Is stress a problem in your life? Do you sometimes have the impression that you will give in under pressure? How does stress affect you the most? Does it give you physical tension, which at times becomes physical pain? Does it keep you in a permanent feeling that you are not enough, that you never do enough, that you will not succeed? Are you constantly nervous and startled at the slightest noise? Does your stress prevent you from sleeping or affect the quality of your sleep? Does stress feed this harassing inner voice that never stops talking, the famous hamster that runs from morning to night?
Would you like to take the stress out of your life? Unfortunately or fortunately ... it is impossible to eliminate it ... stress is necessary, stress is vital. It is impossible to live without stress! So what to do? How to live better with this difficult companion that is stress?
But what is stress?
Stress is a reaction of the body which wants to inform us that there is a threat to our survival. Sometimes the threat is low and quite trivial like being hungry, thirsty, feeling tired, the threat (starving, dying of thirst or lacking rest…) is not immediate. Other threats are more important and immediate like having a car accident or being chased by a bear, in which case life is in danger and the threat is immediate. Whether the threat is low or greater, what the body is looking for at all times is to find security and restore balance for our survival. Very naturally, in a day, the moments of stress should alternate with moments of calm and it is the same in our weeks, in our months and in the year.
In the society in which we live where performance is essential, where the pace of life is accelerated and accelerating further, we live permanently as if a bear was chasing us ... all the time! The morning run to be ready in time, as if a bear was chasing me. My impatience and worry in traffic, the recurring fear of being late, as if a bear was chasing me. My demands for everything, all the time… as if a bear was chasing me. My worries about what others might think of me, what I do or what I look like ... like my life depended on it or like a bear chasing me. We really live as if a bear is chasing us ... all the time. No respite, little or no return to calm. Since we get very good at what we practice a lot, we practiced so much to become faster and faster, more efficient, more demanding… that we became very, very good at this frantic race. Worse ... we have even unlearned to find calm, relaxation, rest ... which are essential to regulate the return of the pendulum. We no longer know how to do it!
First, become aware of it and question our fears ... fear of being late, fear of appearing this, fear of appearing this, fear of failing, fear of succeeding ... Is there a bear chasing me and who threatens my life? Can I relax a bit in the situation? It will not be easy at first… as I mentioned we have been practicing for years to feel hunted down on all sides, it will not be easy to learn to put everything into perspective! We rarely, even very rarely, have a bear chasing us! What are we running after then? It will thus be possible to take an interest in our sources of stress with the curiosity of a detective! To identify in our life who our BEARs are, what scares me, and which I seek to flee with all my might.
Then learn to oppose stress responses with new responses. I explain myself, by becoming more and more aware of how stress affects me I will be able to practice responding to it differently. For example, if my stress creates tension in my shoulders, which tend to go up towards the ears. By becoming aware of it I learn that I can release them and thus avoid accumulating tensions in the shoulders. And so it is for all stress reactions that I can learn to untie and release, so as to reverse the effects of stress on the body. This training allows me to relearn how to relax, to rest, relearn to calm down, to calm down. Relearn how to calm my pompon
In my opinion, yoga is the most precious tool to accompany us in this kind of transformation in our way of life. Because the tools of yoga, postures, breathing, yoga philosophy, and meditation help us to become more and more aware.
Perhaps with these few elements, you are already seeing the way for you towards a life where stress can become a source of energy and motivation and stop being an energy drainer. If you would like to be accompanied in these new learnings, I offer for a few years the Yoga course for stress management, a wonderful course which concentrates on a few weeks the theoretical and practical learnings to learn to manage stress better. In this course, we discuss in detail the biology of stress in order to better understand it. Stress responses will hold no secrets for you, and you can develop new strategies to respond differently and reverse the unwanted effects of stress on you. I also guide you through practical, concrete exercises, which make it possible to undo these automatisms so well anchored in your daily life. Breathing exercises, stretching, self-massage techniques, meditation are used. Of course, you can take advantage of what you learn and plan practice sessions at home, however, the most recommended exercises integrate into your daily life without adding anything to your schedule.
If stress is a problem in your life, you now know that there are ways to reverse your habits and learn to live by managing stress so that it is no longer harmful to you.
We welcome you to this temple of yoga, Yoga Teacher Training at Vishuddhi Yoga. Carefully nurtured and developed after years of diligence by our founder Shri Mahindra.