Taking down the stress
BH, the webinar was great, yesterday.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate, even with all the madness currently going on around us.
Personally, I am starting to ‘feel’ that things are calming down, somehow, even though the headlines suggest precisely the opposite.
For the two weeks before ‘WAR WITH IRAN’ kicked off, again, I was jumping out of my skin for no obvious reason, and my stress was through the roof. I tend to get the zeitgeist about two weeks ahead, for some reason, so I am taking it as a good sign, that the last couple of days I am feeling a lot less ‘stressed’ within myself, although still not 100%.
Obviously.
We are having open miracles here all the time.
The ‘Hamans’, the ‘Pharoahs’, who are strangely committed to bombing chareidim and poor Sephardim and Ethiopians in the periphery, are not going to win.
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I have some more ideas to share about ‘barad’, and how God saved some of that ‘barad’ for the times of Moshiach, which I will try to post up next.
In the meantime, I wanted to just share my notes from yesterday’s class, with some ideas on how to take down the stress we are all feeling right no, in our state of lo be seder – disorder, chaos, confusion.
The SEDER – the ‘order’ is coming soon, in about nine days.
We just have to figure out how to hang on, and not crack up, until it arrives.
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Notes from the webinar (not formatted, as don’t have the time, but hopefully still helpful.)
- The main message for right now is ‘we’re not in control’.
- That’s not a happy, or comfortable message, for most of us, all of us.
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Tachlis, we are living through a period of time where none of the plans, the lists, the chores we want to get to, especially ahead of Pesach, are playing out as we want them to.
- This is affecting every single person, regardless of their domestic situation – single, married, with kids, without.
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And, all this uncertainty causes people tremendous amounts of stress.
- And that in turn leads to tremendous amounts of ‘overwhelm’, and a sense of panic / anger / paralysis / trying to fix everyone’s problems – the 4 stress responses of FIGHT/FLIGHT.FREEZE/FLATTER.
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HOW TO HANDLE THE STRESS AND OVERWHELM:
- DON’T ‘IGNORE IT’ – that will just cause more subconscious stress and feelings of overwhelm to build up. Recognise openly “I AM feeling stressed right now. I AM feeling totally overwhelmed. I AM feeling scared / angry / paralysed / agitated / frustrated / upset – name the underlying emotion, if you can. Naming the problem instantly shrinks it down to more manageable proportions.
- TAKE STEPS TO REDUCE THE ‘PHYSICAL’ STRESS. Here’s what’s been working for me, at least a bit: rescue remedy, walks, sunning, palming and trying to break the ‘Pavlov’ reaction every time I hear planes or sirens, with the ‘head hold’ – demonstrate.
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TAKE STEPS TO REDUCE THE EMOTIONAL / MENTAL STRESS.
- Accept the reality of our situation right now. We can’t do what we want to do, we can’t get to all the cleaning and prep we’re perhaps used to, we are operating in ‘survival mode’, which means most of us just have energy just for the basics, to clean the house of CHAMETZ, not dust, and to keep the food yummy but simple.
- To not feel ‘guilty’ that we aren’t doing a super-duper job of Pesach prep this year. REALLY? Just carrying on day to day, and doing the holiday even in the simplest way possible IS A SUPER-DUPER JOB BY ITSELF. If we are getting out of bed in the morning, we can already congratulate ourselves for doing a super-duper job – ESPECIALLY if we have a tendency to respond to stress by FREEZING.
- No chumrot – Rebbe Nachman himself talks about this, and if there are not a lot of questions, I will read you what he says.
- And this is the huge one, in terms of shalom bayit: TO CUT OURSELVES SOME SLACK, SEE OURSELVES WITH A ‘GOOD EYE’ – AND TO ALSO SEE OTHER PEOPLE WITH A ‘GOOD EYE’, TOO.
- When people get stressed like this, they are spending most of their time in a triggered ‘stress response’, which means they need a lot of energy just to overcome feelings of anger / blame / frustration / fear / panic / depression, OR, trying to be the ‘superwoman’ who holds it all together while everyone is cracking up around them. That last one is the FLATTER stress response, that many people don’t even understand is a stress response.
