Stress Relief: Your Environment Reflects Your Level of Stress

Everything comes into your life for a beautiful and Divine reason – everything and everyone. The people, or pets, and even your plants all have something to teach or share with you.

When you realize there are no accidents and everything and everyone who enters your life is supposed to be there (yes, even those who cause crummy to horrible experiences) your stress level begins to fall.

Are you kidding? Not at all. Stop and notice…

How do your plants grow? Do they grow? Do they look the way you expect them to?
Many years ago scientists monitored plants while shrimp were being boiled alive nearby. The plants showed stress.

I know my plants do better when I take the time to talk to them. And I most definitely know that trees communicate with me as do stones.

Hey, that is why I am able to make such beautiful sculptures and carvings. Basically the stones or wood tell me what to make. After all, the finished form lies within. All I need to do is remove the excess wood and know where to place which stones!

No, I do not hear words coming from seemingly inanimate objects. I feel their energy. Even rocks have very distinctive energies. You will feel them when you allow yourself to do so.

You will also see the energy that surrounds things you think have no living energy. Auras are energy fields that can actually be measured with manmade instruments and scales.

There is a whole world out there most people never see because they do not believe such things can be real. They fail to accept other dimensions and possibilities into their world.

Back to the subject of plants and how we learn from them.

If you grow plants, either indoors or outside, observe how they fare and under what conditions they thrive or wither away. Pay attention to the conditions under which they are living when you look at their vitality.

How does what happens with your plants reflect what is going on inside you? When your stress level rises do your plants need more water because they sense your dehydration?

Do they manage to make it through long periods of drought when you forget to water them – the way you make it through tough times?

Ever seen a plant come back to life when you were preparing to throw it away?
How vulnerable are your plants to insects or fungi and parasites? How about you? Is there a correlation between the health of your plants and your own health?

The connection with pets is pretty clear. So “getting” that everything in your environment impacts and is impacted by you takes stepping outside your box.

You may know some people who can’t wear watches. The watches explode or stop running. Many of my friends (and me too, dang!) experience sensitive electronics, especially computers. Others can do things on my computer with no problem that I cannot do at all when my energy goes out of whack.

You don’t need to judge anything. Just take notice of how things, living or not, in your environment seem to react to you and how you feel.

Stressed Women Over 40

Women over forty often find stress closing in from all areas of the lives.

For those who were stay-at-home moms or homemakers the work place is unfamiliar territory.

Women who have been out in the work force may begin to question the value of what they contributed to society or to the planet. Most likely they also awakened their drive to connect with their spirituality. Of course their bodies are going through changes that may magnify the emotional journey on which they find themselves.

For many women over forty, the move toward introspection accentuates their empty feeling or loneliness – even when they find themselves still married. They begin to acknowledge just how unhappy they are.

These days you find many marriages, of more than 30 years, ending. The women who made that conscious choice decided they could no longer live in deep unhappiness and preferred to jump into the unknown.

For those women, the thought of living out the rest of their lives with the stress of not feeling fulfilled is way more scary than stepping out of their comfort zone.

Just look at the statistics for middle-aged women and feminine cancers. How many of them are looking for a way out, a way to end the disappointment of not giving birth to their own desires and taking care of their own needs for themselves.

Stress takes its toll on those who get caught by surprise. Without healthy habits and independent thought paradigms one easily succumbs to overwhelm—whether those be emotional or physical states.

Yet there is another way to live, a way that reduces, eliminates and avoids stressful situations from taking over one’s life. That way is to replace habitual thoughts, emotions and actions that currently disempower you and cause stress with new habits, new ways of thinking.

Remember that thoughts lead to emotions that lead to actions that create results. Then that cycle repeats.

So when you start with new thoughts you will experience new and different feelings which means you will take actions you never took before. The result you create will compose your new world and different life.

What you have been doing up until now got you through life—at a price. If you feel unhappy I guarantee your health is not optimal. Eventually your physical health and emotional health will become a major issue (if it hasn’t already) requiring medical intervention of some sort.

You can choose to stay in your stressful life or you can do something different. Nothing will change for you until you decide first and act second.

Divorced Women Over 40 Stressed by Memories

Divorced women over 40 may carry unresolved issues around for years – maybe forever.  In that case they will go on repeating the relationship lesson they have not yet learned.

What lesson is that? The way your husband treated you during the marriage probably made you feel a certain way. At least that is the story you tell yourself and probably all of our girl friend and anyone who will listen to you.

Since misery loves company you will not have trouble finding other angry, hurt women to listen to your complaints. Well, actually you more likely share poor me stories.

Yet you were never the victim in the marriage. He may have treated you without respect and maybe never honored you at all.

So here is a question: did you go into the marriage expecting him to make you happy? Did you look to him to build your self esteem? Did you need praise from him to feel good about yourself?

And what if he never provide any of that once you were married?

The thing is he treated you the way you taught him to treat you.

What?

