Hey, right before I published this I realized that my friend and fellow teacher Rachel Posner wrote a great blog post about stress. I encourage you to also look at her blog. She’s a formidable teacher, very skilled and gentle and I think you’ll like it. My article is about using practices like meditation for stress relief.
Power Over Stress
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I believe that humans are often more powerful than we can imagine and that we have much more control than we think over common but debilitating emotions like stress. Part of our control over stress lies within our ability to understand and experience the most real part of ourselves, a part that we may readily access, one that is wholly unaffected by emotions, the part that many call the True Self. Learning to control stress might simply require one essential practice, a practice that is synonymous with our True Self, the practice of Awareness.
“Yeah, that’s great wisdom, Mr. Miyagi, but what does that really mean and how does being ‘aware’ help me not feel so much stress? Even this conversation is stressing me out.”
Ancient Wisdom
Well, there’s some ancient yoga wisdom that offers some pretty mind-blowing and yet direct, cut-to-the-chase ideas about this topic. And what amazes me is how often it seems that modern science, psychology, and spirituality are trying to catch up to some of what people figured out thousands of years ago. Sure, they hadn’t discovered Oreos yet but… Anyway, some of this ancient wisdom I’m talking about is found in the Vedas.
So, the Vedas are volumes of ancient texts from India. One of the Vedic teachings that I love so much is called the Gayatri Mantra and it broadly explains how to dissolve stress (and other debilitating emotions) by realizing that we all come from one, expansive Source. It explains that if we could truly understand and experience our True Self, that of Source, we wouldn’t experience ourselves as stress, but rather we would see ourselves as the very thing that we seek: peace, love, and joy. The Vedas also teach us that our true identity is that of Awareness itself, the nature of which is boundless peace, love, and joy.
Most human beings, across all time and distance, myself included, all seem to suffer from the same fundamental problem: feeling separate from Source. Truly I believe that the key message that most spiritual and religious traditions try to point to is the quintessential teaching that we all come from Source. That and perhaps the best way to describe what Source is could be summed up simply as love.
Stressed
In part, our difficulty in experiencing our True Selves, that of pure Awareness, peace, love, joy and all that, is because we too often identify with things like stress. We may not do this consciously, but when we feel stress, we often feel that stress is somehow what we are. Our language even reinforces this. We often say, “I’m so stressed, ” when it would be more inline with our True Self to say, “I’m so aware of stress.”
Many of us have come to regard stress as a normal part of life. While stress may be common, stress is nonetheless fundamentally contrary to our True Self. The problem is that emotions like stress feel real, especially when, oh, I don’t know, it’s raining outside, you’re late getting your toddler to school, and you’re riding on a jam-packed tram filled beyond capacity without any seats left making the ideal moment for your kid to start throwing a grand mal temper tantrum which in turn elicits the icy glares from a mob with hundreds of eyes, people who are uniformly doubting your parenting skills, meanwhile Drunk Guy, reeking of booze and piss, is pressed hotly against your side and breathing in your face as he gratuitously offers you his sage and honed parenting skills.
(Let me pause to breath for a second.)
More about stress… Stress is part of our ego, the part of our being that is not our True Self. Our ego experiences all the transient parts of our being, transient things like emotions. But before we start hating on the ego, consider that the ego actually has a very important role. The ego is meant to help reveal the REAL and permanent part of our being, our Awareness. Instead of identifying as stress we can use stress as something to be aware of, something that helps us to practice Awareness, that illuminates our Awareness, not something to latch onto like it were a life raft in the ocean of existence that is drawing you down into a vortex of despair.
Meditation for Stress
Practices like yoga, meditation, and especially Yoga Nidra, help us gain a facility to actually welcome, recognize, and witness things like stress as nothing more than just another thing in this vast Universe, something to be aware of. Once we can learn to witness these parts of our ego, parts like stress, we can separate ego from our True Self and open to experience our birthright of peace, love, and joy. After all, like ancient wisdom says, these good qualities are truly what we are and identifying as them is really the most natural thing ever. So easy.
“That sounds great but after practicing this magical ‘Awareness’ I imagine that I’m still going to feel stress from time to time.”
Probably, but with practice you might not feel stress in the same way and you may not feel it as often or as fiercely. In time, stress may even become something you can merely experience with a sense of interest and curiosity instead of resistance and aversion.
When you experience your True Self as Awareness through practices like Yoga Nidra, your entire perspective of life can change, especially your perspective about what stresses you out. Stress can become just a thing, not your entire world. In truth, you may even develop a feeling of gratitude for emotions like stress because they may give you a great opportunity to practice Awareness. Through practicing and identifying as Awareness you may become unidentified with stress and can thus allow that misguided life raft to just slip away with the next wave of thought or emotion that floats by.
Yoga Nidra is one of my favorite ways of developing this skill of experiencing yourself as Awareness. It’s an excellent practice for learning to control stress because its superpower is relaxation into Awareness. Modern psychology tells us that we can’t feel relaxed and stressed at the same time. So, when I lead a Yoga Nidra practice, I deliberately lead students through a deepening Awareness practice that makes them super relaxed. Then we practice witnessing, either by my suggestions or whatever spontaneously arises, everything and anything that comes up, including emotions like stress, as simply another thing to be aware of. With a foundation of relaxed Awareness, you experience things like stress with an entirely new perspective and it breaks the Full Nelson grip that stress can sometimes have on our lives.
We may not be completely stress free after our first session, but it’s quite possible that even after one session you’ll finish even feeling much more relaxed than you were before the session and with a different perspective about not only what stresses you out, but even the idea of stress itself. Plus, then the more you practice, the more you will find that in time your entire relationship to stress has evolved to be much more manageable.
But don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. I’ve made a free Stress Free Yoga Nidra practice that I’d like to offer to you for free. This guided meditation lasts about 36 minutes and is designed specifically to manage stress. This is one of the tracks will be on my upcoming volume of Yoga Nidra recordings that I’m busy working on and will come out in a few weeks. This volume of Yoga Nidra recordings will also include a practice on working through grief, healing, creating abundance, getting grounded, setting goals, working with depression, and much more. I thought I’d give you a free practice to see what this volume of recordings is all about and because hey, the world could be a little bit better with you operating at your best and less stressed.
Truly my mission in teaching yoga and meditation is to help people be their best selves so they can go out into the world and kick ass at whatever they do be that babysitting or brain surgery.
I’d also love to hear the other positive ways that you’ve discovered to help you manage stress. Please leave a comment below
And hey, if you choose not to listen to my completely fantastic Yoga Nidra recording, well I’m not going to stress over it.
Photo by David Newkirk
By the way, my live, online Yoga Nidra session happening this and every Sunday (9 am MST) is devoted to the theme: Breaking the Stress Cycle. Please join me for a live Yoga Nidra session devoted to managing stress. I record each session so even if you can’t make the time, register ($12) and you’ll still receive the recordings.
Also, I’m still offering everyone who preorders my new book, Practical Yoga Nidra ($12.99), one free, online class. If you haven’t already and would like to, I’d be honored if you would click the picture of my book below to preorder your copy which comes out Dec. 10th. Send me a screenshot of your purchase before 9 am on Sunday morning and I’ll add you to the class roster.
Hey, everyone, I know that stress is a real and serious thing for many of us, myself included. I know for me that I’m a much better version of myself when I’m not hamstrung by stress. I really hope that you have good ways of managing stress. If you’re game, give Yoga Nidra a shot.
Blessings!