Nourish Your Body And Calm Your Nervous System For A Peaceful Holiday Season

Holiday overwhelm doesn’t have to be your default. We’re sharing a gentler way to move through November and December, where your body feels supported, your mind stays clear, and indulgence becomes intentional rather than regrettable. Think of this conversation as a practical field guide: fewer hacks, more habits that actually stick.

We start by resetting the nervous system. A simple 20-minute morning buffer with no phone or news sets the tone for the day, while balanced breathwork—equal-length inhales and exhales for at least six cycles—tilts your body back into rest and digest. From there, hydration becomes a quiet superpower. Warm water, especially with lemon or lime in the morning, supports digestion and deeper absorption. Add trace minerals or a pinch of quality salt to counter processed water and stabilize energy, skin, and mood through dry winter air.

Movement keeps your detox pathways awake. If the season makes you sedentary, put your legs up the wall for ten minutes to boost circulation and lymph, or get creative with short walks, hot yoga, or indoor cycling. The point is consistency, not intensity. And when it comes to pie, stuffing, and cocktails, we ditch guilt for intention. Offer a brief prayer or blessing over your food, ask it to nourish you, and enjoy your "Yes" fully. These micro rituals—warm water, breathwork, legs up the wall, intentional eating—create a foundation that steadies you through travel, disrupted routines, and long to-do lists.

If you’re craving a season that feels grounded, present, and whole, this is your starting place. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs less stress and more steadiness, and tell us the one small ritual you’ll try this week. Your body—and your holidays—will thank you.

Episode Links:

• Season 1, Ep. 20: Unlocking Cosmic Wisdom with Numerology: 2025 and the Universal Year 9
• Masaru Emoto - Water Experiments YouTube
• Season 1, Ep. 85: Ayurveda for Seasonal Shifts: Aligning Mind, Body & Spirit with Autumn Energy w/Sasha B

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Season Theme
• 1:13 November Focus And Guest Preview
• 2:35 Setting Your Holiday Foundation
• 5:06 Travel, Routines, And Food Disruptions
• 7:38 Balance Over Indulgence Cues
• 9:13 Nervous System 101: Rest And Digest
• 11:14 Morning Buffer And Digital Boundaries
• 13:20 Breathwork For Fast Regulation
• 15:03 Hydration, Warm Water, And Minerals
• 17:05 Movement, Lymph, And Simple Detox

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hi, I'm Lizzie.

SPEAKER_02: 0:10

And I'm Nikki. Together, we welcome you to the Modern Dutch Collective Podcast, a space where we explore holistic living, spiritual alignment, and personal growth.

SPEAKER_00: 0:20

Each week, we'll share conversations, practices, and wisdom to help you live with more joy, purpose, and connection.

SPEAKER_02: 0:28

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Mindfulness, we are here to help you connect, expand, and hold to yourself. Let's elevate mind, body, and spirit together. And now on to Facebook. That's why each week this month, we're guiding you through supportive conversations and grounding practices to help you stay centered, calm, and aligned through it all.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22

You'll hear episodes on cultivating mental clarity and emotional boundaries, honoring the body through nourishment and rest, and tending to your spiritual grounding through gratitude and purpose.

SPEAKER_02: 1:33

Plus, we're joined by Maureen McLachlan, a board-certified acupuncturist and expert in Chinese medicine for a beautiful conversation on how, as women, we can balance our energy, restore harmony through wisdom and acupuncture, herbs, and holistic living.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

And as always, you'll find two guided practice episodes designed to help you anchor the teachings. One for grounding and protection, and one for heart-centered gratitude.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58

Wherever you're listening from, these episodes are here to help you move through the holidays with intention, connection, and inner peace. Let's step into November together. Rooted, present, and whole.

SPEAKER_00: 2:35

We are so happy, so excited, so aligned, like we want to say, you know, like we love to say all the time, we are living it right now, or these numbers would not be showing up. So I don't know if you guys listened to our numerology episodes, but if you haven't, you should because numbers really can show you when you're on the right path. And so Nikki and I are feeling it. And we're so happy to be here with you today to talk about one of our favorite things supporting our bodies through nourishment and grounding. We love to feel good in our bodies. It just makes life so much easier to just feel good when you wake up in the morning. And so we're here to talk about how to feel your best in your body during the holiday season when all these different kinds of things are coming at you.

