Expanded Consciousness
Perhaps the most neglected tool is your ability to relax. The antidote for anything is its opposite - thus Relaxation is the antidote for stress.
This may seem so obvious that it is hardly worth stating, yet the fact that so many folks are stressed out is a clear indication that the wisdom of this simple principle is often overlooked.
What is even more amazing is that relaxation is often the only solution that is required as its facilitates an expansion of consciousness whereby over stressed conditions are dissolved, and solutions to deeper concerns are effortlessly revealed.
The Stress Response or the Relaxation Response
In the same way that it is necessary for you to have the right amount of sleep to maintain your health and well-being, it is equally necessary that you cultivate your ability to relax.
The Stress Response or the Relaxation Response? The one that is triggered is determined by your Relationship with the circumstances of your life. The antidote for stress is Conscious Relaxation, and, just as you have learned to enhance the Stress Response, you can cultivate the Relaxation Response. Relaxation is the ultimate release.
Relaxation, like everything else, has two qualities. There is one quality of relaxation when you are on vacation - a time when all your obligations are put on hold and you have no responsibilities.
The other quality of relaxation is being able to relax in the midst of activity - the kind of relaxation that elite athletes or very mature folks display while they are engaged in that which is challenging.
Stress is natural. Stress is the human organism's natural response to any change or demand. The stress response is commonly called the fight or flight response. It causes increased blood flood to the heart and muscles and the shutting down all non-essential functions.
The stress response generates the same host of chemicals, hormones and neurotransmitters whether the change is so called positive or negative. As a temporary state, this reaction serves the body well, but when the stress reaction is abnormally prolonged it can lead to serious illness.
Your bodymind requires some stress to maintain health and well-being. You have to have enough stress to be stimulated and challenged to grow in all areas of your life, and, not so many demands that you have an over active stress response.
The stress response and the relaxation response are coordinated by the complimentary extremes of your body's autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system controls the stress response and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the relaxation response.
In this light, if you feel that you are over stressed, then the simple answer is to stimulate the relaxation response. Relaxation always shows up as space, an expansion of consciousness - thus it means to relax by taking a vacation, take a work break, consciously breathe more fully, do some yoga stretches, or by simply allowing your conscious mind to be silent (this is the most difficult space for most folks to establish).
Relaxation is always about space where your consciousness is naturally expanded... most often this means that you relax the activity of your conscious mind.
So the answer is simple and yet its application may be very challenging because it is one thing to know the answer intellectually and quite another to live the answer - to make it real. Therefore it is best for you to practice making space by regularly stimulating the relaxation response.
A powerful means to accomplish this is the practice of a meditative art like yoga where you learn to use your conscious mind appropriately, and where you also learn to let it relax when its role has been played - yoga practice facilitates both physical and mental space.
Yoga provides both qualities of relaxation. When you attend a yoga class, you are asked to leave all of your obligations outside the yoga studio - this sends a subtle signal to your conscious mind to relax, and it is one of the many reasons why folks are asked to leave their footwear outside.
Then while you practice yoga postures and meditation you are making space for both your body and your mind as you reconcile the extremes of action and inaction that is yoga.
And with consistent practice your bodymind learns to generate the relaxation response in the same way that it learned to generate the over stress response. In this way you relieve any over stressed condition and enjoy the many benefits of yoga such that your bodymind regains the equilibrium of robust health.
In the process the same energies that were being consumed by your stress response are made available to be used in the realization of your goals of health and well-being whereby the means to accomplish your goal is also its realization.
In this light whenever you have a thought like, 'I'll relax when I reach this goal'... you question the wisdom of this thought... because now you clearly see that while it is essential for you to take action steps toward accomplishing whatever you wish to achieve, you also see that it equally essential that you relax along the way.
Thus you see that the combined interaction of taking action steps and relaxing is the best means for you to realize your dreams with relaxed ease - once again what you see is that the means is the end.
What you believe determines what you can or can't achieve.
The result of relaxation is that your consciousness naturally expands. This lets you see the two faces of one principle (like the opposite sides of the same coin) as what you believe determines what you can or can't achieve.
When you allow any limiting beliefs that you presently hold in your conscious mind to relax and fall away, you are no longer bounded by them, at the same time you are enabled to embrace new possibilities that allow you to create life as you want it to be.
* Article provided by James Traverse. James' Mind Power site is dedicated to helping you Create the Life You Want with CERTAINTY. Be Certain. Master Mind Power with Certainty. Visit http://beingyoga.com/index.html for FREE results oriented information .*
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