Transformative Practices

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Stress

Building Resilience Rather Than Stress Response

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Resilience is the alternative to stress response. Learn skills to increase resilience and experience joy rather than feel stress.

How do we strengthen ourselves in ways that enable us to experience challenging situations without experiencing a ‘stress response’?

Consider the joy and openness of a child engaging life.  With children we see curiosity, vitality, self-assurance, and ease.  As adults we may recapture these feelings when we play with children, connect with the beauty of the night sky, feel the splash of the warm ocean on our ankles, smell night jasmine blooming, or in some other small way connect in a simple conversation with the natural elements of earth.

It is the absence of a kinetic connection with our body and with life, that often results in an ‘authenticity gap’.  That is we are not living from our deep centre.  Power, clarity, even the strong internal fire of our ‘will’, benefit from a sense of connection with our physical body and with the natural elements.

Most of us have an accumulation of stress, and stress perpetuating habits, which maintain the separation from our body.  This contributes to an ‘authenticity gap’, that keeps us from feeling and living with childlike joy and openness.

Deep Relaxation

Deep relaxation breaks the chronic stress pattern.  The strategy for increasing our resilience is to insure that deep relaxation follows experiences that are intense and demanding.  One common technique to both strengthen our resilience and to release stress is physical exercise.  Intense exercise can facilitate deep relaxation.  Adaptive stress pushes our limits towards new and greater capacity.  Relaxing after engaging in this strengthening behaviour builds resilience.

Creative Play

Creative ‘play’ goes a long way towards releasing stress.  Our intellect acknowledges that most of life is outside our personal control.   Still, the mind and body are often locked in a holding pattern, as if focusing our thoughts narrowly, and holding our digestive tract tight, will somehow keep challenging things from happening.  Rather, let us attend to our authentic feelings and our authentic response, to ourselves, and to the situations that arise in our lives.

Release Control

Releasing attempts at controlling the external environment usually takes discipline.  Meditation and breath work help many.  Living with ‘questions’, and conscious inquiry or curiosity, also helps.   For example, the question, “I wonder how I get this book published?” is a more spacious stance than “I have no idea how to do this and I’m stuck”.

We need to actively cultivate relaxation, vitality and meaning.  Many of our habits take us away from rest and authenticity.  Identifying small shifts and acting on them can profoundly impact our health, contentment, and resilience.

Action – Here are a few ideas

Shift to Connection and Wonder

Sit quietly, connect.  Feel the physical body; feet, legs, hips, belly, chest, arms, neck, and head.  Notice the areas that are easy to connect with and notice the areas that are harder to feel.  Is there tension in any part of the body?  If so, breathe into the area.  Consider accepting that your mind may not know everything.  Accept that parts of life are not in our control.

Shift into wondering about ways of seeing yourself, life, this moment, and the future.  Wonder and imagine.  Look at a flower or mountain, or anything in nature, letting the mind shift from ‘naming’, to wonder and joy.

Notice how the body and mind feel now.  Do you feel that you have more space?  Can you feel openness where there was contraction?  Spend time each day, wondering.

Play . . .

Remember what it felt like to play as a child.  Go back to a time of innocence and ease.  Let the feeling of that experience permeate the body.  While still feeling this way, wonder what activities you might add to your life, that will bring back some of the authentic innocent joy of childhood.  Note the activities, and weave these lighter moments into the fabric of daily life.

Relax . . .

Within the constraints of your current fitness, try pushing the boundaries once or twice a week.  Then rest deeply after exerting yourself.  The push alone is not sufficient to adjust chronic stress patterns.  Push without recovery time, may perpetuate, or add to, the stress load.  So push, then engage in some form of deep rest.    Let yourself be in this state of rest and  spacious openness.  We want to increase the amount of time each day that we are comfortable feeling deeply relaxed.

Given the demands on our lives, this call to wonder, play, and deep rest may be one of the most challenging tasks.  Over time, we will increase our ability to maintain a feeling of deep peace and relaxation, even when presented with highly charged situations.