SPEAKER_02: 3:29

Yes. And with it being 1111, we are a few weeks away from that, you know, peak of the holiday season. We get into Thanksgiving, everything throughout the holidays and Christmas, December, New Year's, everything that goes along with it. So think of where you are right now. How are you feeling now? How are you feeling now in your energy, now in your wellness, now in your routine, your self-care? You know, take a check, check in with yourself to see how you're feeling now, to setting to set that foundation as you launch into these times that can be busier, more hectic, you know, lots of demands and things to get done. And feeling that in your body, feeling it from a point of, you know, your mind, body, spirit connection, what we talk about a lot in this episode and what we talk about a lot on our podcast. How does your mind feel? How does your body feel? How does your spiritual divine connection feel? And today we're going to give you some nourishing and grounding practices that we've talked about before, but we wanted to repeat them, talk about them now, and remind ourselves, because even though we talk about it a lot, we still need reminders that yeah, it's a good idea to breathe or a good idea to do this for yourself. Uh, just FYI. So us talking about this today reminds us as well to set that foundation for us to have these grounding practices in your mind, body, spirit, particularly your body today. We're going to talk about as we're moving into the holiday season.

SPEAKER_00: 5:06

Yes. And on our last episode, you know, Nikki mentioned a lot about the travel fatigue you might be feeling, whether or not you're flying or driving or hitting multiple places in one day, or multiple places in a week when normally you don't do that. Your routines being disrupted. Maybe you're sleeping over, you're at your family's house and you're sleeping there. So your AM routines or your PM routines are different. Maybe you're eating at a different time of day than you normally eat. I know my in-laws eat at 5:30. So anytime they're with someone that eats later than that, it throws off their entire food schedule and their sleeps, thus their sleep schedule as well, because they're going to bed later than they normally do. Plus, not to mention the food and drinks. I mean, this is the time of good food, good drinks, other people making all this good food for you. Fresh home cooked meals all the time, hot lux. And so it can be very easy for us to go off the deep end. And not saying that we should not indulge, you know, I am just saying there can be times where we know that dairy does a certain thing to us and we decide to do it still. You might be gluten-free, and that bun over there might look so good, you know. And so you do the you do the bun and then you pay for it. You know, your body makes you pay for it. So there are a lot of things that can disrupt our body during the holidays. So this is just, we're just bringing these to top of mind here because n all of these affect us. How depend it doesn't like we're gonna travel different ways. We're gonna have different routine disruptions, we're gonna have different types of foods and different types of drinks that are going to call us to them, even though we might not, our bodies might not agree with them in a certain way that somebody else does. But these things affect all of us. They affect all of us.

SPEAKER_02: 7:10

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And, you know, the the time for indulgence and um indulging in any sort of way. Like for me, I don't, I haven't um had alcohol in three, three and a half years. But for me, uh, I, you know, love chocolate covered pretzels. I love everything on Thanksgiving. I can eat Thanksgiving food every day um for the rest of my life. I can eat stuffing and everything that goes along with it for some reason. That's just what my palate is. So it's uh it's it's having those um enjoying and indulging. But as Lizzie said, knowing what your, you know, your triggers are and how things um how things make you feel in your body so that you don't wake up January 5th with that holiday hangover might not be from food, it might be from the overindulging in other things that you had and um without nourishing your body. So there is there is a balance, you know, and how can we tell, how does our body signal us when it's overloaded? Living and feeling that you're in that sympathetic nervous system, the stress nervous system, the stress response rather than the parasympathetic, the rest and digest. Parasympathetic is slower breath, slower pace, not triggered when little things come to you, being able to take things with ease, feeling grounded in your body, feeling your digestion is in a good place, feeling that you have that inner peace and the life and where we live now on planet Earth, with how much it's happening as we move into the age of Aquarius and everything and all the old systems that need to crumble to get there. We are thrown with a lot every single day. Whether you watch the news or not, someone's gonna chirp in your ear what's happening in the world. And getting your body into a good place for your parasympathetic nervous system is a great like way to make sure that you are in the right alignment as you're moving forward with everything in your body and everything with the holidays and any indulgence. And the simplest thing for being in the parasympathetic nervous system, an easy way to do that is to give yourself 20 minutes in the beginning of each day to not have any outside stimuli, not have your phone, not look at text, not look at emails, not look at the news. The only outside stimuli during that time could be affirmations, or if you do subliminals, you're in that theta brainwave state. Setting up your day to be reactive only keeps you in that sympathetic stress sense all day. And if you say, like, Lizzie Nikki, I can't, I can't, like as soon as I wake up, I have to check my email, I have to check my phone. What if something happened? Well, you could have you could wake up 20 minutes earlier and people would still think you woke up 20 minutes later. Like just you're creating that time and space for your own self-discipline so that you give yourself that time to be able to be in that relaxed state where you're almost like the tree in the wind and the hurricane, and things are coming at it from every angle, and you are strong in your foundation because you gave yourself that that space.

