2. Regulation and Awareness

Don’t we deserve the best? Don’t those around us deserve the best of us? Life can be overwhelming, what if that sense of overwhelm was optional?

Our ability to stay grounded, come what may, obviously has a huge effect on what we will be able to achieve. Life happens, we react to it. We exist within it but most of the time we are not in real danger. But for many of us, much of the time, are stressed. What we call stress comes in many different forms, but most of the time we consider it to be ‘out there’, ‘work’, ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, ‘that person’, ‘family’, ‘comparison’ etc… – the ‘stressors’. What if we looked at these ‘stressors’ as the mind ‘distressing’ about these things? 

Could we have a choice to switch off the ‘distress’ and have these things become emotionally manageable, to observe any situation with calm and act accordingly. This is of course easier said than done. Many of us have become so used to being in a state of low-grade, mid-grade or even high-grade chronic ‘distress’, that removing most of it would feel new apart from anything else.

Consider how important our bodies are to us, I mean REALLY CONSIDER IT. Our bodies are the manifestation of how we engage with the world, they are a miracle of biological machinery. A poor analogy maybe, but if some of us treated a car or bike like we do ourselves it would not last very long. We really need to look after our bodies, really listen to what it needs, the basics: sleep, good food and kind exercise. This should come before, and I mean BEFORE, anything else. With this level of awareness, we will realise what harm ‘distress’ is doing to us and MOST CRUCIALLY we will realise that if our body is physically reacting to a perceived non-existent threat, to treat this with ‘the language of the body’ rather than the mind: breathing and movement. In the end, we need to assure the body that there is no threat and it will calm down.

If we are committed to look after our bodies properly, prioritising this above all else, then we have a chance to look after our thinking too! This is a very good idea, since we can avoid the perception of ‘stressors’ getting to the point of ‘distressing’ our bodies. Again, easier said than done. Consider the idea that our minds have learned to react to the ‘stressors’ in a certain way, if we accept that our minds can change, then could we learn to react a different way?