I’ve been MIA from the blogosphere lately, and with good reason. My boss is out on maternity leave, which means extra evenings and weekends of work for me. Tara Brach, regular exercise, and red wine are getting me through the temporary madness.
An older talk by Tara Brach called Soul Retrieval is especially resonating with me lately. It’s all about investigating the way we respond to stress. The talk kicks off with the lofty premise that we can experience freedom in the midst of stress depending on how we respond to it. As evidenced by my extra glass of red wine this evening, I’m not there.
When things get stressful, I react the way Tara says most people do—with speed, obsessive thinking, and a desperate attempt to control the experience. I leave my aliveness, my free heart, and my spontaneity. I lock into the trance of conditioned behavior in order to get through the stress and expect to pick up the pieces once the situation is over. My adrenals don’t appreciate it.
On a side note, this is how I tend to approach difficult asanas, too. In forearm stand, I muscle my way into the inversion with a collapsed chest. Once I get air, I adjust into the lifted, open, easeful posture. My shoulders don’t appreciate it.
Here’s the cool thing about all this though. Tara says that when you’re most bothered, when your karma is coagulating around a situation, that’s when there’s the most potential to wake up to the depth of who you are. With my boss out on maternity leave, I’ve been presented with an unusual amount of opportunities to investigate the way I respond to stress, and I’ve been trying to take advantage of the extra practice. If I can respond to stress from wisdom and presence for just one extra minute, even one extra second per day, I count it a blessing.
