Purge Your Stress

By GAYATRI PAGDI

Some of us remember the old man of the sea in the tale of Sindbad. The man who enslaves Sindbad and rides on his shoulders with his legs twisted round his neck and will not let go until Sindbad would welcome death.

Or, remember “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge? The albatross that hangs around the neck of the mariner becomes such a huge burden; it is a fate worse than death.

The stress and negativity that we collect in our lives and store within our bodies seem a lot like that.

In the whole hectic pursuit of happiness, we actually take more and more stress. When good things happen, we worry about whether they will last, or what we will do when they are gone. When we await good times, we tend to think of negative possibilities and worry about them. And, then, we store all this worry, this stress, somewhere in the body. The more it accumulates, the more the body suffers. In the meanwhile, we wonder unhappily why the precise things that we worried about have come so true.

We often talk to ourselves, to our bodies, but we rarely ever listen to them. The body follows the command of the mind too often and falls prey to the stress that the mind has forced it to store. It can become a vicious routine. One way to break out of it is the mantra of “let go!”

All of us can learn to let go of stress. When we let it go, we give the body a chance to return to its optimal state. Some of us are better at this than others because they are better at letting go of the negative emotions. They manage to not hold onto everything that has happened to them in the past. The way to start letting go of stress is to start noticing its effects on the body. You, obviously, don’t like what you see. It’s probably time to try the next step. This involves getting in touch with your stressful emotions.

In our day-to-day lives, we don’t want to feel all the pain of the stressful emotions that we have accumulated for long; so we push them in the basement of our minds. But, if we wish to get rid of them, we must clear this subterranean vault, free the negative, painful, fearsome issues and acknowledge their existence. Once we look at them squarely in the eye, it gets easier to release them. If we hold onto them, we would be jammed with their results.

Mental health professionals tell us that most of us release emotions at least partly by acting them out. It is much better to learn to release emotions by feeling them. When we do that, we are no longer at their mercy, or terrified, of their possible eruption, or also feel their constant pressure.

Acknowledging your emotions and then consciously letting go of them can help us live a calmer, peaceful life. It’s not easy, but persistence, practice and the right medical help are never wasted, even in the most seemingly hopeless cases.

One day we might discover that all the baggage that we had lugged around our necks, or carried on our shoulders for so long, has lost most of its weight. It bids fair to the fact that some day it might also disappear completely.