How to Radiate Calm & Joy Even Under Stress
FIND STILLNESS
You may only have twenty seconds, or you may have two hours, but no matter how much time is available to you, take that time to find stillness. Stop the conditioned response your primordial brain and body is triggering. Halt the swirling preconceived notions of how you act in a situation like his swirling in your conscious – and subconscious.
Breathe.
Breathe deep.
If that’s as far as you feel comfortable going, stay there, and the breath will guide, heal you, make you curious and alive, opening you to new possibilities. It’s beautiful, it’s possible, it’s with each person’s potential to unleash.
If you want to go one step further, pray, meditate, and open up to help even if you don’t know from where it’s coming, even if you don’t believe in God, the Universe, or, ‘any of that.’ Please help me do the best, be the best, for every being involved, including myself.
PLAY THE GAME
Did you know this life is a game? Sometimes the game is light and playful, other times downright vicious and unfair; the suffering is real. So why don’t we give up? Why don’t we throw in the towel and say, ‘I’m not playing’?
Desire pulls us forward.
Hope.
And love.
It’s when the game gets the toughest that you can radiate calm and joy because it’s as if you’ve yelled out, ‘Put me in coach. Let me show what I’m made of.’ It’s a shifting of perspective, it’s looking at the situation, life, with new eyes.
Yes, there’s no coach. And yeah, I totally get that you will be standing exactly where you are whether you think, ‘I’m here to play. Here we go. I’ll show you what I’m made of,” instead of, ‘Well forking fork this is awful and totally unfair. I’m getting drunk on wine, or ice cream, or movies, or all of them at once.’
Because here’s the thing, what if we’re being watched? What if we are the heroine or hero in the movie, and just like a movie would be mega boring if everything was picnics and relaxing on white sandy beaches, so too would your life. So there’s some turmoil, conflict, hardship, stressors.
What’s going to happen?
There’s a reason the three-part act is used in plays, books, and movie scripts; it works. We can’t get enough of it. All is well at first until the heroine meets a sudden danger, conflict, deathly illness, and swarm of zombie vampires. She doesn’t think she has it in her. Blunder and fail, scrambling around, then slowly, gradually, or bam, all at once, she grows as a person in some way and rises triumphant. Celebration and some semblance of normal returns. The end.
When you start to see both huge and little moments of turmoil and suffering as your own movie moment, you get to change how you react.
You’re the heroine, and here is your moment.
So what if it's not an attack of vampire zombies, but something as small as your two years screaming and thrashing on the floor of the grocery checkout floor, or your boss bullying you for the fiftieth time?
Now is your time to show your mettle, to show you can do more, be more, even if that means just remaining patient and calm and telling your two-year-old no, and your boss that you refuse to be talked to like that ever again.
It could be losing someone you love, and being strong enough for the first time in your life to ask for the help you need to heal.
Sometimes being the hero means growing strong enough to announce you need some help; sometimes it is to ignore the opinions and manipulations of others so you forge the path you know is right.
PREPARE, RECHARGE, TRAIN
A key ingredient to radiating calm and joy in stressful times is to condition your body and mind for them. The best way to do this is through yoga. Qi Gong is lovely too, but only if you do the breath work that carries you through the entire practice. Breathing deeply in and out the nose, no matter what crazy position you put yourself into, watching your response, stilling your thoughts, gaining focus.
Breathing, deeply and regularly, every single day.
Then putting yourself with purpose into stressful situations to strengthen the body and mind, like walking into a cold shower each day, giving a speech in front of a crowd, and saying sorry for the first time without offering any defense or excuses. Anything that makes you shy away, feel reticent, or experience fear, that is something you can use to boost your internal strength.
So the next time a stressor comes along, you can continue to breathe deeply, pause between trigger and response, see life as a game, ask for help, and meet the challenge with courage, and in the process, whether win or lose, we learn, we grow, we expand.
And that’s what life is all about.
That and love.
Wishing you internal strength, love, and courage in your life journey, Heather