SGM June 2014 Weekly Message Five: “Three Steps to Release Stress Right Now!”
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“3 Steps From Stress to Empowerment”
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Welcome back to the June 2014 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM!
This week we wrap up our exploration of life’s Big Questions by tackling an issue that affects us all more deeply than we might imagine—STRESS! Now, more than ever, stress is a fact of life that we all must learn to handle well. You would be a rare person indeed, if you didn’t at least occasionally, if not daily, ask yourself the question, “How can I handle the stress I’m feeling?”
These days, I think it’s safe to say that we all experience moments of being stressed out. However, do you really know how deeply stress is affecting your health, your feelings of inspiration and motivation, and your ability to take steps to achieve what your heart desires? Stress is more than those spikes of overwhelm that we feel periodically. In today’s hyperactive, over-stimulated culture, stress is a constant, underlying feeling of pressure that never relents. It’s so prevalent and persistent that we may not realize just how deeply it impacts us or what it really means to feel truly peaceful, empowered, and inspired.
Stress accumulates in our body and saps our vitality. From past trauma, to unending To Do Lists, to the constant demands on our time and attention, stressors subconsciously drain our energy, inhibit our immune function, sabotage our digestion, and leave us susceptible to exhaustion, depression, chronic illness, and cancer. Stress robs us of the ability to feel joyful, inspired, connected, and alive. It can steal the feeling that life is a sacred, purposeful journey.
Fortunately and most importantly, because of the nature of our stress response, we can do something about it!
In this Weekly Message, we’ll explore 3 steps you can practice in meditation and in the stressful moments of your life to release stress and step into empowerment. These three steps are skills you can master, so that stress no longer rules your life. To help you get there, we’ll practice a meditation that guides you through these three steps in a stressful situation in your life, so you can move forward toward what you truly desire in that situation.
Let’s begin by talking about why meditation is such a powerful tool in your quest to handle stress.
I define meditation as a practice of consciously guiding your attention to relax your body, calm your emotions, and clear your mind. It’s a powerful way to consciously activate your body’s natural relaxation response—which is your natural, built-in antidote to feeling stressed-out.
Through daily meditation practice, you give your body, heart, and mind daily moments of relief, so your innate body wisdom can take over. You release accumulated layers of stress, so you can connect to inner guidance and inspired action. Each time you practice, and the deeper you go into your practice, the more you release the traumas and stressful moments that have accumulated in your body. You also create a baseline of relaxed, positive, calm, clear awareness that becomes easier and easier to return to whenever you need.
Meditation is not some exotic esoteric technique. It’s a natural human ability. It’s a natural capacity that is built into your brain. Meditation practice grows your ability to do some essential things with your mind. It grows your ability to focus your attention, calmly observe your experiences, release layers of tension, and connect to a Core part of you that knows what to do to move forward in your life. Through daily practice, you discover that you can choose to relax deeply and return to calm clarity whenever you need.
The type of meditation we’re going to practice today grows three specific inner skills: self-observation, conscious relaxation, and sensing inner guidance. These are invaluable, severely under-estimated skills that anyone can learn to master. You get better and better at these skills through consistent practice over time. Daily meditation practice is a great way to do this. By having a daily meditation practice, you’ll notice yourself more able to live from a state of relaxed, positive, clear, and empowered awareness and return to it whenever you get pulled away from it.
So, how, specifically, do meditation skills empower you to handle stress?
Let’s review a fundamental truth behind all our experiences that explains this. You’ve heard me describe this truth in many ways. Last week, I described it as the fact that “Consciousness shapes your experiences.” I often call this The Law Of Perspective, which says that:
The experiences you have are the result of the way you are looking at things, the perspective of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors you are engaged in at the moment.
In the context of stress this means that stressors are always present. Life is full of demands. These are not going away. However, it’s how you relate to these demands that determines if they will stress you out or not. This insight gives us an important psychological definition of stress, which goes like this:
Stress is the perception of demands and challenges combined with the perception that you may not be able to handle those demands and challenges.
This definition is powerful because it helps us realize that stressors are always with us and that what stresses us out is thinking that we might not be able to handle the stressors we’re facing. It’s actually quite empowering to realize this and become very clear about it in your moments of stress. You don’t necessarily have to change your life or eliminate the stressors around you to handle stress (though you may choose to make changes, if that’s what you need). Your power lies in how you relate to life’s inevitable stressors.
Understanding this definition of stress is so important because it helps us see how we can immediately intervene to shift how stress affects us. It’s all about releasing our stress-producing perspectives using innate skills that we all possess. In other words, stressors will always be present, but we can develop inner skills to see them in a new light and relate to them proactively. Specifically, we can take three steps to change how stressors affect us. Here’s a
3-Step Process to shift from Stress to Empowerment:
1. Observe and accept your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without being caught up in or overwhelmed by them. Step back and witness them as if you are an outside observer. This helps you mentally separate from the stress you feel, so you can move on to Step Two.
2. Release your stressful thoughts, feelings, and behaviors using Conscious Relaxation cues: relaxed aligned posture, inner smiling, deep breathing, and feeling inner body sensations. This initiates your body’s natural relaxation response, releasing the layers of accumulated tension from your body. This puts you in a renewed state of mind and body that enables you to take Step Three.
3. Sense Inner Guidance: connect to what is most important to you and to your Next Step toward that. This step shifts you into an empowered state in which you feel positive about action you can take to move forward productively instead of feeling overwhelmed and powerless.
