Accumulated stress makes your physical body vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and infections. It also makes us susceptible to mental health issues. Scientists don't fully understand how your mind can create problems in the body, but there are over 300 studies that show stressful emotions directly affect your immunity.
When we take a look at the whole mind-body energy system, we can see that when stressed, it's disconnected from integrity. Mind, emotions, and body are struggling for dominance to quell internal stress.
When you overthink, you naturally force your awareness and energy toward your head. This is what the unflattering phrase ‘being in your head’ means.
When you are ‘in your head,’ it is as if the body can perceive attention being directed away from what is tacitly happening. The body may begin to shout and nag at the mind to pay attention to it, not the disconnected thought stream running in the mind, which is fantasizing about ways to get out of the current situation. The sympathetic fight, flight, or freeze system is activated, leading to a higher heart rate, more cortisol release, disrupted digestion, and a long list of unwanted health systems if this state continues.
So what do you do?
To get back into the body and reconnect your energy circuitry, you need to learn pragmatic practices of relaxing and allowing the energy in the situation to move you emotionally or physically. Thinking about what happened, or could happen, or why it happened leads awareness away from what is happening right now. And as we mentally seek escape, we disconnect from the power inherent in the situation.
Here are four powerful practices, and a penultimate fifth step, rooted in the wisdom of ancient Tantric Yoga and Buddhist meditation to build a healthy mind-body connection when feeling stressed:
Step #1: Harness the Power of Breath
Your breath is a potent bridge between your mind and body.
It's your inborn tool to query, regulate, and maintain your mind-body wellness.
By practicing being aware of breath, you communicate with your body on a deeper level, in its native language of feeling. Energy follows awareness.
Consciously breathe deeply with your diaphragm to signal safety and to restore balance within. Your belly should move when you breathe. Physical tension while breathing is an indicator of unacknowledged sensations and emotions. How to begin releasing this knot? By surrendering to what is already happening, and surrendering resistive tension, so the body can metabolize and transform the stress into available free energy.
Step #2: Cultivate Relaxed Consciousness in Daily Life
Mindfulness is a horrible term—meditation is not about being full of what the mind’s contents are, or locating awareness in the mind. What that term is trying to point toward is about making awareness more 'body-full,' fully aware of what you feel inside emotionally and physically. Over time, the mind becomes quiet and the wisdom within emotions and sensations become evident. Deepening your ability to be present with whatever is happening within your body strengthens your mind-heart-body connection and amplifies your awareness of life. Thoughts are empty of substance, constantly appearing and disappearing.
To enhance your connection to your life force, make body-aware practices a part of your daily routine. Bring awareness into contact with your breath, the leading edge of life, and thereby arrive in the present moment, the only time you have ever actually lived in.
Step #3: Embrace Embodied Movement
When you physically move, energy flows, and awareness courses back into your body, away from the grip of the mind.
Engage in practices like 5-minute yoga, qigong, dance, or tai chi to harmonize and regulate stress. Walking is great too, but do it without your distracting devices.
Nurture a conscious connection with your body through movement and embodied presence. Practice moving with conscious gracefulness because it feels better than being dissociated and clumsy.
Step #4: Practice Self-Compassion
When faced with mistakes or challenges, be kind to yourself. If you could have done it differently at the moment, you would have. What happened has happened. Let go.
Your body responds to where the mind goes. Your internal attitude toward yourself is a lifeless artifact formed in childhood that usually does not reflect reality.
Avoid mentally replaying stressful experiences; instead, practice self-compassion and guide your body toward relaxing all resistance to the way things already are.
Transform stress into strength through the power of self-love and acceptance.
Step #5: Source Your Existence in Consciousness Itself—This Is True Freedom and Power
Become aware of awareness, and locate where the spaciousness of pure awareness actually is. This is not a thought experiment. It is a feeling, proprioceptive knowing. This view provides a radical shift in how you approach and understand what is happening in reality and your separate experience of and reaction to it. This is not esoteric theory—it is the key to revolutionizing how you experience life.
Learning how to do this from books and videos is impossible because the thinking and searching mind prevents realizing the embodied truth already present. Reality is the way it is, and your reaction to it, your opinion of it, and your desire for it to be different in any way exists only subjectively within you. After reading hundreds of books, two decades of psychotherapy and Jungian analysis, and five decades of searching and striving, live, in-person training finally provided the breakthrough for me, and it’s why I’ve committed myself to paying forward this work.
Learning to experience reality without stress and anxiety requires liberating the heart and mind by ending unhelpful discursive thinking and emotional reactivity. Your mental habits must be interrupted, and the underlying emotional energy must be utilized in new behaviors. This is identical to Buddhist “pointing-out” instruction or training a puppy; the underlying unconscious primal motivations must be caught in the moment and brought into awareness before they can be modified or transformed. That’s why live, in-person training is essential. Mental knowledge alone is the obstacle, transcended only through tacit embodied situational proficiency.
This kind of training is a subcortical conditioning used in martial arts and performing arts. It works by interrupting old unconscious patterns and allowing a corrected guileless response to arise simultaneously with stimulus, bypassing cerebral systems of rational choice. This ability to respond directly and without stress allows you to enjoy the moment and take pleasure in life—enabling you to relax in situations that previously would have been emotionally unsettling or challenging..
By integrating these ancient practices into your daily life, you will discover a profound mind-heart-body synergy that empowers you to navigate stress with grace and resilience. Clients report dramatic changes due to this ability, whether in the boardroom, the bedroom, or the golf course. Everything shifts, and challenges unwind gracefully and naturally, like Neo dodging bullets in slow motion,
These are some of the basic elements of more in-depth teachings I empower clients with during our work together. If you are interested in learning more advanced meditative practices, ancient spiritual frameworks, the art of transforming emotions, and how to integrate sexuality, purpose, and life-fulfillment, join me for a 5-day immersive experience at the Ascending the Sacred Mountain 2023 Men’s retreat.