Whenever I tell people that part of my work is delivering stress management workshops, their eyes light up. I’m like eye candy. They lean in. They ask questions. They share stories.

I have to admit: I sometimes regard the stress relief part of my work as the “most basic”, the least challenging, and thus the least gratifying one (thanks, patriarchy). It’s not as “deep” as trauma work, or as imaginative as energy work.

I partly play it down because I sometimes… forget. I forget how it was when anxiety ruled my life. I’ve deleted the panic attacks, the unpredictable gut, the rebellious skin, all the mystery aches and illnesses, the string of pointless medical tests, the wild goose chase for *that* miraculous supplement or tactic that would make it all go away.

But of course, even though I’ve managed to radically change my relationship with stress, I do remember.

I remember well how anxiety breeds anxiety. It multiplies. It coerces the body to produce more.

It’s also not all ours. We absorb so much anxiety from others, we inherit it, we measure our worth by it.

It’s a maelstrom we don’t know how to get out of.

We rack our brains to figure it out. We read books, listen to podcasts, exercise, go to therapy.

It’s such an irony that we think and do so much - to think and do less.

We get anxious about how to become less anxious.

We tend to think that we need to relieve our mind from stress so that our body feels better.

But it’s the other way around.

A switch that turns anxiety off is the body.

When attention comes into the body, stress drops – poof! – away.

It’s so simple, we don’t trust it: it’s not gratifyingly “hard enough”.

The caveat here is that by “simple” I mean “boring af”; an unsexy, blow-your-brains-out-tedious repetition of a very basic scheme:

Feel the anxiety.

Trace the thought behind it.

Pivot your attention.

Gaze inside your body.

Stay.

Breathe.

Move on.

Repeat.

Notice the thought.

Pivot your attention.

Be in your body.

Repeat.

This is like the skeleton, the meta way to look at it. It can be applied in many, varied ways.

The thing no one really talks about is that last bit.

“Repeat”.

That’s the boring, repetitive aspect that we usually bypass.

The goal is not to stay chill all the time, but to learn how to bring ourselves back into our chill zone, when we need it.

To be able to change our inner state on demand takes a bit of practice. Practice grows with repetition. Repetition is sustained through devotion.

The devotion to tend to ourselves more lovingly, bit by bit, day by day.

It might sound basic, but hey. Most fundamental things are. How could we grow without them?

Love,

Elena

PS Got any thoughts? Objections? Concerns? I’d love to hear.

📷 Eva Tsakni

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