Chapters

Stress and Resistance

Understanding Emotional Physics

Imagine this scenario: You wake up on a Saturday morning, bleary-eyed and disoriented, to find your alarm clock dark and silent. The electricity in your house is off, and you don’t know what time it is. You leap out of bed, search for your cell phone, and discover that it’s 9:15-—and your parents’ anniversary party, which you’re hosting, starts at noon. You focus yourself intently, prioritize your schedule, and rush to get ready. You jump in the shower, but the hot water runs out because your water heater is electric. Then you realize with a sickening thud that your blow-dryer is electric as well—as are all your kitchen appliances, which means you can’t cook any of the food you bought for the party. Okay, you can still save the day; you can go to the deli and get a cheese and vegetable tray—not perfect, but it will do. You throw your clothes on, grab an apple for breakfast, run out to the garage by 9:30, your hair still wet, and start your car before remembering that your garage-door opener is electric as well. You get out of your car and try to disengage the garage-door mechanism, but it’s completely jammed. You find a wrench and really lean into the job, realizing one moment too late that the “leaning” side of your body is now covered with garage-door grime—and the mechanism still won’t disengage. Now you’re not only late, but you’re hungry, wet, dirty, and trapped in your garage. How do you feel? If you’re like most people, you’ll answer “stressed-out.”

My empathic question to you, and I hope your own empathic question to yourself, is, “What does ‘stressed-out’ actually mean?” What do you feel when you enter into the state you identify as stress? Are you angry? Are you ashamed of yourself? Are you anxious? Confused? Panicky? Furious?

Depressed? All seven at once? Do you feel like crying? What do you feel when events conspire to thwart your every movement? What do you feel when you’re late? What do you feel when you make mistakes or when you look uncoordinated or incompetent? What do you feel when your appliances, tools, cars, and utility companies fail you? What do you feel when scheduling conflicts and demands pile one on top of another until you’re overwhelmed? And what do you feel when you’re not in control of your life?

“Stressed-out” is not an acceptable answer to any of these questions, because stress is not a emotion. The word “stress” doesn’t even come from the world of emotions; it’s a term from the world of physics and engineering, where it is defined as a pressure, pull, or force exerted on one thing by another, or the internal resistance of a thing to the external forces applied to it. Interestingly, this word that refers to things—to inanimate objects—has found its way into our emotional vocabulary. And our emotional definition of stress nearly equals the definition given to us by engineers; it has helped us view ourselves as objects being acted upon by forces, instead of living, agile, and resourceful organisms. The word “stress” has become a universal catchall for emotions in a culture that doesn’t have a functional emotional vocabulary. Now if we’re sad, furious, frightened, exhilarated, exhausted, despondent, ashamed, mournful, panicky, or even suicidally depressed, we can use the word “stress” to describe our condition. This is not a sign of empathic awareness or emotional fluency.

What would a person with a functional emotional vocabulary do in the stressful scenario above? The steps would be different for each of us, but what about alerting all the guests by phone and asking for cooking help or alternative party locations? What about taking some time to cry and feel the loss of the wonderful party experience that might have been so that you can restore yourself and prepare for the party that will be? What about calling the electric company and finding out when your service will be back on? What about complaining out loud to your garage door and really reading it the riot act (and perhaps pounding on it with the wrench a few times) so you can clear the decks and restore your resilience and your sense of humor? What about rescheduling? What about moving the party to a restaurant or a park? What about asking a neighbor to help you with the garage door or take you to the deli? What about sitting with the fear that people will think you’re a failure? What about sitting with the shame you feel when you let other people down? What about being honest about your emotions?

If you can meet a stressful situation as a living, breathing, and emotive being, you can respond to it in a hundred different ways. You can perform many different experiments in emotional physics and navigate through your troubles, traumas, and stresses in ways that will increase your awareness, your resources, your integrity, and your ability to access your deepest issues (stressful situations always expose your deepest issues). Your task is not to create a stress-free and perfect existence (perfectionism is absolute proof that you’ve lost your flow), but to learn to respond resourcefully when stressors appear.

Stress is a relationship between your living organism and the forces of the world; your responses to these forces (not the forces themselves) determine your outcome. Painful stressed-out responses aren’t a necessity in every stressful situation; there are dozens of ways to react. This thing called “stress”—this increase in adrenaline, this sense of pressure, this physical tenseness—is simply a fear-based readiness response that tries to activate and prepare you for change and unpredictability. It’s a normal and healthy reaction. Trouble arises not from your stress response or even from the change or upset that triggered it; trouble arises when you lose your agility, your flow, your resourcefulness, and your liveliness, and become an inanimate object.

When your flow and agility are gone, the actual stressor almost becomes unimportant; in fact, you can be just as stressed-out by falling in love as you can by losing your job. Falling in love asks you to drop your boundaries, which often forces you to deal with your deepest issues of trust and intimacy—while losing your job disrupts your social and financial security, which may force you to question and even completely redesign your career and your life. If you can ground and focus yourself and honor the emotions that move forward during such challenges, you’ll be able to meet them in agile and resourceful ways. But if you don’t have emotional skills, both of these challenges may knock you flat. In fact, if you don’t have skills, you can be knocked flat by just about anything—a missed appointment, a sideways look from a co-worker, or a lost set of keys. The size of the stressor doesn’t matter; your capacity to respond to it does.

