I’ve experienced a good deal of stress lately. My recently attained position is a wonderful thing. But as most people know, even good change can cause disruption, upheaval and stress. I ran into many old patterns, feelings and reactions last week. Performance anxiety has been a big one lately, and the fear of disappointing others through a lack of delivery and service is taking too much room on my plate. Goodness! I can be hard on myself. I’ve never had a job that was created and new. I have such a tremendous opportunity to learn, experiment and grow. What do I do with my energy instead? I use up my creative energy and power worrying about how I’m going to do it all. I can’t think of a worse way to approach this. Granted it’s understandable, but it certainly isn’t helpful.
I was thinking about how I can manage my stress better and it really comes down to remembering the basics: exercise, eating better, meditating, do things that are fun and make me laugh and breathing deep. Ok, every one knows this stuff is good to do, but when push comes to shove most of us would rather dig into the Halloween candy, or open another bottle of beer, smoke, and then take Tylenol pm –whatever people do to tune out and turn off. I may be externalizing as this sounds like my last 10 days… Boy have I been guilty of these things lately. But I realized that as I go through this period that if I can just add one more thing to appreciate in this time, I am better off than I was when I looked for all the things that could go wrong. I am more aware now of this, and can hopefully watch out for myself slipping again. I want to be easier on myself if I melt down occasionally, because the truth is I’ve come a long way in how I react and handle myself. I have more perspective and have a great opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn’t. And nothing is wrong with finding out what doesn’t work. Just move on and try something different.
I read this quote out of a Bill Harris letter and it helped me appreciate from a higher elevation how I’ve grown and continue to do so. It’s simply a good reminder.
“The great modern philosopher and developmental psychologist Ken Wilber is fond of saying that spiritual development (in fact, all development) is a matter of adopting additional perspectives. We begin life with a very limited perspective. As we develop — as we evolve spiritually — we add additional perspectives. As we add perspectives, our awareness expands. In fact, these are just two different ways of describing the same phenomenon. You might say that as we develop we increasingly perceive and experience how everything is connected and goes together — we focus more on the relationships between people, things, and events — rather than seeing and experiencing people, things, and events as separate from each other. In other words, our perspective becomes more holistic. The more we see things in terms of how they are separate, the more likely we are to be unhappy, fearful, anxious, unsuccessful, and isolated. The more we see how everything goes together and depend on everything else, the more likely we are to feel good, to feel connected to the world and other people, and to be successful. In other words, the more perspectives we are able to take... ...the better life works.”
