This weekend I went with my family to Whistler for a mini-holiday. It was fantastic! I haven’t been to Whistler (in summer or winter) for at least 10 years, and I can’t believe how much that place has grown – for better and for worse – into a full-blown tourist destination.

It got me thinking about the mini-holidays we take in life. We love them! A chance to relax and get away from whatever is stressing us out, without the full-blown commitment or the disruption to your regular schedule of a “big” holiday. Of course, you can’t go on holiday forever, and while a laptop-free weekend of lounging by a pool and strolling through the mountains was wonderful, I know I would go nuts if I was so carefree all the time.

That’s the beauty of a holiday – the fact that it’s temporary. As much as we loathe to go home and will tell everyone when we’re back that we “could have stayed there forever”, we really couldn’t have.

What we can do, however, is bring the holiday spirit into our every day lives. In fact, I like to think of my yoga practice as a mini-holiday. I have two favourite ways to do this: one method is to simply focus on the poses that make me feel great. I don’t push myself, I don’t do core work, and I don’t force myself to do those poses that are still a challenge for me. Instead I luxuriate in my favourites, relaxing into them, and just enjoy every second of my practice. Invariably, this ends up being something in between yin and restorative.

The second method I have is almost a stark opposite. I’ll push myself to the limits, jump right into the core work, and test the boundaries of those poses I just can’t master. By the end I’m sweaty, exhausted, and let me tell you, on those days savasana is about the sweetest vacation a person could ever ask for.

Of course, yoga is just one of the many ways to work a vacation into your daily life. You could read a guilty pleasure novel on the bus, lay in the sunshine, or take 10 minutes to do nothing but eat a delicious cookie.

What’s your mini-holiday?