1000 Face's

If there is one condition that has a thousand faces and undermines our body’s balance so completely and silently, it has to be stress. Stress is the common denominator of all disease, yet most people only notice it when it is gone.

When we feel threatened, disturbed or trapped our body naturally jumps into action. We release the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. These speed up our responses preparing us to fight or flight. Our digestion and bowels slow and our immune system becomes inhibited, as energy is diverted to our heart, muscles and lungs- all the systems that enable us to react quickly during a crisis. We feel our mouth become dry and our palms sweat. This is essentially a healthy response.

It takes only a small amount of stimuli for the body to react with stress. Just a thought can trigger stress in the body. Our body cannot differentiate between a perceived threat and an actual one; it responds to both the same way. Just thinking about a possible future challenge can keep us up at night.

If we compound the delicate stress response with all of the troublesome thoughts we experience everyday, then we have a self- perpetuating system. This cycle of thought and reaction is so common and so real, that most people consider it a normal state of reality.

What happens inside the body while this is happening to you? If your body has stress chemicals floating around that are inhibiting its normal function, then homeostasis is disturbed. You are never going to feel the way you did before. If your body is tight, bracing itself for the next disaster, slowing down your digestion, stifling the bowels, and retarding the immune system, then we can expect a lifetime of progressive chronic conditions.

People come to massage therapy wondering why they have headaches that last for weeks at a time or why they suffer from many types of chronic pain. We chronically tense our muscles, preventing healing and trapping toxins. Our jaws clench and grind down our teeth, we brace our necks and deform our posture.

When you relax, at best, it is only a temporary escaping. We attempt to escape what we see as stressful surroundings and go somewhere where stress is not, but stress is never external, it is always is internal. Escape reminds us of what it feels like to be at peace, but it is not true peace.

How can we change this? How can we prevent ourselves from being so effected by so many events? As a first step, bring your consciousness into your body. Start the reconnection process within yourself. When a thought arises that is stressful (and most thoughts bring some amount of stress with them), put your attention into the body and feel the tension. Be present with it and this will help to dissolve the tension. Do this each time a stressful thought comes into you. This is also a form of meditation, where we allow ourselves to move away from our thinking mind and move towards consciousness. Ultimately one’s life will always be a repetition of stress and escape until we move into a different realm of existence. As Eckhart Tolle says, life it is meant to be stressful because if it wasn’t, then we would never seek a higher consciousness.”