And try to identify the source of stress, if possible. You may feel you are stressed but
you don’t know why. Give it a moment. At the end of the day, if you are feeling stressed,
go over your day. There are a lot of spiritual traditions that have this practice of going
over the events of the day as a way to release them from your conscious mind, your
sub-conscious mind. The reason it is important or helpful is because if you can localize
your threat the rest of the system can calm down; otherwise it becomes a generalized
anxiety. For instance, when you have a fight (in a relationship), trace it back to the earliest
moment of disconnection, because the last thing that you said to each other might not
have been the reason for the fight. It is really useful to spend some time to locate your
threat. It is as simple as this – ‘I am feeling stressed at work’, then your sub-conscious
mind knows ‘I am not stressed at home’. Just saying that differentiates. It is important to
let your conscious mind say that and articulate it.
2. Pausing – In Zen monasteries the gong goes at odd hours in the day and when it
goes off you are supposed to stop whatever you are doing and just ‘be’, like checking with
yourself and see what’s happening. That’s the ideal way of pausing and it is also useful
when we are stressed. The tendency is to ‘zone out’ when we are stressed – it doesn’t
help, because the stress response is active and without your awareness, the relaxation
response will not come. So zoning out is not useful – this is not to say that a little bit of
distracting yourself is not okay, it is okay. But what is helpful is to bring your awareness
to ‘I am stressed, my shoulders are tight’… breathe. Just bring your awareness to that.
The second thing is to shift your awareness out of the problem, consciously. Why is that
important? That’s because when we are stressed we tend to constrict our awareness only
to the thing that is threatening us. Do something as simple as wash your hands, get up
from where you are sitting, pick up the phone and talk to your friend – but do something
that is different from what you are doing right now when you have realized your stress.
So, first bring your awareness to stress, sit in it; pause, feel it – what does it feel like to
be stressed. Often that will shift things by itself. If that doesn’t happen, consciously shift
your awareness out of the problem. Bring your awareness to your breathing, connect
with your body (for instance, you can tap your legs to become aware of them, feel your
face).
An exercise to lightly touch the joints
(yourself or another person does it for you)
Stress gets stored in our organs because our joints are blocked.
To unblock the joints, lightly touch each joint.
You will feel it relaxing, opening up. (shaking also helps)
Here and Now (an exercise)
(to get out of stress as stress puts us in the future or the past)
Just start noticing what is in your current environment (flowers, objects).
Or you track shades of a certain colour.
Do it for a minute – and that will bring your awareness into your environment,
out of stress.
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