I’m in a transitional phase where I believe in my mind I am not stressed but my body contiualy tells me different. The old programming my body wants to hold in place while my mind is evolving. The body just hasn’t made the full transition yet to the new experience. It’s because there is still a lot more things I need to work through and let go. Ah, how life teaches us.
This also pushes me to continually dig into an understand of what the body is holding onto. Knowing that the body keeps the score, I am trying to get awareness of what those scores are that are being held.
There are lots of fears that I continually work through - fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of success, and the fear of not being good enough.
All these fears are tied back to a ‘score’ that the body holds. These scores stem from different traumatic event(s) and carry a lot of feelings around them. When these feelings are hit due to a trigger - stress is what I (we) experience.
I’ve notice there is my smaller self, who is run by fears and survival, and my higher self, who moves with knowing and courage. The conversations they have are wild sometimes but a lot of the time, unconsciously, I allow my smaller self to win. This is bottom-up processing and usually unconscious.
What I have been working on for - well forever and will continue to work on forever - is slowing down and processing situations from a top-down perspective.
For example, I notice that the right side of my body, my dominant side, is tense when I don’t have control of a situation. I feel “stressed” because there is an internal belief that the only way to get things done is to make them happen myself. In actuality this belief, feeling, and attachement around control doesn't allow God to bring me what he has for me.
Life just presents the opportunities to build faith so you can let go and trust the process. - Whoa, that was just a moment of preaching to myself.
This bottom-up process happens for the most part unconsciously. Because really it's programmed and habitual. Which then I must become aware and remind myself that it’s ok to let go of this need for control of the situation.
The more I can remind myself that, the less “stress” I experience. Once I begin fixing the internal world, from a top-down process all of a sudden those “external stress factors” seem to dissolve.
Here is what I have learned so far about stress.
I hope as I continue to work through my suppressed and repressed feelings from fears that it brings an awareness for you.
An awareness to continually look inward to work through your feelings and fears so you can have a more stress-less experience and can elevate up to a new height and become you were are destined to become.
Stress is just an internal response to a perceived external circumstance usually triggered by some sort of internal suppressed feeling(s) that we have accumulated throughout our life.
The effects of these suppressed feelings have detrimental effects to our well-being and our relationships with others and ourself. These feelings can result in physical and emotional sicknesses and disease if they are left unconscious.
Your body responds in a way that can be your alarm and can be the trigger to look internally in order to understand why this 'stress' is happening. Life is always trying to teach you something - always!
Working through these suppressed feelings through meditation and then letting go of these feelings each and every time they pop up, reduces your personal stress proneness which by result also reduces your vulnerability to stress related problems, incidents, and illnesses.
You will also begin rise up and experience life from a different level on consciousness because you are letting go of the lower levels of consciousness.
The only power anything truly has over us is the power of belief that we give it.
The body will respond to what we believe. This is a basic law of consciousness - we are subject only to what we hold in the mind. The body will manifest what the mind believes. If we are telling ourself we are stressed because of this and that situation, the body responds.
If these feelings continually get suppressed and repressed, the body over time then becomes the alarm to remind you that you haven't worked through something and now these 'external factors' are triggering what is 'stress.'
We know that the body keeps the score. Feelings are filed in the body. Feelings are what cause the endless amounts of thoughts. If we can work to understand our feelings (emotions) we can have a better understanding of what is being held in the body and we can get to the root of our 'stress' experiences.
It is the top-down processing through meditation and deep relaxation exercises that can help us reshape our experience of the world and minimize our stress proneness and vulnerability.
I want to share a passage from Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender that I believe can wrap this whole post up.
“It is we ourselves who create stressful reactions as a consequence of what we are holding within us. The suppressed feelings determine our belief systems and our perception of ourselves and others. These, in turn, literally create events and incidents in the world events that we, then, turn around and blame for our reactions. This is a self-reinforcing system of illusions. This is what the enlightened sages mean when they say, "We are all living in an illusion." All that we experience are our own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs projected onto the world, actually causing what we see to happen.”
I hope that this post can be a spark of desire to dive deeper into yourself in order to have a better understanding of yourself. So that you can experience life at the highest level.
You got this. We got this.
KEEP GOING.