SPEAKER_00: 10:17

Yeah, and you're still flexible, but you're strong, you have like such a great base that you can roll with everything instead of being so firm, you know, and and unyielding. I love that 20 minutes in the morning. You know, honestly, for me, I will say it is very hard to get 22 minutes myself. If I wake up early, the kids wake up early. It's like in order, if I want to get that last two hours of sleep, I have to be here patting their back, giving them a binkers, giving them a bottle, you know, like, okay, let's get an extra hour here. You know, so for me, my favorite thing to switch to the parasympathetic state is breath work. And so another very simple practice is taking a time to do some four-four balance breathing. So you inhale for four and you exhale for four. It needs to be balanced. If you want to do six, you want to do eight, whatever. The world's your oyster. It needs to be balanced though. So however long you inhale for is how long you need to exhale for. And you need to do a minimum of six breaths. Ten is a magic number, but six is the one that scientifically in your body switches you from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic. So just take a few moments to get those six balanced breaths in, and that will do the trick for you as well. So those are two very simple ways that you can make sure that your nervous system is regulated at the beginning of the day to start your day and get you in the right place, or during the day when you need it. So those are two things that will help a lot. You know, the other thing is that moving and being hydrated are also very important things. I grew up with very dry skin with eczema, and I will tell you, in the winter, it's a lot worse. And so just having that visual and that feeling in my body, I know that that's true. It's very dry time. You guys need to be drinking more water. The tip that Ayurveda gives is to drink warm water. So if you can drink warm water throughout the day instead of cold water, iced down water. I don't even do ice in my water anymore because I know that it kills my digestive fire. I'm getting back to room temp. But if you guys have the ability to warm up water and have like your tea kettle on and put it in one of those stainless steel mugs that can hold it for you and sip on warm water, it is actually very, very hydrating. It hydrates you way better than even just room temp water. And the great thing to do in the morning, first thing in this morning, is either some lemon water or some lime water. So if you can have that as your first drink in the morning, warm, again, that can be very great for hydration. So hydration is very important. Getting some salt in some of your water every once in a while, making sure you have some sort of healthy way of electrolyte replenishment. It's gonna be very important during this time. And then moving, getting outside. I know some places it's frigidly cold. Maybe that doesn't feel that great for you. You can go shopping. I mean, you could go to the mall. I don't know. You know, I'm getting back into my mall days now that I'm in very rural America. I'm learning that people still do go to malls. I didn't even know that that was the thing. But here in Alabama, people go to malls. So I'm going to the mall now. That's where my exercise gym is. Weirdly enough, Planet Fitness is at the mall. I don't know, but it is. It is. And uh, but go get outside, do a little walk, get some sun on your face, bundle up. It's fun. Get those coats out, those boots out, those scarves, those halves, like maybe play dress up a little bit. How often do we get to do that? So go outside, get some some movement in, go to a hot yoga class. If you like to be warm and it's really cold for you, go to hot yoga. Go to like um, what is that? That hot works place where you have your own private area that you can do. Yeah, you can't do it. Yep. Yeah. Like do something like that. Try something new. Maybe go to an indoor cycling class where everyone like is sweating together and working really hard. You know, get some, get some movement in and make sure you're hydrated every day. And I will say, if you don't take anything else away from this episode, that tip about drinking warm water throughout the day, I'm telling you, will change your life and your skin's life. Like just try it and see what happens to your skin. It's it's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_02: 14:56

