How will you remember 2009? And how will 2009 shape your 2010?
I’ve included a link to Tony and Sage Robbins ‘Special Holiday Message’. The second half of the clip is a short video featuring Jim Rohn who passed away recently. I’ve personally found this video very inspiring as I start to take stock of this year and dream of what is to become.
wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
You have got the pieces, now it’s time to put it all together so you have a complete Mind and Body Maintenance Programme. Just as you might spend 30 minutes a day taking care of your body by exercising, it’s important to take care of your mind too!
Here’s where it’s a good idea to focus:
We are not here to have no stress. We are here to learn and to grow. Learning and growing involves short bursts of stress and challenge, followed by down-time where we relax, regenerate and integrate. Not learning is a stress in itself. Leaping from one stress to another stress is chronic stress and really is not helpful.
The trick is to make sure that you are not chronically stressed - that’s when you wear yourself out and create or exacerbate health issues.
By building in these tools and strategies, you can enjoy stress-free living.
What you are focussing on can have an impact on your body and how you are feeling. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a very powerful example of this connection. Some forms of IBS are caused or aggravated by stress. It’s as if your body is trying to get your attention. Research shows, reducing stress can reduce the symptoms of IBS.
Anxiety is another example. Some forms of anxiety are triggered by your thoughts. It’s as if the fire alarm in your body has gone off but there’s no fire. Although the result of the anxiety can feel very real and have a very real effect, the trigger is just like that false alarm. Here’s an exercise you can use that helps alleviate panic attacks and anxiety. It’s called the Emergency Exercise.
Imagine that you are breathing in a white mist.
Breathe in through your nose and as you breathe in, see that mist circling in and around the inside of your head.
On the out breath, breathe out the white mist allowing all the tension to leave your body with this out breath.
Let your shoulders droop and feel your body go limp.
Now repeat this three more times in your own time.
Stress really is a mind and body game. What we think, effects how we feel and we act or react based on how we feel (whether we are trying to avoid pain or move towards something pleasurable). By changing what you are thinking about, you change how you feel and as a result change how you behave. This works the opposite way too.
You don’t have to monitor your every thought to catch what is triggering your stress. You can track back by noticing how you are feeling or what you are doing. If you catch yourself worrying try the Heavy Load exercise and put all your thoughts in one of the suitcases to be dealt with at a more appropriate time.
If you catch yourself stressing over something, hold the image of a beautiful pink rose or a gorgeous friendly butterfly in your mind. Now that you have that image in your mind, change your thoughts to something more helpful. You might like to change the image of the rose or butterfly to something that always makes you feel good when you think about it.
Change the meaning you give to a situation or event and you have the power to change the whole chain reaction; stopping stress at its source!
Today we are focussing on where you keep stress in your body. Regardless of how you get through a stressful situation or series of stressful situations if you are chronically stressed, the effects of it will get stored in your body somewhere. We perceive it as pressure which gradually builds up in your body. That’s one of the most insidious things about stress, it sneaks up on you gradually and quietly until one day it’s all a bit too much and we find ourselves with constant headaches, in floods of tears without really knowing why or with gut disorders such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome – they are all ways in which our mind is trying to get our attention, encouraging us to modify our behaviour so your body can get on with what is does best – regeneration and repair.
So why does understanding where you keep your stress help so much? If you know how stressed you are, you can take action and repair what has been done, modify your lifestyle (even temperarily) so your mind has the space it needs to sort your body out. One of the ways of doing that is by assembling your body map (instructions are on page 42 of the book, Reduce Your Stress – Your 7-Day Turnaround Programme: visit the shop at www.TurquoiseRay.com to get your copy).
You can also do a quick body scan by becoming aware of each part of your body. Ask yourself:
Note wherever you find tension, and give yourself the instruction for that part to relax. For example, back relax. Keep doing this exercise and you will feel your body relax, even if it’s just a little bit. The more often you do this, the more your body will respond and the easier you will find it to relax your body on command. Remember Day 1? Relaxation is the antidote to stress.
By taking time to get the tension out of your body, building in relaxation and letting go of the things that are worrying you, you can live a stress-free life!
I’ve got a pathophysiology exam today, so day 2 has arrived just in time! If ever there was a need to let go, it’s today!
Today we look at the important role your mind plays in your stress response. It really is the conductor of the orchestra known as your body. Stress starts in your mind when you perceive a situation to be threatening. You decide whether the situation you are facing is stressful or not. That one decision triggers a cascade of events in your body and you will feel what you feel based on the question you asked and the answer you gave.
Carrying things around (like have I done enough study or do I really get it) will keep your subconscious mind occupied forever (well, until you decide to stop carrying it around with you). It’s still weighing you down, using up energy and affecting how you feel. Worrying about something won’t change the outcome so rather than carrying things around, choose to park it, let it go. There’s a great exercise on Day 2 called the Heavy Load exercise that allows you to do just that.
For those of you who follow Reiki, Dr Mikao Usui devised 5 principles:
Here’s a little exercise to help you let go of that which you no longer need.
How stressed are you right now? It’s important to know where you are right now so you can work out where you want to get to. I love this quote by John Schaar:
“The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating.
