Category Archives: Stress

My heart in your hands by aussiegall

When beginning a new job or getting married or other life challenges, extra stress helps to solve these experiences.  But often we experience stress that is non-productive and is robbing us of our energy.

Some and even great stress can be beneficial. The added energy from stress helps us to more to more and better solutions for our lives. Changemaker is aimed toward finding the repetitive non-productive stress that robs you of energy.

Since stress has been found to contribute to most of human illnesses, Changemaker encompasses mental, physical, emotional, behavioral, social and spiritual reduction techniques.

Your mind, body and emotions either work together to help you experience your life more fully or are each using energy in avoiding behaviors. The way to control your life is to control your thoughts and your words. So many of the techniques you will learn from Changemaker will introduce you to ways to stop over-reacting or avoiding behaviors.

When we were children, we often had to learn self-defeating or self-limiting behavior to appease our authority figures. Many parents confuse discipline with punishment. To avoid punishment, we often learn ways of avoidance or delay that rob us of our true being. So in continuing these behaviors we are using our energy non-productively.

We tell our bodies how healthy we want to be by the choices we make in using our energy. The Changemaker goal is for you to learn how to tell your body that you want to be completely healthy. By learning how to reframe your thoughts in order to choose positive thoughts, you are telling your emotions that you want to be healthy.

By learning convenient and easy ways to exercise, you are telling your body that you want to be healthy. By learning how to incorporate meditation, relaxation, visualization, and other coping techniques, we tell our minds and our soul that we want to be healthy.

You can learn all these techniques by using the Changemaker Blogs. Each blog is about an individual topic that you may choose to focus on.

Stress should lead you to exercise–

“Take a Break! A few quick tips -”

“Get up out of your chair or leave your workbench and walk over to an open window. Change your point-of-view. Breathe some fresh air. Go for a five-minute walk, either in the corridors of your building or out-of-doors. Call a friend and chat for five minutes. Close your eyes, clear your mind, and take an imaginary vacation – relaxing on a warm beach, deep-sea fishing on a beautiful yacht, or skiing down a gorgeous mountain.”

“These short, focused breaks can help reduce muscular tightness and physical stress, and also help your brain recharge so you can be more creative and productive!”

Making stress a positive:

“How to transform anxiety into something productive and positive? Here are some suggestions:”

1. Simplify everything you can. Pare down and get down to the bare bones in life. Eliminate as much of the “fluff” as you can.
2. Keep a complete calendar and list of everything you have to do and all appointments. Trying to carry all this information around in your head adds to frustration and a “muddled” feeling. Let it go, get it out of your brain, and record it somewhere else!
3. Relax when you feel stressed. Make a conscious effort to take deep breaths and physically relax your body.

Complete Guide to Pilates, Yoga, Meditation Stress Relief

Parragon Publishing

Blue-throated Macaws by Dave-F

ISBN 1-4542-216-5

Amazon link

This guide has four main sections: pilates, yoga, meditation and stress relief. Following are an excerpt from each section:

1) Pilates: “Pilates exercises have been designed to work the muscles of the body as efficiency as possible in the minimum time. These low-impact exercises treat the body as a whole and are very effective. There is therefore no need to spend hours each day at the gym: you need to practice only two to three times a week, and can start with 10-minute sessions and build up to longer ones slowly.”

Included in the pilates section are guidance in correct breathing, how pilates works, what to wear, learning how to center the body, the importance of good posture, getting into motion exercises, standing and sitting exercises, and exercises on a mat.

2) Yoga: “By allocating time every day to a sequence of yoga postures, you can help to purge the mind and body, and achieve a state of deep relaxation. This can result in greater self-esteem, because you will have a sense of achievement and an inner calm that will help to dispel the worries of the day. The deep breathing and physical exercise required for yoga will help you to deal with a raft of complaints, such as pain of the joints and muscles, anxiety, stress, postural problesm, and bowel tone and function problems.”

Included in the yoga section are the five principles of yoga (relaxation, exercise, breath control, a nourishing diet, and positive thinking and meditation). Also added are guidelines for practicing yoga, the seven chakras of the astral body, yogic breathing, warming up exercises, the standing postures, seated exercises, improving focus with the balancing postures, opening the heart and strengthening the back, and the inverted postures.

3) Meditation: “There is no doubt that the mind’s ability to analyze, discriminate, plan and communicate has helped us reach where we are today. Yet it can be a double-edged sword. Although the brain may help us to reason, to think creatively, and to relate to others, if we don not learn to switch it off it can overwhelm us. It can persecute us with fears about failure, our appearance, or the opinions others may have of us. Meditation can bring relief from those anxieties by helping us to silence inner chatter, to recognize and dismiss negative thoughts, and to create a feeling of peace and serenity.”

Included in the meditation section are suggestions for finding time to meditate, preparing to meditate, postures and breathing, relaxation, affirmations, mantras, standing and walking meditation, the chakras, visualization, meditation for healing, color and light, the power of sound, and meditations for stressful situations.

4) Stress relief: “For long-term stress relief and optimum well-being you need periods of mental and physical relaxation throughout the day. Relaxation is a set of easily learned skills that will teach you how to combat the effects of stress and restore the balance between body and mind to enable healthy, happy living.”

Included in the stress relief section are a strategy for relaxation, relaxing your body, breathing, reducing muscle tension, massage, restoring vital energy, relaxing mind and spirit, meditation, visualization, hypnotherapy, self-hypnosis, autogenic training, biofeedback, improving self-worth, setting goals, going with the flow, living for the moment, positive commuting, freedom from fear, relationships, diet, exercise, the world of work, relaxing at home, the world around you, getting a good night’s sleep, and natural remedies for relaxation.

Tags: breathing, chakras, exercises, meditation, pilates, relaxation, self-esteem, serenity, stress relief, yoga