Absolutely. Especially the lemon, lime in the morning alkalizing your body too. That's huge. The salt, the electrolytes, you know, extra things just to mineralize your body. A lot of our water is um not with minerals now because of how processed it is for our um, you know, for bacteria, for us to be able to process it in the right way. Uh, but finding ways to bring minerals into your body and ways to bring salt into your body. But the the water, you know, hydrating at this time, huge movement huge. I am uh partial to hot yoga because I teach hot and power, and I truly feel with your body detoxing, your skin's your largest organ. I even tell my students they can just lay on their mat in the hot yoga room at 105 degrees. They don't have to even move, they're still gonna get a lot of benefit. But the movement does so much for your mind, body, spirit connection. And something that can happen during this time is we are a little bit more sedentary. Our lymphatic system is the only system in our body without a pump. Our movements the pump. The lymphatic system is our detox system. So when we are not moving, we are storing and storing toxins inside of our body. So moving at least every day, a walk, something that you're stretching, or legs up the wall, waterfall pose also activates your lymphatic system. And that's something so easy that you can do while you're on the couch or in your bed, just elevate your feet above your heart. Like that's all you need to do and keep it there. And that's something that will really help you to feel that um health and wellness inside of your body.

SPEAKER_00: 16:33

And isn't it 10 minutes? Isn't 10 minutes the magic number for legs up the wall that gives you the most like scientifically proven benefits in your body?

SPEAKER_02: 16:42

Yeah, especially women, uh, especially women like with how much um tension we hold in our feet and our ankles, just reversing all of that is such a key, just like the warm water. Take away the warm water, take away waterfall pose. That's all you need to take from this episode. Because those things are going to help you feel, and they seem so simple, but we we know through our own healing journey that fast fixes do not heal you. The way that you get healed and the way you work and live in wellness is to have those micro practices that you keep around that help your body feel the best that it can feel. So 10 minutes, yes, is the magic number. And it's interesting because if you don't really do this the first time you put your feet up, how magical it feels to have the blood start to flow back down. It feels like you're at the spa. So why not be at the spa? Drink some warm water and put your feet on a pillow, right? Just enjoy that part of it.

SPEAKER_00: 17:43

Cucumbers out too. Uh slap those on my eyes. I mean, exactly. Just enjoy. I'm literally sitting here thinking about my tea kettle right now. I'm like, I'm gonna go put that baby on after we get done recording these episodes. I'm I'm ready. And I'm looking at this wall. I was literally, you're like legs up the wall. I'm like, where could I do that? And I would this wall right here next to the bed on this side. I'm like, okay, so I'm about to implement these things back in my life some more. I've been doing more tea lately, but I need to do warm water throughout the day. So, okay, I'm gonna put on the on the Wally World list today some organic lemon. Wally world list.

SPEAKER_01: 18:20

I'm obsessed with that. I'm a Wally World girl. I'm a Wally World girl. Oh, you need some boots, Wally World. Oh, you need some sweats, Wally World. Oh, you need some lemons, Wally World, like I mean you go there for everything. I love it. Love it.

SPEAKER_02: 18:36

And we we don't want you to feel like you'll we want you to, you know, restrict yourself, still enjoy, enjoy the seasonal foods. Lizzie brought up Ayurveda. Another thing with Ayurveda is giving intention to your food, the energy that's coming into your body. So if you are eating that five chocolate cover pretzels or five biscuits with butter, whatever it is, right? You just yeah, that's what you want to do. Give that intention to the food. And that intention can be a simple prayer over your food. It can be, you know, setting the intention that this food nourishes me and heals me. It can be just giving loving energy to your food. If you, you know, want to learn more about this. Dr. Omoto's water experiment, he did talk. He the way that it worked is that he spoke loving words into water and spoke angry words into water, froze the water, looked at it underneath the microscope, and the loving words looked like snowflakes. The angry words look like chaos. And that's our body is water. Our body is, you know, blood and water and everything. And what we consume, we're consuming the energy in Ayurveda. It's also known in Ayurveda, we're consuming the energy of whoever cooked or made that drink or whatever it was. So if they were in a bad mood and you eat it, you're ingesting that energy. So a simple prayer, Lizzie and I do Reiki, so we can do our, you know, simple Reiki blessing over it. If you have Reiki one, you can do that as well. Or just the, you know, loving energy over what you are about to consume can take three seconds and it will transform the energy coming into your body.

