Stress Management Skills for Real Life

This lesson is all about the nervous system and how it relates to our experience of stress. Understanding how this works can help us get a handle on how our bodies are responding to stress and some of the options we have to regulate our system.

In this meditation, we'll explore some ways to calm the nervous system and allow the body to enter the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the "rest and digest" state where the immune system can activate and digestion can regulate, among many other benefits.

In this lesson, we work with the concept of core beliefs: deeply held unconscious beliefs about ourselves. We explore some of the ideas of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in order to uncover and work with our core beliefs so we can switch to a more adaptive way of handling stress when it arises.

In this meditation, we work with compassion as a major antidote to difficult unconscious core beliefs. When we can access compassion for others, we're likelier to be able to apply it to ourselves, even when our core beliefs about ourselves are far from compassionate to begin with. Don't forget to add your thoughts and questions to the Classroom area of the course!

In this lesson, we explore the concept that we could embrace, honor, and learn from the wisdom of darker emotions like anger and sadness. If we can become friends with those darker emotions and can know what to do with them, they no longer cause us so much stress. Don't forget to add your thoughts and questions to the Classroom area so I can see and respond to them!

This meditation explores a Buddhist practice of inviting an emotion into your body and then separating from the story of the emotion so that you can feel it more purely in your body. From there, we may have the opportunity to learn something from the emotion rather than trying to suppress or reject it. We focus specifically on anger here, but you can do this with any emotion.

In this lesson, we explore food, stress, and relationships. We talk about how food works in relationship to our nervous systems and guidance around eating in a way that supports your general health and wellness. This is a big topic, and there are references in this lesson to sexuality and disordered eating, so be gentle with yourself when you're listening and feel free to skip this lesson if it feels unsafe for you in any way.

This meditation explores sitting with and loving our bellies exactly as they are, for everything they do for us and everything we've been through. We also work a little bit with the chakra energy centers that exist in the belly. Explore how it feels for you to be with your belly and think and feel about it.

In our final lesson, we talk about pleasure, which isn't as simple as it sounds. Opening to darkness and the present moment can be difficult, but it can also open the door to feeling joy and pleasure. Opening to pleasure sometimes also opens us to darker emotions sitting there just behind it. Enjoyment is a practice and it's very worth working on.

This is one of my favorite meditation practices and I wanted to end our course on this sweet note. Here, we practice sitting with the concept of something sweet, pleasurable, or enjoyable and explore what that's like. Getting better at experiencing sweetness means it's easier to find in our day-to-day lives, making our general experience of life happier, healthier, and more enjoyable. I'd love to hear more about how this course was for you and any remaining questions or thoughts. Don't forget to post your thoughts in the Classroom area of this course!