Overcome Stress by Witnessing, not Resisting
Stress will age you faster than anything else and it’s one of the most difficult things to avoid. I’m talking about bad stress—not good stress like you would feel on your wedding day. Both kinds get your adrenalin flowing but it’s the negative stress that can do major damage to your body, mind, and spirit.
It all starts with everyday life and the events that flow into your life. Some events don’t cause a ripple in your psyche because you have no stored traumatic memories associated with them. The same event for someone else might cause them to come unglued.
For example, let’s say the first batch of cookies you put into the oven today burned. You just scrape the burnt cookies into the compost container and prepare the cookie sheet for the second batch, since that’s an event that already happened and there’s no way to undo it. Well, maybe there’s a little, “Damn,” but you quickly recover.
Another person might react quite differently. Suppose he suffered a trauma as a child when his parents were yelling at each other while cookies were quietly burning in the oven and filling the room with smoke. He had watched as his mother took the cookie sheet of blackened cookies out of the oven and flung them into the face of his father. An even more traumatic fight had then ensued. That person experiencing burnt cookies today might pound his fists on the counter and scream at the top of his lungs.
My point is that it’s not the event that causes the stress—it’s resisting that event, rather than accepting it—especially since it has already happened. Life brings all kinds of events and most of us just keep reacting the same way time after time to the ones we find stressful.
Just so we’re clear, accepting an event doesn’t mean you don’t take action. You don’t say, “Oh well, it rained in when I left the window open and soaked the curtains,” and walk out of the room. No. You close the window. It already happened so there’s no sense in resisting “what is,” but you do what you can to alleviate the situation.
Handling stressful events is something I’m working on for myself and I find that meditation helps a great deal. When I meditate, I don’t just sit there with a blank mind for half an hour, drifting on some cosmic cloud. Thoughts come into my mind and I witness them and gently let them pass. I don’t jump in and go along with the story my thoughts are creating.
By witnessing my thoughts in meditation, it forms a practice for everyday life of watching events unfold and being aware of my thoughts.
Ellen Wood of Questa is an artist using the name Maruska as well as the award-winning author of the series of books, “The Secret Method for Growing Younger,” available on Amazon. Contact her at ellen@howtogrowyounger.com. Her website is www.howtogrowyounger.com.