We’ve talked about these three steps many times before on SGM. Several months ago, we practiced the following meditation to help us apply them. Yet, one thing I’ve learned from the weekly meditation groups that I lead and from my own practice, is that repetition is the mother of learning.
There is so much information bombarding us all the time. It’s so easy to lose focus and get pulled away from what we know to do. So, it’s important to be called back to these three steps again and again. It’s absolutely essential that we remind ourselves of these three steps—and repeatedly use them in specific situations of our lives—so we master them and can call on them at any time!
So, if you will, I’d like you to call to mind one recent stressful experience. It can be anything that made you feel uncomfortable, on edge, or pushed into overwhelm. Once you have that in mind, you can follow along with the guided audio in PART B of the recording above to shift from stress to empowerment in this situation. The meditation script appears below for your reference.
I would love to hear your results with this meditation in our Discussion below.
To your inner peace and empowerment,
Kevin
PART B: “3 Steps From Stress to Empowerment”
Guided Meditation Script
In this audio, I’ll guide you through three inner steps to transform an experience of stress into empowerment. By following along, you’ll grow your inner skills of Self-Observation, Conscious Relaxation, and Inner Guidance, so you can tap into them more easily anytime you need.
So, if you will, call to mind one stressful experience from this past week. Think of one moment that put you on edge and challenged you. It could be a moment in traffic, a deadline you faced, being late for an appointment, an argument or interpersonal conflict . . . any moment of tension or discomfort. . .Go ahead and choose one to work with now. . .
Now, I’ll guide you to witness some important details of this experience from a calm observer’s point of view. In other words, I am not asking you to relive this experience or go through the experience of it again, but to notice some details about this experience as if you are a curious scientific observer. See if it’s possible to make note of what happened without judging it as good or bad, just noticing “what is” and accepting whatever you notice with a gentle, easy-going attitude.
So, if you will, call to mind where you were when this event took place. Notice any important details of the environment . . . Recall who you were with and what happened. . .Notice any thoughts that went through your mind. . .Notice how you felt when you thought those things. . .Notice what you felt pulled to do when you were thinking and feeling that way. . . Notice anything that arises as you recall this experience. . . See if it’s possible to accept what you thought, felt, and did, and what others said and did without judging yourself or them as good or bad—just noticing what happened and letting it be O.K.
Is it possible that everyone, including you, was doing the best they could given what they knew, what had happened to them in the past, and what was happening at the moment? Notice how you feel when you think this way. . .
Notice if you are hanging onto any judgments toward yourself or others about what happened. . .Just notice and accept whatever comes up for you—and, as best as you can, allow it to all to be O.K. . .
If you feel tension about any of this, just notice that. Allow whatever you feel to be O.K.
If you feel a desire to forgive yourself or others for anything related to this experience, feel free to do that now.
If you feel a desire to let go of anything you’re hanging onto about this experience, notice that, and feel free to let it all go right now, if you’d like to.
Now, I’ll guide you to consciously relax your body.
So, if you will, feel the bottoms of both feet and your toes. Allow the bottoms of your feet and your toes to soften and relax, consciously letting go of any tension . . . Feel the palms of both hands and your fingers. Allow the palms of both hands and your fingers to soften and relax. As your hands and fingers relax, allow that soft easy feeling to spread through your arms and shoulders and allow them to relax down.
Now, focus to the top of your head. Imagine a string attached to the top of your head and allow that string to draw your spine into a nice alignment, feeling a sense of spaciousness up through your spine and through the top of your head.
Tuck your chin just slightly to release any tension in the back of your neck.
Smile, a gentle, easy smile of acceptance and gratitude for this moment to consciously relax and let go. Allow that feeling of smiling to relax your jaw and your eyes . . . Release any tension from your eyebrows and your forehead. Allow that feeling of smiling to wash down through your whole body, creating a relaxed positive inner environment, nurturing every cell.
Take a few slow deep breaths. As you inhale, imagine and feel as if your whole body is filling up with your breath. As you exhale, imagine and feel as if your whole body is emptying out and allow yourself to relax even deeper. Each time you exhale, allow yourself to let go even more. . .
Now, feel your body as a whole from the inside. Feel the entire space inside your skin. Imagine and feel your whole inner space as open, clear, still, and spacious.
Now, in the center of your inner space, focus into your heart, the Core of your Being. Smile and breathe into your heart and enjoy the sensation there.
In a few moments, I’ll guide you to ask your heart this question: “What do I feel inspired to do about this situation in which I felt stressed or about similar situations in the future? What will take me toward what is most important to me in this situation?”
Float that question in the space of your heart, in the Core of your Being, and just notice anything that arises. See if it’s possible not to try to have an answer. Trust that answers are always available—and that you’ll find them in just the right way at just the right time. There’s a Core part of you that knows what to do. It’s just a matter of paying attention and noticing what comes up. Guidance may arise as a thought, feeling, image, or inspiration. You may notice something now, later today, or in the days ahead. If you notice resistance, frustration, or anything else, just notice and accept that, too.
So, now, ask your heart, the Core of your Being:
“What do I feel inspired to do, what will take me toward what is most important to me in this situation?”
Continue to smile and breathe through your heart and pay attention to anything that arises. Just noticing, accepting, and paying attention to anything that arises. . .
Now, slowly open your eyes and feel the space around you. Feel your relaxed inner presence within the space around you. Take this relaxed present awareness with you into your life and follow your Core inspiration.
Well done!