Oakville Zen Meditation
Training your body, mind and heart while under stress
Stressors are everywhere, permanent, either acute i.e. loss of a loved one or chronic such as guilt They are defined as an event being perceived as generating negativities of all sorts.They consciously affect our body, mind and social interactions when they are acute, but, when they are chronic, their effects, even subliminal, are still quite detrimental. Their negative impacts have been described in the previous talk.
Zen approach:
Even if the word “stress” is not in the original Zen literature, Zen is teaching us that we can deal with our stress and stressors better by applying these 3 approaches:
1) Mindfully reading your body:
Our body reactions to stress are an automatic great proxy to our emotional mind Even more, our physical responses almost always precede our emotional ones even when they are still at the subconscious level.
>>>>During acute stress generating severe negative emotion, the release of stress hormones will affect your body immediately i.e. physical restlessness, fast breathing, tachycardia, sweat, tremor, diarrhea, etc…
>>>>During chronic stress producing ongoing emotional negativities such as anxiety, doubt, regret, guilt, and worry, the body responses are more subtle but always present. Being mindful of your body is a great way to assess your stress- made reactive emotional mind. Learning body scanning is a very effective tool to read your body. We will practice.
2) Mindfully reading our restless mind under stress.
A primary mind-training tool is mindfulness- based meditation practice during which you learn to watch your mind allowing you to tame its wildness. It is done by repeatedly bringing your non-judgmental, non-decisional attention from the popping up emotional feeling “A” back to your focus point such as breathing in order to anchor your restless mind. By becoming acutely aware and accepting your negative thoughts / feelings, you become the observer of your mind rather than its object. It implies, automatically and with practice, a better control of its detrimental activity while under stress.This is called “taming the monkey mind” in Zen literature. Mindfulness meditation works directly on our emotional brain by partially deactivating /bypassing our emotional circuits while creating new circuits so called rational. This is re-wiring neuroplasticity that we talked about many times.
3) Training your “heart:”
Under stress, and along with mindfulness comes the tool of training your heart to be more open and compassionate to self and others while under stress. Practicing compassion, and loving-kindness called Metta to self, and to others draws you out of yourself as a victim, and reminds you to control your potential societal misbehavior. When you feel the force of stress squeezing you down and drawing you into yourself, you can resist, via compassion, to the tendency to close down in a protective cocoon.You will then look around you, and get a larger, and more rational perspective of what events, people, and life are all about
It is unrealistic to expect a stress-free life, but there is a real possibility that you could transform the way you are dealing with it. Stress brings harmful habits of mind, body, and heart. But, instead of viewing it as an enemy, you should regard stress as a teacher, and the opportunity to learn from it for better mind control, and a more objective understanding of people and life.
