that can help. A tool that will provide you and your guests with a calming aura that will diffuse their tension. It is not a fancy spiritual device or a harsh artificial chemical, but rather a creation of nature itself. For thousands of years, peoples from all across the globe have used lavender to relieve mental and emotional tensions within their lives. Lavender has a natural energy that lends itself to beings around it, creating peaceful atmospheres and calming minds. Christmas is supposed to be about love and tranquility, and this is what lavender provides.

This Christmas, use lavender everywhere you can.

Hang dried lavender like mistletoe, spray lavender water to give your tree a fresh scent, bake edible lavender into your holiday meal, give lavender essence as a gift to a friend or family member, or as your personal gift from Santa. Let its brilliant scent, energy and color replace the hectic and aggressive side of your Christmas.

Let purple become the new red.

We have everything you need to get started. Here at Inspired Living’s very own Beachwood Center for Wellbeing, we grow our own beautiful lavender, and use it to create a variety of powerful homemade products. Click here to view our store page, and take a huge step forward in easing your Christmas woes!

Generosity In Hand: The Generous Hands Project

This Thursday will mark the 395th anniversary of the very first Thanksgiving dinner. Over these long years, many a tradition has come and gone, yet the celebration of Thanksgiving has continued, and unified our country.

No matter a person’s creed or color, Thanksgiving symbolizes something that all of us can relate to; for we all have something to be thankful for.

Each of has people in our lives that have given their time, money, wisdom, and love to us. This holiday gives us the chance to express gratitude for what we have been given, and that is what we must do.

Sometimes we forget, that thankfulness and generosity go hand in hand.

Thanksgiving is a day not only to celebrate the generosity of friends, family and strangers who have gone out of their way to enrich our lives, it is also a time to extend the same generosity we have received, sending the warmth of love towards the hearts of others.

In 2013, photographer and Pastor Sean Bendigo took a series of powerful and inspiring photographs. He invited congregants of Madison Church and members of the local community to share with him expressions of what they were grateful for. He then photographed their open hands. Hands that are open not only to receive, but also to give. They symbolize the gratitude we hold so deeply, and must show as well as be thankful for. He called this collection The Generous Hands Project. Throughout this week, we will share these photographs with you, in hopes that they will inspire you to share.

To make sure that you receive the entirety of this wonderful collection, as well other inspirational writings and images, be sure to visit inspiritedliving.com/join and sign up for our daily footcandles.

Have a joyous Thanksgiving, and remember to give as much as love as you receive.