It is a New Year. If 2017 was the year of inescapable stress, let’s make 2018 the year we begin to master stress. Let’s use it to inspire us to evolve beyond our current limits to new heights of good health, prosperity, and happiness.
We need an empowering new choice in how we manage things like stress and conflict so that we can enjoy more beneficial results and less destructive consequences.
Our best individual and collective thinking brought us to this critical time and place in history and unless you are completely satisfied with the current state of affairs in the world, you understand it is time for a change. I would like to suggest that not only do we need change, we need a change in how we change, or we will recycle the current morass into a different form of the same fundamental problem and history will repeat, again. We need an innovative solution that efficiently, comprehensively, respectfully, and sustainably addresses the current human condition. I hope to shed light and clarity on the patterns that bind us to the current reality we share, and offer solutions that empower us toward a sustainable life we can all enjoy.
All change begins with acceptance.
Acceptance of stress as a form of stress relief
The key to good health and wellness is found in your relationship to “stress”, not in the elimination of it. Conversely, the key to poor health is also found in your relationship to “stress”. Your ability to adapt to stress, while under stress, is the difference between feeling exhausted and feeling energized. Even seeking relief from stress, while on the surface can seem very inviting and sane, becomes a danger when it is the first reaction and deadly as the only response. If your response to stress is not empowering your ability to adapt to the stress, in real-time, it may be a part of what is ailing you. If you could adapt to the stress, you could harness it as a resource for greater health and wellness, and you would be relieved of dreading it. Stress is to a person what water is to a fish. Acceptance is key.
Whenever you adapt to stress, you create an opportunity
to harness its energy as a resource for greater health and wellness
If you find this to be stressful, and you are ready to stop reading, that is a common reaction. Rarely do we hear someone say, “Great! More stress! Bring it on!” Before you dismiss this notion as absurd, ask yourself why you need to decrease the stress? You have survived all the stress you have suffered in your life. Other than temporary relief, what do you gain from having your stress relieved? Are you left with the dread of more stress and the need for more stress relief? Or do you gain a greater capacity to adapt to stress and a diminished need for stress relief? Does the stress invigorate your health and well being?
When do you need stress relief? Is it toward all forms of stress? Most likely it is only the stress that exceeds your ability to tolerate, the stress you would do without if you could, and the stress you believe is unnecessary. Basically, any kind of stress that leaves you feeling overtaxed, overburdened, or mistreated, is stressed to be relieved.
Am I saying seeking stress relief is bad? No. It is not about stress relief being bad or good, it’s about having a choice to deal with stress through relief or dealing through adaptation. If your need for stress relief precedes adapting to stress, you are vulnerable to resisting stress and this leads to health problems later. Therefore, when relief becomes the way of dealing with stress in place of adapting to stress, then it can become a hindrance to health. Hence the adage from the Tao Te Ching, “The tree that bends, does not break.”
When you discipline yourself to use the benefits of stress relief to refresh your ability to adapt to stress, you can enjoy an abundance of good health and wellness.
Fortunately, we are created with an immense natural capacity for adapting to change. It is woven into the fabric of our being in the form of fascia, that when healthy, is adaptation incarnate. Observe any healthy young child, they are virtually unstoppable, they learn and grow and change at an incredible rate. They can literally fall down, wail like death, then go back to playing as if nothing happened. That’s power!
If you want to limit the harm that stress has upon your life and unlimit the bounds of your good health and well being, then look not to changing the stress itself (for it is not the enemy), look instead to your response to stress and change this. After all stress is just another word for change. To see what I mean, go back and re-read this post up to this point and substitute the word change for stress.
What was unfamiliar to you in this post that spoke to you today, that left a meaningful impression?
