Ease Your Way out of Stress and Into Happiness
I often like to use the image of a river as an analogy for life. People are frequently afraid to relinquish any perceived power and step into its flow for fear that they will be overtaken and be swept away by the current. So, they resist. This resistance leads to feelings of being overwhelmed, victimized, unloved and stressed-out. By releasing your grip, you can eliminate all those negative perceptions.
An easy first step to letting go is laughing at yourself. If you hurt yourself, try not to take it so seriously. Don’t overlook the pain of course, but check-in and see if it happened because you were resisting by sabotaging your ability to perform a task or generally not being present in the moment. When you make a mistake, ask yourself if you are just learning how to do something or if you’re resistant to the desired outcome (i.e. fear of failure or success?). Regardless if it’s a big or little error, laugh at yourself —not derisively, but as on the same team—and feel the stress dissipate. You may be less afraid. If you have an accident, be it a flat tire, crashed computer or delayed flight, laughing helps you to be in on the joke. It also assists you to live in a space of faith that there is a divine order and that everything happens for a reason.
Another way to lessen resistance is to release judgment. This helps to remove value-based blocks and can be applied to anything viewed as a stressor. A sound that is deemed to be unpleasant is noise. Events perceived to undesirable are sad or wrong. People thought to be unkind are careless or even malicious. By switching the thought process, these things no longer carry power. A fire engine siren may be loud but its volume serves a critical and practical function. Losing your job will likely cause financial and professional challenges, but it’s also an opportunity to make a much longed for career change. Instead of being rude, people might be preoccupied, feeling sad or ill, or perhaps in a hurry and be the reason they don’t park their cars in the most efficient manner.
Although you might intuitively be aware that you feel better when you breathe, it’s good to know that doing so can actually help you to be more in the flow of life. The next time you’re stressed notice your breath. You’re likely holding it. Many people believe that the very act of breathing is being in communion with the Divine. While holding that idea in mind, try breathing consciously and determine if you feel more connected and less resistant.
Many of us have an assumption that change equals stress. We’ve internalized this concept to the extent that even a hint at change can cause our hearts to race. Change is inevitable, though. By accepting and even embracing it, we can lessen and perhaps extinguish resistance to it. A way to start that process is to consider that change is taking place constantly in our own bodies. Moment to moment cells are dying and being created, causing tissues to grow, stretch and process. You might even begin to believe that you are made of change. Surely if you can handle all that ever-present biological change with ease, you can certainly handle a new policy or procedure at work gracefully. It might take a much bigger leap to regard the dissolution of a major relationship as anything but stressful, but it might help to hold onto the understanding that significant life changes can lead to inner transformations. That’s exciting!
Ultimately, stress is just a story we tell ourselves. Believing we are stressed out and that stress is bad will cause us to feel bad. By lessening our resistance to whatever comes our way makes life easier and peaceful.