SPEAKER_00: 20:08

Well, and asking it to nourish you. Like also like loving energy, gratitude for all the hands that it took to get to you and the hands that prepared it, and then asking for it to nourish you and give you energy. You know, I love that that Nikki is sharing this with you right now because we're not telling you not to eat the things. You know, we're not telling you to not to drink the things. I love a good cocktail when I'm hanging out with people. Haven't had the opportunity to hang out with people in a while, but I love a good social drink. So we're not even here telling you not to do these things. We are all we're doing is suggesting, suggesting that you put some intention into the food before you eat it, which is so beautiful and something that we don't think about. I know that I did grow up with like a prayer before we ate, but that has been long, that has been long ago. You know, that is that's not something that I feel like is in at least the families I know in a lot of the modern day practices in the evenings. So I love that you brought this up to to remind us of this because I really like this. And especially in the holiday season, we do pray more often around the food. I think it's a great thing to practice year around. I love this so much, Nikki. I'm I'm I'm writing all these things down because I'm about to start implementing this stuff into my life here. My husband's gonna be like, where are all these things coming from? Yeah, right. It's coming from me and Nikki and our channeling. The universe wanted to remind us to drink warm water, to do 10 minutes of legs up the wall, and to start praying over every single freaking thing that we eat. And so, you know what? Okay, I can meet you there, universe. Thank you for the for the reminder.

SPEAKER_02: 22:00

Oh my gosh. Uh it's it's funny because I I do a Reiki prayer over all of my meals and all of the cat's meals and Kyle's meals. And when we go out to dinner, oh my gosh. It's so funny. And my brother and his partner will go out to dinner and their meals will come. And we were out to dinner, I forget what it was, like a month ago. We're at the dinner and all the meals came and I did like the Reiki blessing and everything. And my brother's like used to it now. He won't even start eating until I do my blessing, which is hilarious. And I love it so much because he's not esoteric like me. He's an engineer, and I love that he's like, Okay, you're gonna bless it. And then his partner's food took a little bit longer to get there, and it came on the table, and we're all eating and chatting. And his partner goes, Hey, hey, can I can you can you are you gonna bless this? And I'm like, yes, yes. So my gosh, it's I it like it fills me up, fills me up with so much joy that um and it's like these micro practices that we do that really help us and our energy, and and they can snowball and other people, you know, can see the value in them. So that's that's something that's near and near to my heart is the blessed food or water or coffee or tea or anything that I'm ingesting. Oh my gosh. You know, oh my gosh, I love it so much.

SPEAKER_00: 23:08

I love it so much. See, Nikki and I, we just let the freak flags fly these days. It don't matter where we are, who we're with. We are just, we're just ourselves, you know. And that's you know, that's why we're sharing with you guys because we feel so light, we feel so free, we feel so aligned. All these things are happening for us, you know, a lot easier these days than they used to. And that's why we're here sharing with you guys because we want you to feel light, to feel free, to feel authentically yourself. And like you can show up yourself no matter where you are and who you're with. And if you want to pray over the food, you pray over the food. If you want to stretch in the airport, you stretch in the airport. If you want to do Reiki in the car before you go into the conference, you do Reiki in the car and tell someone you need a moment. You know, like I mean, you do whatever you need to do to be good for yourself, thus everyone around you. I mean, seriously, just like Nikki just said about praying over the food, the ripple effects of you being yourself and showing up authentically yourself and doing the quote unquote weird things, the woo-woo things that that serve you, you you don't even know the the huge major ripple effects that come from that. I was talking to Sasha in our Ayurvedic episode, and we like talked about that part in Pocahontas where grandmother Willow touches her little willow, you know, branch down into the water, and you see the ripples, and you see the ripples. I mean, like this so perfect like vision uh like that we were taught as little kids in this movie that is so true. And so, like, that's why we're here for for you guys, and we show up and we record these things because these things they're for us and they're for you to help you feel great and live this magical, joyous life where things are difficult, but we're so resilient. We have so many great practices that we know who to lean on, what practice to lean on, what things to do to help us move forward in the highest best way possible for us. And so that's this is why we're here. So, like I'm just I didn't realize that this is what this episode was gonna be, but I'm loving this episode so much because I'm getting so many things from this that I'm about to go walk out this door here and announce to my husband that we're implementing.