The paths are not to be found, but made.
And the activity of making them changes both the maker and their destination.”
And that’s what the next 7 days are about. Making those paths so we come out of this short journey a little more relaxed, a little less stressed but more importantly aware of our stress triggers so that we don’t keep reacting to stress triggers in the same way (or better still, changing so that they no longer trigger our stress).
Ok, so this programme is a layered approach to beating stress. Today’s about laying down the foundations. Check out Day 1 in the book so you know exactly what stress is and isn’t. It’s important to be aware because you can use this knowledge to stop stress at its source.
So what’s the foundation for a stress-free life? It’s all about being relaxed. My tai chi teacher used to say a stressed man walks a stressed mile and a relaxed man walks a relaxed mile. But, when you are walking that mile, how relaxed (or not) you are, determines the physiological response that is running your body. Stress is an inflammatory response. Relaxation is the antidote. Today is all about relaxation. It’s fundamental to stress relief. That’s why my book starts with a relaxation exercise.
So, here’s my question for you? What do you do to relax? If you can’t remember, think about what you used to do for fun when you were little and work forwards from there. Now is the time to build something relaxing into today. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Maybe you like to watch the birds in the trees, walk through the park on your way to work and take in the beautiful spring flowers.
Do something relaxing today.
Saturday 10 January from 5pm to 6 pm at the Lewes Wellbeing Festival
Learn exactly what stress is and how your mind and body works together to kick off and close down the stress response.
Discover how you can use this power to reduce your stress and eliminate tension from your body.
Tracy is recognised as a leading expert on reducing work-related and financial stress. Originally from New Zealand, Tracy trained with the Association of Stress Therapists and qualified as a Stress Therapist in 2001. As a Chartered Accountant, with over 20-years Commercial and Programme Management experience with blue chip companies, Tracy is passionate about sharing practical strategies for helping people reduce their levels of stress, enjoy what they do and experience work-life balance.
When: Sunday 14 December 2008
What time: 1pm – 3pm
Where: London
In the crazy leadup to the holiday season, one of the things that tends to come up a lot is STRESS!
This month, guest speaker, Tracy Tutty, author of the book: Reduce Your Stress – Your 7-Day Turnaround Programme will be showing us the 3 secrets to a stress-free life. She thinks the format of our workshop is helpful and we’ll work through some exercises because as she says”stress is such an individual response that its easiest to learn about it by experiencing how you can change the response in your own body.”
At this workshop, you’ll get:
• An introduction to what stress is
• A facilitated exercise where you will discover your own individual stress patterns
• A discussion on how you can use your stress patterns to reduce your stress levels
• We will close with a relaxation exercise
I am excited to reduce my own stress in the crazy leadup to Christmas and I look forward to having you join me in this stree-busting workshop!
Yours in growth,
Laura
To sign up for this workshop please visit http://arobbins.meetup.com/106/calendar/8951682/?a=cv1p_grp
There’s a theme emerging right now – financial stress. I’m seeing a lot of people who are financially stressed regardless of the state of their finances. Financial stress is particularly painful because you can’t leave it in the office at the end of the day or shut the door on it in the morning. Out of the 3 biggies – work stress, relationship stress and money stress – it’s the one that never leaves you. You’re always carrying it on your shoulders and if you have it, it’s always grinding you down.
Wednesday 5 November is National Stress Awareness Day, so lets mark the occasion by talking about what you can do, right now, to recession-proof your stress. Discover the 3 Best Kept Secrets to a Stress-Free Life in a free 30-minute seminar that you can listen to over the telephone. We call it a teleseminar.
We’re doing something a bit different this year. This year we will make a recording of this teleseminar available to you for one week from Wednesday 5 November 2008. Why? Because I know you’re really busy. All you need to do is dial in at a time that works for you. This means you can listen in, wherever and whenever you are.
You can listen to this free seminar at any time for one week from Wednesday 5 November 2008.
To listen to this free teleseminar, telephone:
UK Dial In: 0845 245 5205
International Dial in: +44 (0) 1452 55 00 00
And enter this Access Number: 71064323#
Discover the 3 Best Kept Secrets to a Stress-Free Life and recession-proof your stress.
So it’s official, the UK economy has shrunk for the first time in 16 years. And yet we’ve been talking about and acting as if we are in a recession for the last 18 months. Were we receeding or correcting?
All this talk reminds me of that old story about the Dad who sells lemonade on his lemonade stand. His business does really well and he decides that he wants to give his son the education he never had. So he sends his son off to business school.
One day his son comes home and says, “Dad, haven’t you heard? A recession is coming. We need to sell everything and batton down the hatches because nobody will be buying lemonade.” So Dad takes his son’s advise and cuts back on marketing and selling his lemonade. Sure enough, sales fall through the floor. Dad says to his son, “Son, I sure am glad you told me about that recession. Just think where we might have been if we hadn’t known.”
Maybe, just maybe, if we hadn’t spent so much time talking ourselves into a recession, we would have experienced a correction. Maybe, just maybe, if we see things as they are, not worse than they are; we can talk ourselves back from a recession.