20 Zen-like tips for getting married and planning your wedding

When you get engaged, way before you sign up to an awesome lifetime with your favourite person in the world, you’ll be signing up to a wedding planning journey which will help you to arrive at your big day. Whether you are the low-key types, the colour-co-ordinated tabs types, or the last minute.coms, you will ALL have to go through some process of making your wedding happen, because a wedding is an event after all, and any type of event that you throw needs some sort of planning.

And it’s this planning that has the potential to make people crazy. To make everyone lose their minds and totally lose sight of the bigger picture. Of course, it is unrealistic to think that every part of the wedding planning process is going to be enjoyable and even with the best wedding suppliers onboard you may still feel a little bit of stress, anxiety or worry. But peeps, let me tell you, none of it should be so bad that relationships are in danger of being fractured, that you suffer sleepless nights or that you cannot function because all your time is consumed with your wedding planning. NO. Just NO.

If I was invited to your engagement party (let’s just pretend you’re having one, even if you’re not!) and was allowed to present you with just one gift, it would be the following mission statements that I having lovingly crafted just for you. If you want your heart, mental heath and maybe even your hair to still be intact by the time you get married, I suggest you not only read this post, but that you print it out, pin it up and you look at it every time something in your planning process starts to get you down or simply have it as a daily reminder. This is not a guide to wedding planning, it’s a guide to how to approach your wedding planning and learning to keep the shizzle in perspective.

So here my lovelies is my gift to you. Twenty top tips to promote inner harmony and a peaceful mind in the run up to your big day.

 The Engaged & Ready’s zen guide to getting married

1. During every single day of your planning process try to focus on the reason why you are getting married. Namely that you love each other and you want to be together for as long as life allows you. This is the only reason.

2. It’s one day out of a lifetime with your love bunny.

3. Be realistic.

4. Don’t seek to have a perfect wedding day, but set out to have a wedding day that is just right for you both.

5. Nobody remembers the little details.

6. Some things may not go to plan. That is a fact. Deal with them quickly and then move on.

7. Don’t put yourself in debt for your wedding day, it’s not worth it. Literally. Debt is a negative that you don’t need hanging over you on your wedding day.

8. Please yourselves. It is your day. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.

9. Set yourself planning goals and try to be organised (not anal or OCD, just organised). Good organisation can help to lessen any potential stress.

10. How you are in the run up to your wedding day may directly be correlated to how you will be on your wedding day. Happy stress-free planning can lead to a happy stress-free day and the reverse of this could be true too.

11. Be nice to people involved in your wedding. Rudeness, anger and disrespect aren’t going to get you anywhere. People will always go out of their way to help nice people and you could really do without bad karma coming for you on your wedding day.

12. Breathing deeply and counting to ten really helps you take stock of the situation and bring back the perspective.

13. Let people’s negativity bounce off you. Let their comments wash away. What they might say about your wedding plans reflects everything about them and nothing about you.

14. Be present in the present. Your wedding has not taken place yet, so don’t get stressed about things that have not yet happened.

15. Start simple and if possible stay simple.

16. Keep it real.

17. Have your wedding and not someone else’s.

18. Make your own rules. Don’t follow traditions and etiquette if they aren’t right for you.

19. Ask for help when you need it. Wedding planning does not require you to be a super hero.

20. And remember that when your wedding day is over, the only thing that matters is that you and your love bunny got to celebrate being a couple (with your nearest and dearest) and that your journey together is well on its way.

 

The end.

Ps. I know that having a zen-like approach to wedding planning is much easier said than done. I know it was far easier for me to write these sentences than it will be to put them into practice. But please try. Try, try and then try some more.

Are you in the throes of wedding planning at the moment? Have you got any zen-like tips to add to this list and help your fellow newly-weds-to-be? If so, share it with us in the comments below.