In part one of this series we talked about what stress is. My definition was that stress is the conscious awareness of a thought. Today we’ll start to talk about managing stress.
Most people don’t define themselves as being stressed until they reach a point somewhere close to meltdown. Yet there’s a range that begins with the with conscious thought and builds up pressure until you reach the tipping point that causes a breakdown.
Becoming more skilled at dealing with stress means getting an awareness that you are on the road to being stressed earlier and earlier. As you develop your awareness and speed with which you can process the details of life, you free up more brainpower and clarity to deal with the situations and problems in your life. Also the quicker you deal with these aspects, the less chance there is of fear and strong emotions biasing and distorting your thought processes.
What happens when you are slower to deal with problems and thoughts is that your brain gets pulled in many different directions. It starts to work on one issue, then you feel a pang of fear about some impending situation and so that becomes your priority.
The result is that you start down one journey and change direction before reaching the end. And you keep doing this until you reach the end of the day and realize you haven’t finished any, but you’re completely exhausted. And in the morning you have to start again only with more being added.
If you could focus your full attention on one thought, you’d have your full brainpower focused on it and so you could process it quicker.
There is an almost perfect analogy to stress.
Housekeeping.
I know this because neither my Wife, nor I, like housework. And so it’s something that we’ve had to work hard to consciously keep under control.
If you let things slip in your house, if you take a couple of days and slack off, you wake up the next morning to a mess. There’s a whole backlog of tasks that have to be done just to get to a blank slate.
Then there are continually going to be more mess created, more jobs that need doing as you go through the day. And it is much harder to get a house tidy than it is to keep it tidy.
This is true also of the mind. We’re always producing and encountering problems, conflicts and cognitive loose ends. In time these almost always will be resolved, but when you have them in your head simultaneously, they cause your brain to split into too many different directions.
Part Two to follow;
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2 comments ↓
Yes Rob,
you are very right; if we are Facing with Stress in the Now, we have to Deal with it in the Now… or else it will pile up and add to more stressful energies and frustration… it is also true that if we did come with a mind, then we also did come with he tools to deal with it in ourselves…
When you mention stress, lots of questions come to my mind…
where is the source of stress?
How did it originate?
If we know that, we can terminate it too…
Are we the cause of stress as well as the effect/result of it?
if so, how do we get to the core of stress to nip it?
Are the events of life stressful in themselves or is it in the way we deal with it without proper tools?
Is stress an accented energy?
Can we relate stress to our breath?
Can oxygenation dissipate the energy of stress?
Yes, if we wake up to ourselves within to witness the process of life as it goes on inside us, physically, emotionally and mentally… if we can manage to connect these aspects of our being we can see how they influence one another… for this, we have to be alert on ourselves, lovingly listening to what our body has to say or what we are thinking in the mind both of which gets the emotions caught in between…
stress happens when we have lost our true power of knowing to our sleepiness of not-knowing… in our state of wakeful knowing, we know exactly what is happening to all aspects of our being… in knowing, we are being present all over our being, giving total attention to it all… as soon as the thought energy is being directed to some aspects of our life, it becomes an accented energy that concentrates over a specific area of our eenrgy field and in keeping on staying in the not-knowing sleepiness, the stress gathers enough momentum to tAke over our sleepy-self… once we are lost to that, we have set ourselves up to be the victims of powerlessness; this canonly happen when we have given our true power of knowingness away to laze around in sleepiness; this is what we do as humans mostly… anything can take over us when we are in the not-knowing state of consciousness…
well, what is the way out? It is the same way as we got into it… how did we get into it? By turning our Witness-mode off.. to come out of it, we can turn our Witness-Mode on and watch what has been taking place when the Presence was away from our being…
Lovingly, be present with yourselves and watch how it unfolds all through the Present times and Absent times and make sure to return your Presence back to yourselves… it is amazing that we take off ourselves at times… make sure we return and take inventory of whatever happened when we were away… this is only possible if one is a true life-enthusiast who just wants to know life as it comes and thus live consciously… this is our evolutionary step - to BEing CONSCIOUS HUMAN. Whenever we are not-Conscious, we are giving our power away and are being in the default/Unconscious where there is no presence to observe what is so…
Feel the body, listen to it and watch its language; you may get access to what simply goes on in your mind; or watch/observe and be with your thoughts as you think without directing it else where, you may come to touch with what your body is doing as your mind goes on with this process… whichever serves you in the best interest of yourself, is the best way for you… nothing comes to us that we cannot handle; it is in conscious-handling of the energies we create unconsciously, that we evolve - in and out and through stress and whatever we can define that affects us..
Always remember to look at how we feel, because in becoming aware of just the body and the mind, we tend to forget the emotions that play as the meat in the sandwich! Watch what emotions push inside out and vice versa; watch them as they shuttle between mind and body… and ask yourselves -
AM I MY BODY?
AM I MY THOUGHTS?
AM I MY EMOTIONS?
If I am not my mind, body or emotions, what AM I?
WHO AM I BEING?
What roles do my body, emotions and thoughts have in my BEing myself and in not BEing myself?
- it is impossible to not-know the answer yourselves if you truly lovingly submit yourselves to the above… it is a possibility!
Sereena.
Thanks for sharing Sereena.
I think you’ve made some great points. One of the things that I’ve been most shocked and amazed at in looking into traditional views of stress is that everyone seems to think nothing can be done about stress, except putting your life on hold while you meditate or something.
I think what you’ve done in this post, is point out that stress is the side effect of losing yourself in the attempt to conform to conventional ideas of life. People are always searching for experts. As you say you don’t need any more information or anyone else to tell you what to do. You just need to listen to your body and your inner wisdom.
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