“What opportunity?!” I hear the exasperated scream!
Well, all of life is a test, challenging us, asking us questions. But we rarely make time to ask ourselves what it is trying to teach us? What is the lesson here? We’re so unconsciously reliant on automatic response patterns we learned as children, that we don’t often appreciate that we have the agency at every moment to purposely choose a different way.
Sometimes it’s not until we go through a ton of pain, one of those “crawling on the kitchen floor” type moments, that we finally get desperate enough to look for another answer. It does not have to get that bad!
Whether we are living with stress symptoms, or even if we are dealing with a significant health challenge already, we still have that opportunity to take the quantum leap that can transform our karma, our attitude, our enjoyment of life, and our health. It’s going to take some work. But please don’t delay it any longer!
We can get help to liberate ourselves from our ingrained patterns, ways that can also help us to better deal with current stressors as well. This includes conventional medicine, psychotherapy, bodywork, energy therapies, meditation, yoga, acupuncture and many others.
I’ll cover several simple strategies for dealing with stress in the next chapters of this theme. For now I’ll mention that bodywork therapies have the potential to release historic physical tensions, as well as current ones.
“To the extent that we can release any held patterns that no longer serve us, we can reduce current stimuli that reinforce outdated behaviour.” - Dr Fritz Smith in The Alchemy of Touch.
Bodywork can help the person return to physical balance and begin the internal work that they need to do to transform.
After working through a few issues we will gain the confidence to welcome anything that comes along. It doesn’t need to be labelled “Good” or “Bad”, that’s making up stories again. Ram Dass said “Love everyone, and every thing,” including the seemingly dark stuff. Ram Dass was able to even love the stroke that changed his life forever. He said it was like being “stroked by God”. Everything that happens offers opportunity for growth.
Next - Three Stress Relief Techniques - “Kiss Me Quick, Hardy!”