If you don’t have the capacity to respond resourcefully to the many disappointments, sudden changes, pressures, and shocks life brings you, you may hide behind stress. We all do it. We all hide our real emotions and tell people we’re stressed-out, which means we don’t have to explain tense behavior that covers up our angers, anxieties, or suppressed tears. We don’t have to question our stress-relieving buying sprees that cover up our depressions or despairs. We don’t have to address our stress-based addictions and distractions that cover up our panics, furies, or traumatic memories. We don’t have to change our stressful eating and health-care habits that cover up our emotional distress, our intellectual confusion, our physical exhaustion, or our spiritual malaise. When we hide behind the term “stressed-out,” we don’t have to explain ourselves or question our behaviors, and most important, we don’t have to slow down to feel anything. When we’re stressed-out, we’re no longer responsible for ourselves; we become slates upon which the troubles of the world are written; we become things—not vibrant and questing organisms, but mere victims of schedules, utility companies, finances, personality clashes, illnesses, the weather, traumas, and life itself.

When you feel stressed-out, please understand that you’re disconnected from your grounding, your flow, your agility, your sense of humor, your instincts, your ability to set a boundary, and your interior village. Stressrelieving practices like deep breathing and relaxation are lovely (though crying is often more relaxing than either of them), but if you don’t go in and ask yourself what you’re feeling, you’ll continue to experience the imbalances that lead inevitably to stressful suffering. If you can learn to respond to stressors by grounding and setting a safe boundary around yourself, you can bring your full-bodied insight to the stressful situation.

For instance, if you experience a gnawing stomach-ache, a sore neck, tight or clumsy muscles, powerful food cravings, or any other physical sensations, you can ask your body what these sensations mean for you; you can work with your body instead of running from your discomfort. You can also connect with your emotions. If you’re afraid, you can ask yourself what you sense, and what actions you need to take. If you’re angry and too many things are getting under your skin, you can fire up your boundary and complain (consciously) like there’s no tomorrow. If you feel like crying, you can cry! If you’re full of amorphous anxieties and confusions, you can question your intentions and relieve your ambiguity. If you’re crushed by unmoving despair, you can ask, “What must be released?” so that you can be rejuvenated. If you’re depressed, you can ask where your energy has gone. If you’re exhausted, you can take a hot bath and get some sleep. No matter what you feel, you can use your skills to work through the deep and often painful issues that stressful situations always uncover.

You can also observe your thoughts. If your mind is spiraling into disorder or is hyperactivated, trying to plot a way out of your troubles, you can reconnect with your fear-based intuition and instincts, and bring order and focus to your inner chaos. You can also connect meaningfully with your eagle nature (rather than abuse its visionary capabilities to merely escape from your current situation) and ask it for direction. You can pay attention to your dreams and your visions, and you can stop yourself in the middle of a stressful situation and observe your situation from an eagle’s-eye view. For instance, if you always feel powerfully ashamed when you let people down, or if you’re consistently unwilling to ask for help, perhaps you can see that something in this electrical outage is giving you the opportunity to finally face these issues head-on. When you can observe life with the help of your visionary spirit, you’ll understand that the flow of each day isn’t so much about schedules, work, or parties as it is about stretching and challenging yourself so that you can live more fully. If you can bring your fiery eagle nature into play, you may find that this electrical outage was not a personal affront to you or your plans, but might just be an opportunity for you to meet and work with your neighbors, to rely upon your siblings and friends, to connect with your parents in a new way, or even to make plans to alter your relationship with the utility company and get yourself a solar array. You really can’t know why events unfold as they do, or what each day has in store for you—just as you can’t be certain that the things you perceive as mistakes, hindrances, and stressors really are.

We can’t control the flows of the world, but we can prepare ourselves for just about any eventuality by nurturing flow and balance within our own psyches and by becoming conduits through which the currents of honesty, ingenuity, vision, insight, and emotions can flow in response to any stimuli (stressful or otherwise).

Stress in itself is not the problem; stress is a necessary and even sacred part of life. Without it, you would be untested, undifferentiated, unchallenged, and insufficiently resourced. Even the word “stress” tells us this: an alternate definition for stress is to underscore, accentuate, or emphasize something. When you feel stressed-out, you are in many ways slowing yourself down to notice, emphasize, and underscore (albeit unconsciously) the important issues that arise within you. Your key task during stressful times is not to strive for a stress-free life or an impenetrable psyche, but to work with your stress responses in honest and soul-honoring ways. Stressors always uncover important issues; therefore, if you can wade into your stress responses with all of your skills and resources, you can wend your way into the deepest regions of your soul. If you try to avoid stress or repress your stress responses (or express your stressed-out behaviors in incompetent ways), you won’t gain the agility you need to engage with the often stressful flows of life in all their power and unpredictability.