SPEAKER_02: 25:30

That's amazing. So, and so with that, you know, as you're listening, think of one small ritual you can do this week. What would that be that you can start to weave into your day? Just a few seconds, a minute, here and there, 10 minutes, whatever it is. What is something that you can do to start to set the foundation here as you're listening to this episode? Whether you listen to it on 1111, when you listen to it, that time is the right time for you. How can you set that ritual for you to start to have the snowball effect, to start to be in your own energy, to start to set that time for yourself and for the holiday season or whenever it is that you listen to this?

SPEAKER_00: 26:08

Yes. Yes, I love it. I love it. And I don't even want to talk about anything else. Like I think this is where we end it. And Nikki has a phenomenal interview coming up next week that you guys really need to listen to. Um, can you share a little bit about what you guys talked about?

SPEAKER_02: 26:24

Absolutely. So next week I am bringing in my acupuncturist, uh, that is Maureen McLaughlin. I've been working with Maureen for several years. She's actually how I started doing my Zen acupuncture. It's facial acupuncture because I have not wanted to do Botox. I've wanted to do natural. So I do natural ways to promote the longevity, you know, the qi that's moving through our body, glow from within. So she was my practitioner, I found from that. And she's been on with me through my acupuncture journey, so much so that she's moved two and a half hours away. And I drive that one way to see her for my appointments. Now she's not down the street anymore because I think she has so much knowledge, so much passion, so much passion to help her clients. And her specialty is in fertility. So we talk about that. We talk about the herbs that she uses for her clients' fertility journeys. We talk about how acupuncture can help you to release anything inside of you, move your body around. We talk about several different of the meridians and areas in your body that are most important. I wouldn't say most important, that are, you know, kind of the highlights that help your body to set the tone for how you will be and move forward. We also touch on paramenopause, menopause, what that looks like, um, how herbs can also, because she is, you know, she's has her Chinese medicine and also as an herbalist, she's able to help everyone with all the herbs that she um gives for menopause, paramenopause, hot flashes, a lot with women's health. So it was a beautiful conversation, and she's a lovely human and she really cares about her clients. She's very grounding and very real. So I think you'll love that episode, especially as we're kind of closing out Thanksgiving and getting into that point at the end of November, moving into December and learning, you know, different ways that you can promote yourself to be healthy from within and how acupuncture and herbs will help you as well.

SPEAKER_00: 28:20

Oh, I love that. I'm so excited to listen to it. I always listen to Nikki's episodes. I always listen to Nikki's episodes because I'm not there. And so if I'm gonna add and I'm gonna add a plus one in that download column. So I will do it. Algorithms. Okay. Exactly. Algorithms. Algorithms. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, you guys, for coming to another episode. We're again episode 101, season two, our very first episode of our next season. We're so happy to be here. We're grateful for the year. We're grateful for all of you. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. We love you all. We're not going anywhere. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 29:03

Yeah. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here on our journey. And we appreciate all of you. Have a wonderful holiday season and close out of the year. We'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_00: 29:21

Thank you so much for spending time with us on the Modern Zen Collective Podcast. This podcast is at the heart of everything that we do, created to guide, inspire, and walk alongside you on your journey. If you're ready for more, explore our Practitioner Collective, a trusted resource of experts in healing and wellness to help you deepen your practice for fast track transformation. And be sure to join our Independence to get first access to new offerings, challenges, and exclusive website. You'll find all the links in the show notes.