By Lorena Saavedra Smith

Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

Every December, my body reminds me that although time is moving, some parts of me remain rooted in the place I left behind. I didn’t have the language for it back then, but this disconnect began the first year I spent the holidays away from my birthplace. I remember standing in my small New York apartment trying to recreate the sounds and scents of Perú: I lit a candle, played the music I grew up with—and suddenly I felt a tightness under my ribs, as if my body had pressed “play” on a memory I didn’t know was still there.

At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening. Today, after years of somatic (body-based) practice and working as a yoga therapist, I know this reaction well. My nervous system was remembering the environment that shaped it.

Systemic impressions

For replanted people—those of us who move out of our original soil to grow in new territory—I’ve found that the holidays tend to stir these sensations most.

Yoga philosophy and my own practice in mind-body-spirit connection have taught me that the environment is not something around us. It is part of us. We breathe with it, regulate through it, and carry it in the subtle layers of our being. Just as yoga teaches, our system holds sensory impressions, memory, and meaning. This wisdom aligns with what so many of us who migrated experience: When familiar traditions disappear, the nervous system notices. When rituals shift, our inner world searches for coherence.

For some, this seeking shows up as restlessness. For others, as a sudden wave of emotion. And for many, as a quiet discomfort that feels like longing.

Yoga therapist and ecopsychologist Lorena Saavedra Smith

Help from integrative yoga therapy

As an integrated therapist, I support clients through these moments—not by trying to “fix” the feeling, but by helping them understand what their body is communicating. I know this terrain well. What I once dismissed as holiday sadness was actually cultural grief and acculturation stress—the body’s natural response to celebrating in a place that didn’t hold my memories. These experiences are part of the emotional work of navigating multiple cultures, and researchers describe them as normal physiological reactions to cultural loss and transition. They often show up in shifts in breath patterns, muscle tone, sleep cycles, and the nervous system’s regulatory processes, all of which interact with the sensory memories the body holds.

Across classical and ancestral lineages, including yoga, ritualized practice (breath, mantra, offering, repetition) has long been used to orient the mind, regulate the nervous system, and create inner stability. Over time, this awareness has convinced me that a candle, a simple mantra, or a grounding breath before cooking a dish from home are not small things. They are ways of telling the nervous system, “You are safe. You belong. You can be here and still honor where you came from.”

Replanting for the holidays and beyond

Over the years, I’ve noticed that my own replanting process mirrors four simple but powerful movements:

1. remembering where I came from,
2. slowly introducing myself to the new environment,
3. reclaiming the parts of me I once hid in an effort to fit in, and
4. learning to weave my past and present into something that feels like home.

These steps eventually became the methodology I now use with my therapy clients. In many ways, the process naturally reflects what yoga therapy offers—orienting, grounding, re-inhabiting the body, and creating rituals that restore a sense of continuity.

I often share the following with clients during tender seasons like those around the Northern hemisphere’s winter holidays: If this time of year stirred something in you, know that nothing is wrong with you. Your body is remembering. And through breath, ritual, and gentle awareness, you can remember yourself, too.

We don’t have to choose between new and remembered environments and cultures. We can learn to belong to both when we let our memories walk with us, create new rituals where we are, and allow our inner and outer worlds to meet without fear of losing ourselves.

Lorena Saavedra Smith, C-IAYT, author of Awaken Your Roots, is an IAYT-certified yoga therapist and ecopsychologist. She offers coaching and therapeutic services rooted in ancestral medicine, ecosomatic movement, and mindfulness. 

Supporting research

• Eisenbruch M. From post-traumatic stress disorder to cultural bereavement: Diagnosis of Southeast Asian refugees. Social Science & Medicine 1991;33(6):673–80.
• Berry JW. Stress perspectives on acculturation. In: Berry JW, Sam DL (eds). The Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Gard T, et al. Potential self-regulatory mechanisms of yoga for psychological health. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014;8:770.