A new way of looking at stress.
Some studies report that stress is the “leading cause of premature death”! When you consider that, you can see that it is a quite a serious topic. We often dismiss stress, saying, “Oh yeah, I was a bit stressed last week”. Acknowledging that a week of stress makes your body work harder shows how it can contribute to dying young. Incorporating techniques to relieve stress into our daily routine can be vital for maintaining our overall well-being and helping to counteract these harmful effects.
Our hearts need to work harder, our lungs have to work harder, our nervous system has to work harder, we sweat more, have tense muscles, tense scalp, and we hold our entire skeleton in a different way (you can see a stressed person a mile off from their stance). Then we wonder why we feel tired and don’t have the energy to do what it is we need to do, let alone the things that we would actually like to do. But it is entirely preventable.
To relieve stress with natural meditation may not be what you expect it to be but if you take the time to look into it and start practicing living this way, you could easily add a few years to your life.
So, what is stress, anyway?
There are 2 types of stress, one is purely physical stress, for example, you go for a run and the exertion of the physical activity causes a slight stress on your heart, muscles, and lungs. This is stress caused by real events, physical events.
Luckily most of us don’t need to worry about having excess physical stress in our lives in a detrimental way such as in third-world countries where extreme hard labour can be an unavoidable daily event. In the example of going for a run, the body responds in the way it needs to, to propel us in forward motion but when the activity is over then the body simply returns to a non-stressed state. A slower heartbeat, slower breathing, and so on, and the physical stress stops.
However, we create the other kind of stress with our thinking; it is mental stress. Unlike purely physical stress, something real doesn’t cause it; only our thoughts do, and that stress is the one that is killing us.
Our thoughts create this stress, a feeling of pressure in the form of resistance, a physical feeling of resistance.
If we let it, thoughts will go on forever and the stress can go on forever as well. Now really consider that. For example, we choose to be stressed about eating, and we usually eat three times a day. If the thinking gets out of control, then we will continue to feel stressed as long as we continue to eat. And as mentioned before, it has no way to end and there is a good chance that it will shorten your life span.
So how can natural meditation help with this?
If we can understand what causes it then we can understand how to relieve stress.
When mental stress happens, we can do two things. We can either let thought take over or we can use the Undo Natural Meditation approach.
To relieve stress, recognize that it arises from the belief that things should differ from their current state. Recognizing facts and letting go of biases can be liberating. “What if things are simply as they are?”.
For example, I’m getting ready for work and I spill coffee on my shirt. Because I had the idea that the morning would run smoothly, when it doesn’t, I get stressed. It’s pretty silly when you think about it, isn’t it?
But really, if I can drop the idea I have of how the day should have turned out, then it’s just a matter of trouble shooting the change in logistics, a neutral response to the fact that I need to change my shirt and maybe call work to say I’m going to be a little late.
So maybe I will be late for work today, does that really matter all that much? If I abandon the idea of punctuality, it will be different; I’ll simply arrive at a time other than planned. Even if punctuality is crucial, the unavoidable fact is that I’ll arrive later than ideal.
If I keep investing my energy into stressing about the change in outcome, I am investing in illness. The return on investment will be negative, possibly a very big negative over a lifetime, as mentioned before.
Once we have dropped the mental resistance to things not going our way, then we can just return to the sensations in the body and burn out any residual feelings caused by the stressful thinking.
Focusing on stress sensations in our bodies, like a tense scalp or sweaty palms, is the first step to relief. You will notice an instant shift in your stress levels by just doing that alone.
By shifting focus from the stressful event to physical sensations, stress, merely a form of resistance, starts to melt away.
As mentioned, stress stems from our thoughts about nonexistent issues. By shifting to feeling our physical body, the body naturally takes care of itself. It is just nature taking care of itself, it’s natural meditation.