He observed (subconsciously, perhaps) the way you treated yourself. Did you take time for yourself to do things you enjoyed? Did you do and say things that said, “I love me! I am terrific just the way I am!”

Loving yourself means doing what you want to do for you. It is not selfish. It is fulfilling our own personal desires not just the desires of everybody else in the world.

Think a moment of some of your friends. I bet you have at least one friend who, when she says she is on her way over to visit you scurry to get the house straight and neat.

That person loves herself and expects others to treat her with the same honor and respect she shows herself. You know that from experience. For that reason you tidy up the place when she is coming over.

Now think of a friend who comes over dressed kind of straggly. You wouldn’t give a second thought to straightening or cleaning the house, no matter what.  That person settles for how others treat her. This is not about being understanding this is about not feeling worthy or deserving of good things.

See the difference? Do you also see how you taught your husband how to treat you?

Whatever behaviors he exhibited toward you either left you feeling good or feeling bad. You always had a choice to accept or reject his behaviors. You could always have let him know his actions bothered you or were not acceptable to you.

If you did so great for you. If you didn’t then you cannot blame him for how treated you. He mimicked how you treated you to the best of his ability.

When you fail to object to how someone treats you, in essence, you give them permission to treat you that way.

Make sense?

There is no one to blame for all the stress of your marriage that still bothers you. Don’t even blame yourself. Chalk it all up to one big learning experience.

Stress: It’s Not What Is Going On, It’s How You Feel About What is Going On

When you feel really overwhelmed, like there is no way out, remember that you are reacting to your interpretation of the situation and not to the situation itself.

Somebody else in that same situation, or even you at a different time, may not even notice anything heavy duty going on in the moment.

How can that happen? Your state of mind determines your interpretation of what is happening. Your interpretation will either make you feel good or bad. Good can be happy or at peace. Bad can be angry, sad or full out stressed.

In any case it is how you use your imagination that determines your interpretation of the current circumstances. Yes current, in this moment – not yesterday, not even an hour ago. The past is gone. The only time you have is this moment. So you can only act in this moment.

And what you think about determines how you feel which causes you to take certain actions. And after you take those actions you again look at the new situation and decide (by thinking) how you feel now. You continue the cycle of think, feel, act.

What can you do, with that knowledge, to move out of overwhelm and stress and into a feel good place where you can live permanently with only brief visits to the stress you now endure?

Did you say to change your thoughts? Seems pretty obvious, don’t you think?

When your life fails to look the way you want it to look would it make any sense to keep taking the same actions every day? Why would they take you to a different place tomorrow, or the next day if you they never led you there before?

Perpetuating a routine that fails to serve you or move you to a better place makes zero sense. But how do you step outside the box to create all new thoughts, feelings and actions?
Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it.” Okay then what do you do?
Find someone who already lives the way you want to live and copy what they do. By copying their actions you begin to think the way they think. Obviously choose a role model who lives stress-free if you want to live stress-free.
Ah, note that different people have different definitions of stress and therefore different ways of living stress-free. So your first task is to define what stress is for you and then to figure out how your world will look when you live without stress.

Stress-Free Living Requires Conscious Living

Stress-free living requires you to consciously stay focused in the present moment and pay attention to your thoughts. You know your thoughts by monitoring your feelings.

I tell my clients that I never ask anything of them I have not been through or done myself. Since I have survived some major traumas in my own life and had to come back from nearly dying I do know how hard life can be.

Ah, hard if you choose to live in struggle and stress.

I find myself frequently needing to take care of crisis situations. Those moments keep me on my toes and, most important, they keep me sharp making me walk my talk.

Hmm. Why do I create such situations? Well, let’s see, I tell people I never ask anything of them I have not done myself. That is huge clue!

To stop putting myself into varied stressful situations I need to drop that line from my repertoire. No kidding!

You may think I am being silly here. But when I speak or write those words I am sending a clear message to my own subconscious mind and to the Universe that I need to keep experiencing challenges so I will be able to say, “Been there. Done tha,.”  regardless of the client’s situation.

That whole notion is really no different than thinking, as a psychotherapist, you have to suffer from every possible disorder before you can assist anyone in healing from that disorder.

What a ludicrous thought. Yet no more out there than what I put out to the Universe pretty regularly.

I know how the body, mind, spirit system work. I do not need to suffer any conditions or setbacks or stress at all –unless I need to learn more life lessons (which I do). In fact, if my own well being is not fully charged with love I can be pretty much useless at helping someone heal.

Make sense?

I know how the body/mind attracts stressful situations to itself. But only when I remember to stay present and live and act consciously in this moment can I be truly stress-free.

And I can continue to create these new thought patterns that keep me focused in the now rather than repeat the past stuck behaviors.

All I have to do is catch myself experiencing overwhelm or pressure to recognize I am not living in the present moment. Then I come back and make a decision to replace those other thoughts with pleasant ones that fail to make me feel bad.
Eliminating stress is as simple as creating new habits. It all starts with your thoughts.