Hello and welcome to Being Strategically Resilient.
Today we're going to focus on exploring stress and the window of resilience.
When we encounter stress in our lives,
It can actually serve us as a catalyst to help us grow,
Get stronger,
To grow and learn.
But how we handle that,
The demands,
The stress of our day depends significantly on our baseline energy.
When our energy or vitality is high,
We tend to meet challenges with openness or with positivity and our energy is low.
We become physically tight,
Rigid,
And closed off.
And this brings us to a favorite metaphor of mine,
And that is the window of resilience,
A brilliant conceptualization by Danny Siegel.
Picture the typical window and when stress pushes us out at the top of that window,
Our energy becomes high,
Anxious,
Chaotic,
And our sympathetic nervous system gets stuck up there,
Stuck on alert.
And when we drop to the bottom of the window,
We become sluggish and frozen.
So strategic resilience means intentional body and breath practices to regulate these states.
If we're elevated and anxious,
We intentionally activate the parasympathetic nervous system to downregulate it.
Our body and return to a state of equilibrium and focused energy.
For today's practice,
We'll assume that we feel a bit elevated,
Anxious,
And worried about the day,
And we need to downregulate.
So let's meet this feeling together,
Shall we?
Okay,
Sit comfortably and see if your back can be straight,
Aligned,
As if there was a string extending from the base of your sit bones all the way through your head to through the sky,
In a nice and dignified posture.
You can close your eyes if you feel comfortable or you can maintain a fixed gaze on a spot in front of you.
Place your hands comfortably on your thighs and now let's begin.
Again,
We begin to notice the body in place,
Sitting,
Our feet on the floor Our legs relaxed,
Our knees feeling their hands on our thighs,
Shoulders back and hopefully that sense of sinking into the chairs is being experienced by you Now,
We want to meet this elevated anxiety Recognize that your nervous system is simply at the top of your window We're not going to fight that feeling,
We're just going to help it come down We're going to use the body and breath to do that I want you to focus on your breath And with each exhale you're going to settle the body deeper.
Starting at the top,
Soften the forehead,
Cheeks and jaw.
Carry a lot of stress there.
On the next sex scene,
See if you can soften the shoulders and the neck.
Next exhale,
Relax the legs and feet Just feel the tightness,
The rigidality melting away as you shift from a closed state to an open state Cradling that anxiety and breathing with it.
Picturing it,
You'll be reducing with each breath.
Enjoying each breath as it comes in and out.
Breathe in,
Breathe into that stomach that causes the relaxation response.
Breathing into the stomach.
Release and fold and then exhale.
Just noticing the nervous system downregulating in your window becoming Let's do two coherent breaths together,
Okay?
So breathing in through the nose for five seconds slowly.
Holding at the top and then exhale through the nose for 5 seconds.
Slowly.
Try this again.
Why so slow?
Intentional inbreath.
Holding at the top and then exhale for 5 seconds.
Oh,
That's fantastic.
You're doing great.
So just return to your natural breathing rhythm.
Just feeling the shift of the energy.
In harnessing the power of each breath to down regulate that anxiety so now it's not even it's just there it may be but it may be so so less significant as it was Take one last breath.
And you can slowly open your eyes and move your body.
And move your neck side to side and back and forth.
And just noticing how you feel.
Noticing the reduction of anxiety This practice done daily will reduce stress and anxiety,
So stay faithful to it.
Even some days if it doesn't feel like it's working as good as you want it to.
Again,
Congratulations on your practice and until next time.