Great Sleep Reduces Stress

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Sleep is vital.  Being well rested is shown to improve our feelings of contentment and joy.  When we are rested we make better decisions and feel more connected with ourselves and our community.

Do you welcome sleep or think of it as an unpleasant requirement of the physical body?   How many hours of sleep each night are best for your body?

All mammals sleep

The requirement for sleep, in mammals, has an inverse relationship to size and relative metabolism, with the smaller mammals, (higher metabolism), requiring more sleep.  Humans seem to function best with seven to eight hours of sleep, elephants require three to four hours of sleep.

During sleep the body’s balancing and repair functions peak.  Without sleep, particularly without deep sleep, our body, our mood, and our mental capabilities suffer, then  eventually fail.    Rats deprived of sleep die faster than rats deprived of food.

Sleep and the Quality of Sleep

Good quality sleep, reduces the impact of stress in our lives, and enables us to respond rather then react, to stressful situations.  Good sleep reduces our sensitivity to pain, elevates our mood, and facilitates the metabolization of sugars.  Good quality sleep also impacts on our weight.  Research (University of Chicago) has associated poor sleep with unhealthy increased weight, and with the development of Diabetes Type II.

Do you have trouble finding sleep? Do you wake in the middle of the night, thinking of obligations, stressors, or problems?

Many of us have trouble getting to sleep.  During times of stress sleep can be harder to find, and we can wake during the night, overwhelmed by the challenges of life.  In the 2 am to 5 am time period those challenges can seem huge – even insurmountable!

How does eating and food impact your sleep?

A common contributor to poor sleep, happens hours before we go to bed.  Eating heavy foods within four to five hours of bedtime sets the digestive process in motion at a time of day that it is designed to be least active.  Yogic methods, and many traditions around the globe,  encourage eating the largest meal, and protein, fat, sugars, closer to mid-day or early afternoon.  Later in the day, but at least three hours before sleep, is the final food – a light meal.

What sleep rituals work for you?  What techniques and practices help you enter sleep and rest deeply?

Good habits around sleep establish a stable structure that facilitates relaxing, and entering easily into a deep restorative sleep; so does reducing stimulation prior to sleep.  Listen to soft music rather than watching television or reading a stimulating novel.  Having a regular time for waking and sleeping helps.  What else will help?  Sufficient day-time exercise, and a metabolism that is not overly taxed by caffeine, alcohol, or hard to digest food will help.  Meditation, prayer, contemplation or journalling can be  beneficial.  It frees the mind from ‘chatter’ or ‘clutter’.  A bath in sea-salt is also great as part of an evening ritual.  Finally, consider your environment.  Is the room temperature  moderate and comfortable?  Is the area clutter-free, and electronic-free?  Does the sleep area feel safe, peaceful and inviting?

Other specific practices to enhance sleep include:

Breathing long and slow through the left nostril.  If you lay on your right side, your breathing naturally shift to the left nostril.  Breathing this way shifts the nervous system, bringing about relaxation.

For two to five minutes, lay on your back with the legs out, slowly inhaling and flexing the toes and feet toward your head then slowly exhaling and flexing the toes and feet away from the head.  Or, for two to five minutes, lay on the back with the legs out, heels together.  Inhale open the toes wide but keep the heels together, exhale big toes back together.  Other forms of meditation and breathing are very beneficial in preparing ourselves for sleep.  Consider finding one that works for you.

Some of us find a tea, spice or herb combination helpful.  Explore and experiment.

What can happen in our lives when we commit to setting ourselves up for a great night’s sleep?

We not only improve the quality and length of our sleep, but perhaps more importantly, we see other benefits:  greater sense of continuity with our natural rhythms, a greater connection with our essence, with joy.  There is a calm feeling throughout the day, (in spite of challenging circumstances), much better food digestion, greater resilience and greater confidence in taking on demanding situations, knowing that the energy expended will be restored.