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- Just as we have ‘stress responses’, our children and husbands and friends and parents etc all have ‘stress responses’ too. If we recognise that, and understand it, we will start to cut ourselves and others way more slack, and stop beating ourselves up, or others up, if they can’t manage to meet our, or their own expectations. This is the key to having shalom bayit going in to Pesach this year. Much easier said than done.
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Which brings me to the last, but most important step: PUT EVERYTHING BACK ON HASHEM.
- Tachlis, take some time to walk around the block and talk to God for 5 minutes, about the overwhelm / anger / fear.
- Your kid, your spouse, your mum, yourself is annoying the heck out of you? Take a time out, to step back and not take this personally. WE ARE ALL SUPER-STRESSED, no-one is operating at their best, right now.
- Even you fall into a stress response – don’t stay there! Ask Hashem to get you out of the ANGER / PANIC /FREEZE / OVERWHELM / TRYING TO CONTROL STUFF. Especially with the FREEZE, get up and move physically, because the FREEZE chemicals, if allowed to settle down, can tip a person into full blown clinical depression, and exercise, walking, movement disperses them before that can happen.
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RELY ON THE PRAYER WE SAY WHEN WE BURN THE CHAMETZ. That even if we saw it, even if we know about it but couldn’t clean it – it’s still totally nullified by that prayer. This is simple emuna.
(My husband wants me to add, if it’s less than a kazayit.)
For those who missed the life session, here’s a link to the message I shared:
https://youtu.be/6n2omhl0Odg
It’s called “The Hidden Power of Matza: Repairing Adam’s Sin
By the way why does everyone (especially teenagers and children) have some kind of “disorder,” autism, ADHD, OCD, this, that, the other, whatever the “DSM” folks call a disorder? How did this come about, where 90% of humans are now “disordered?”
There are 2 answers to the question: 1) Yes, everyone has some sort of ‘disorder’ that is actually just their bad middot and stress responses. The more bad middot a person has, or the more unresolved trauma they went through, the more they will present extreme reactions that could very easily be called ‘a disorder’. In theory at least, once you understand what you’re dealing with, EVERY DISORDER CAN BE AMELIORATED – and most of them could probably be almost totally eradicated, at least back to the level of ‘regular’ bad middot, and ‘regular’ responses to stress.
2) The DSM is a big con put together by the psychiatric industry to convince everyone their brain is ‘broken’ and their psyche is unfixable – requiring never-ending sessions with shrinks that can’t really help you, or prescriptions for pills that ‘help you’ by basically performing a chemical lobotomy to take big chunks of your personality and soul out of the picture.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, in his excellent book ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ explains in the last section that really, ‘TRAUMA’ and responses to it, are the only ‘disorders’ that the DSM would actually need to contain.
Of course, the DSM totally refuses to include the information that mental illnesses are caused by trauma (and bad middot, that can be changed, with a lot of prayer and determination, and not letting ourselves off the hook for all our bad middot by playing the ‘victim’ card.)
Things like One Brain can help a million times more, to get that ‘stored trauma’ response unplugged, and out of the body, than talking to a shrink for years about ‘how bad your life is’ and ‘how much you suffered’.
From what I’ve seen and experienced myself, shrink culture just makes the participants wield their victimhood to try and manipulate and guilt others into giving them what they want, while they duck the work of really working on the bad middot that are holding them back in lives, and making them so miserable.
You pay shrinks a lot of money to listen to you moan on about how hard your life is…. no-one else can really put up with it for very long, especially if it’s never-ending and unceasing and a one way street of ‘poor me’.
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Last thing to say, is if anyone is looking for a frum, male One Brain practitioner here in Israel who speaks English, to deal with ‘trauma’, try Chaim. Here is his website: https://www.kabbalahempowerment.com/ I’m not getting anything to recommend him, but I know him personally, to I’m happy to give him a plug.
Hope that answers your question.
Thank you so much for the hat tip Rivka!
As you said, One Brain goes to the energetic root of the problem. Using applied kinesiology, we track the signature of the emotion to find out what is happening beneath the surface, when it happened and release it.
While the medical establishment doesn’t view it as “proper therapy”, it’s a very precise and powerful process.
I am building a website to focus entirely on One Brain at a more accessible price, which is http://www.onebrainflow.com and should be finished this last week of March.
Blessings to everyone,
Chaim