DailyOM

1. We seldom concretely identify those situation and people we find stressful. To understand what brings on stress in your life, try to maintain a heightened awareness of your physical and mental feelings for a week. When you feel your heart racing, your muscles tightening, or your stomach contracting, ask yourself why. Keep a list of those things that trigger stressful feelings.

2. Make relaxation part of your daily routine. Deep breathing and simple stretches can be performed both at home and in the office. Taking a few minutes to sooth your soul by savoring a cup of tea or grounding yourself can center you, giving you the ability to deal with stress more effectively.

3. It can be difficult to let go of worries or thoughts that provoke anxiety. One technique involves dissipating stressful thoughts before they get out of control. Concentrate on the thought and firmly say “Stop” to prevent the thought from recycling itself in your mind. In doing so, you will be free of the thought’s power to influence your mood.
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healingarts | June 30, 2005 |

Michael Sky, from The Power of Emotion: Using Your Emotional Energy to Transform Your Life

Emotional suppression sometimes serves a useful, even essential, purpose. When suffering a severe traumatic injury, the body automatically passes into the physiological state of shock, blocking all feeling and sensation, and numbing consciousness, so that the injured person can better begin recovery. Similarly, when children experience physical, emotional or sexual abuse, they commonly report feeling numb, losing consciousness, and sometimes even leaving their bodies (they may remember objectively observing the event from above). In such cases, emotional suppression serves as a mercy, a blessing, and a necessary first step in the healing process.

Even during lesser travails, suppression often seems the best we can do. As children learn early on, no matter how much a parent (or boss, policeman, or other authority figure) may violate you, it rarely helps to vent your rage, and indeed, expressing anger-energy typically only makes matters worse. Grief-stricken as you may feel, crying does not always help—especially when around other people who will not abide tears, or when the time and energy given to crying might interfere with something else that needs to get done. The same with fear: showing one’s fear to others can undermine one’s ability to lead and/or interfere with the need for immediate action. Feeling sexual arousal at the wrong time or place or around the wrong person offers no other choice than to suppress it now. Likewise, needing to laugh during a funeral. (more…)

healingarts | April 9, 2005 |

Harriet Lerner, from The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You’re Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate

The thread that unites my work both as an author and as a psychotherapist is my desire to help people speak wisely and well, sometimes about the most difficult subjects. This includes asking questions, getting a point across, clarifying desires, beliefs, values, and limits. How such communication goes determines whether we want to come home or stay away at the end of the day.

This is no simple matter, as glib terms like communication skills or assertiveness training imply. Assertiveness is considered a good idea — if not a cultural ideal. But despite decades of assertiveness training and lots of good advice about communicating with clarity, timing, and tact, we may do our best to speak but still feel unheard. We may find that we cannot affect our husband or wife or partner, that fights go nowhere, that conflict brings only pain rather than an opportunity for two people to learn more about each other. We may have the same dilemma with our mother, sister or uncle, or close friend. (more…)

healingarts | April 1, 2005 |

Nowadays, we take for granted that air is composed of free floating atoms in the form of gases. But the ancient Greeks could only guess at the nature of that mysterious substance that sighed invisibly through the trees and filled their lungs with breath. They called it pneuma spirit. To the Greeks, the lung, or pneumon, was the organ of their bodies that drew in spirit from the surrounding air. The Romans likewise referred to breath as spiritus. To this day, we say that we expire when we give up our last breath, while inspiration means literally the drawing of air into our lungs.

Like so many ancient beliefs, those concerning pneuma and spiritus contained more than a grain of truth. Our brains, in which reside all that we think of as the human spirit, are totally dependent upon oxygen. Fully one third of all the oxygen used in our bodies goes directly to the brain. Evidence suggests that the more oxygen we receive, the better our brains function. Einstein’s brain, for example, possibly received more oxygen (and other blood borne nutrients) than most. Marian Diamond found that rats raised in a highly stimulating environment had enlarged capillaries and a higher density of glial cells, which are believed to act as mediators between the neurons and blood vessels of the brain.’ As noted in Chapter 1, Diamond found a similarly high density of glial cells in Einstein’s brain. (more…)

sky | February 28, 2005 |

From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax, to be peaceful, we my wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth. This is not a retreat, it is a treat. During walking meditation, during kitchen and garden work, during sitting meditation, all day long, we can practice smiling. At first you may find it difficult to smile, and we have to think about why. Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and bodisattvas.

I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling.

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.

‘Breathing in, I calm my body.’ This line is like drinking a glass of ice water-you feel the cold, the freshness, permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel the breathing calming my body, calming my mind. (more…)

sky | |

There should be no dead breath, no small chemistry, but intentional and full use of breathing as a feeling instrument in the actual and present ingestion, translation, and transfer of Life-Energy. — Da Free John

The purpose of conscious breathing is not primarily the movement of air, but the movement of energy. If you do a relaxed, connected breathing cycle for a few minutes, you will begin to experience dynamic energy flows within your body. These energy flows are the merging of spirit and matter. — Leonard Orr

Breathe deeply and gently through every cell of the body, laugh happily, and release the head of all worries and anxieties; and finally, breathe in the blessing of love, hope, and immortality that is flowing in the air, and you will understand the meaning of human breath. — Pundit Acharya

We so easily take breathing for granted. A fully automatic process, beginning at birth and continuing without interruption until the day that we die, breath typically flows as a fully unconscious process—we have no need to in any way consciously attend to our breathing. Just as we can expect to breathe quite adequately while sleeping each night, so can we expect our breathing to continue without consciously doing it. Breath will continue through the deepest and most unconscious of human sleep. (more…)

healingarts | |