Sinking

We all have different tolerance levels to stress.  We also all have different triggers.  What sets off one person will pass another by like a cloud across the sky. 

My particular triggers are always to do with emotion.  So, this past week has been particularly hard for me.  Things happened at work, people got upset, I found myself in the middle of it all, and when my feelings are churning around inside me I find my eating and sleeping and concentration are altered too, and consequently my ability to continue to deal effectively with whatever the situation demands.   If it drags on for days or even weeks, the stress can become unmanageable.

Mindfulness has helped me enormously, and still does.  I can usually remain calm in the midst of strong emotions, even my own, and I can often find space around the feelings which tends to stop them escalating and creates a pause in my gut reaction, allowing me to respond much more, well, mindfully. But then, as soon as I'm off guard, either when my mind starts up on the storyline again, or when I'm trying to fall asleep and my thoughts have become untethered from the present moment, I find my body is reflecting the unease once more in a physical heaviness in the pit of my stomach, or a tightness in my chest, and my attention is unwillingly drawn back to it. The buddhist nun Pema Chodron helpfully wrote about this:

For a moment or more, touch the quality, the mood, the bodily felt sensation free of the storyline.  This uncomfortable experience, this familiar sensation that can sit like a lump in your stomach, that can cause your body and face to tense, that can physically hurt - this experience itself is not the problem.  If we can get curious about this emotional reaction, if we can relax and feel it, if we can experience it fully and let it be, then it's no problem.  We might even experience it as simply frozen energy whose true nature is fluid, dynamic, and creative....Our repetitive suffering does not come from this uncomfortable sensation but from what happens next....It comes from rejecting our own energy when it comes in a form we don't like...[If we choose to] abide with the energy, and then move on, the power of this is not just that it weakens old habits but that it burns up the propensity for these habits altogether....We can live from a broader perspective, one that admits all experiences - pleasurable,  painful and neutral....We can learn to accept the present moment as if we had invited it, and work with it instead of against it, making it our ally instead of our enemy.'

This reminds me of many years ago, when I was a live-in home companion for someone in Oxford, on my afternoon three hour break walking around a nearby park.  The usual feelings were assailing me; deep loneliness, old pain from past heart wounds and more recent fresh ones,  a sense of hopelessness about the future....And suddenly I heard myself saying, 'I accept this pain.  I fight it no longer.  I'm not going to resist it. I'm going to welcome this pain,'  even opening my arms wide (I must have looked mad to any onlooker).  Which sounds like masochism or insanity or both.  I have no idea to this day what prompted such weirdness, but the reason I mention it here is because something profound happened.  It is really beyond the scope of language to express it, but I will try.  I was aware of something deep within me shifting.  Instead of being overwhelmed by what I had imagined as overwhelming suffering, it actually diminished.  It kind of melted inside me.  I was aware that some kind of healing had taken place but didn't have a clue what, or whether it would even last.  I felt freer and lighter.  And that was it.  Of course I continued to feel great sadness from time to time over the years, but it's become clear that some blockage within me was able to begin clearing by my decision to stop resisting and start embracing what felt like hell.  I had to literally 'embrace' it because otherwise, when I try to just 'accept' something, it becomes more like resignation which is not acceptance at all and can lead to depression. 

I think I've written this post for myself today.  I think this is what I need to do right now, and remind myself that emotions themselves last for an extremely short time (something in the region of 90 seconds) and the cortisol resulting from stress lasts about 1.5 hours, and then they've passed by unless, unless I keep feeding them with the storyline, or am deep down resisting the unpleasant sensations they produce.  Right, I'll get to it.

Photograph 'Sinking' courtesy of Eva  at http://fantasticfoto.shutterchance.com/