I fell into bed last Thursday with a Migraine the size of a 100ft boulder. It was pushing on the side of my head and dripping down into my ear canal and even the right side of my neck.
It’s been quite a while since I have had this type of migraine…the ones that just debilitate you and have you hiding under a pillow in a dark room.
I was frustrated of course because I want to be feeling good. I want to be feeling healthy. I want to be operating in low stress.
The old me would have fought this. I would have had a long winded dialogue inside of my brain…
“How could you have gotten here? Now we are going to be behind on work. We are going to owe people emails. We are going to be seen as weak for not responding in real time to the demands of our business”.
I saw these thoughts trying to swarm me and take me down, but I stopped them, and I calmly reminded myself that my body is my sacred companion. She speaks to me when she needs me to hear something.
So instead of fighting her, I listened. “Rest my darling, we have done enough this week”.
It took me many years to get here. To not bully myself into overworking and shaming myself for being…human.
The stress of a nation. I cannot stop thinking about this phrase. The interconnectedness of all of us. That my stress rubs off on you and becomes your stress and your stress rubs off on your daughter and becomes her stress and so on.
A pandemic of sorts in its own right. How do I stop sneezing my stress on everyone around me?
That would require us to take responsibility for the stress that is occurring in our lives. Which would also require a ginormous shift in how we operate as a society.
Can we move a boulder that large uphill the way I meditated myself out of a boulder sized migraine?
Let’s examine that for a moment. We think that celebrities and the 1% are void of stress. We imagine that these financially rich and abundant individuals know some sort of secret to stress reduction and share a key that opens the door to a stress free life but that the cost of that key is an abundant bank account. The key couldn’t possibly be shared with anyone who cannot afford to purchase it.
We chastise Gwenyth Paltrow for sharing intuitive fasting tips and her stress-reducing strategies on Goop as if she isn’t also facing the same exact issue we are all faced with, we are extremely stressed and conditioned to work for validation and hate ourselves for the good of the GDP.
When we tie wealth to stress reduction we ignore a million if not a billion other ways for us to reduce our stress. We also feed right into the cultural disease that working harder and more and earning more will lead to less stress.
But when? Just in time for that cancer screen to come back revealing we’ve got a Stage 4 crisis on our hands?
Or just in time for the stress to lead to a heart attack at 40? Don’t believe me? Ask my clients.
And that is not to say that resources and access are not warranted and deserved for every single human being on this earth (I believe that we all deserve this, all shapes, sizes, cultures, deserve to have access to resources to live a thriving and safe life).
What I am saying, is that when we only focus on wealth as the solution we are ignoring tons of solutions that we can implement right now to reduce the stress of this nation. Starting with addressing the pandemic of overworking and a culture that is valuing your stress over your health.
Heart attacks are good for business.
Diabetes is good for business.
Obesity is good for business.
Our healthcare systems are running our entire country. So why would we ever address the elephant in the room that a big reason we are getting sick is because we have created an environment where the only way to survive is to work yourself to sickness or to death and then pay a doctor to try to fix you?
In this scenario you might think I am calling doctors evil or saying hospitals set out to ruin people’s lives. No, in fact it is quite the opposite.
Doctors get into this because they are often impacted by someone they love falling ill. They want to help.
And they do. They perform life-saving procedures every single day.
Hospitals are innovating on resources to try to help us, looking for solutions to our illnesses at every turn.
But how could they solve a problem they are not taught to see?
The stress. They are solving for the symptoms. And I commend them.
But while they are busy solving for the symptoms we need to begin to get busy solving the problem.
So how do we push this boulder up the hill?
It requires a radical shift in how we approach our work and our own lives. It requires a new consciousness built on awareness of our bodies intuitive power and the unconditioning of the lies we have been fed by a society built on fear and shame.
I am not alone in this belief. There are thousands and perhaps millions of experts from all different fields talking about this. I will do my best to share them with you so you can have access to their free knowledge and have your own key (for free) to solving this problem. I do not pretend to know everything. I just have one small piece of real estate that I am able to share and I will continue to learn so I can help you find the resources you need to reduce your stress and change your life.
Next week I will break down the first three steps you can take to reduce your stress and get back into the driver’s seat of your life and stop sneezing stress on the people you love.
Remember if it’s not you sharing your stress someone is sneezing their stress onto you. Protecting your energy is going to be the most important step you take. It is from this place we can help reduce the stress of the nation.
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