And we can all know and recognize that we are interconnected in our feelings of stress.
We might not be stressed about the same things,
But we all experience stress.
And so just holding with compassion our shared humanity here.
There's 54 of us here together and we can all inevitably say that,
Yeah,
There is stress in our lives and we would rather have love than this stress.
So my invitation is that you let go of any distractions for the next 45 or so minutes and you really take the opportunity.
There's nothing to do.
You don't need to take notes.
You don't need to write anything down.
This isn't a lived embodied experience to give yourself a break from all the doing,
The hustle and bustle of your day or night and be at peace with yourself as a human being as we let go of stress and let love in.
So I will say before we get started,
Just a quick reminder that you can follow me here to find more of my meditations and anytime during our meditation if you have a question about what I'm talking about or you need clarity,
Feel free to leave a comment.
And if at any point during the practice you find this to be really valuable,
Donations are really appreciated because this is my life's work and this is the most important offering I can give to the world.
And I know that in me offering this freely to you that it will ripple out into your lives and it will positively make a difference to all the people that you touch.
And together we keep on and keep on creating more love in the world and less stress.
So with that being said,
Let's close our eyes.
If you're still holding your phone in your hand,
I invite you to put it down.
And with our eyes closed,
Just taking a moment to feel into the body.
Noticing your feet on the floor.
And as you notice your feet on the floor or if you're sitting cross-legged,
Notice your feet on whatever surface you're on,
Whichever part of your feet is touching the earth.
Let yourself begin to connect in to something bigger than you,
Into this planet,
This earth that we all share that holds us all up every single day with ease.
So as you breathe in,
Feeling the weight of your body in your chair or if you're laying down in your bed.
And as you breathe out,
Sighing or making a sound,
If that's convenient,
If there's no one you'll disturb,
And just letting go.
Sound is such a powerful tool in shifting our reality.
Part of my work as a sacred musician is opening people up to the power of their voices to heal.
And one way we can do that is by releasing what we've had trapped.
So as you take a deep breath in this time,
I encourage you to make a sound of release.
By letting go.
Sometimes when we feel stressed,
We feel like we can't take a deep breath.
And if that's the case for you,
My invitation is to not focus on breathing deeply or calming down,
But just on being really curious about what is real,
What is present,
What is alive right now.
Because oftentimes when we stop trying to force ourselves to not be stressed,
Naturally our body takes over.
It knows what to do and it wants to return to equilibrium.
We just have to give it the opportunity to do so by getting out of the way,
By letting our thoughts rest for a moment.
And we can let our thoughts rest by paying attention in two places,
In the breath and in the body.
So we'll begin first by focusing together on the breath.
There is a practice that we are going to do now that I just love recognizing that we can create coherence between our brains and our hearts,
Both physically within us and then together as a community here by all breathing together.
So we're not trying to force ourselves to breathe in any particular way.
And we're not trying to do anything,
But we are inviting a willingness to breathe together if it feels safe and comfortable to breathe in for six and out for six.
And if this feels like,
You know what,
I don't like this,
This doesn't feel safe for me,
Then you can let your attention rest in a part of your body where you do feel safe.
At any point,
You can always come back to that part of your body.
Oftentimes people find that to be their hands or their feet.
And if you'd like to try this rhythmic breathing that helps to really soothe the nervous system and to create coherence between the heart and the head,
Then I invite you to take one hand and place it on your heart and one hand and place it on your belly.
Remembering that we're not trying to force ourselves to breathe.
We're just giving an invitation to see if the breath would like to flow this way.
And so we'll start with the hand on the belly.
And with your eyes still closed,
If that feels comfortable,
Just breathing normally and watching becoming the observer.
What happens to your hand as you breathe in?
And then what happens to your hand as you breathe out?
You might notice that your hand rises subtly as your belly fills with air.
And then it slowly falls as you breathe out.
Breathe in and it fills and rises.
You breathe out and it falls.
So we'll breathe together.
And I'll count so you don't have to.
And my invitation is for you to keep your focus on your hand and on your belly,
Where you're actually in the experience of being the scientist of your life and getting curious about what does this in-breath feel like now?
What does this out-breath feel like now?
So we'll begin by taking one in-breath in through the nose and then just sighing out the mouth.
And now focusing on the felt experience of breathing.
We'll breathe in two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Moving on in your own pace as you stay anchored in the feeling,
What is this breath like in this breath?
Not judging it but just experiencing the rise and the fall,
The expansion,
The contraction.
And then noticing however your breath is in this moment and bringing your awareness up into the hand on your heart,
Connecting into your heart center,
Into that place inside of you where your own basic goodness resides.
Beyond all the stress and fear and pain and the swirling emotions that you feel every day,
Deep down below is your true nature,
The essence of goodness that is with the real you.
It's where love resides,
Where joy resides,
Where gratitude resides.
So feeling into your heart center,
It might only be a little or you might feel a lot here.
And just letting yourself stay as much as possible focused on your heart center and feeling,
These elevated emotions,
Joy,
Gratitude,
Love,
Bliss,
Whatever it is that's most resonant for you in this moment.
Stay centered in your heart and really feel it and take it in.
Dr.
Rick Hansen says that negative emotions and negative experiences are like,
I'm going to say it wrong,
Are like Velcro.
If you know what Velcro is,
It sticks.
Those negative things stick to us and we hold on to them.
And he says that positive experiences are like Teflon.
They slide right off and we let them go.
So what we're doing right now,
As we stay focused in our hearts and on these elevated emotions,
We're actually increasing our resiliency and we're increasing our memory so that we are holding onto what it feels like to be in our true nature,
Not what our mind tells us we should be thinking about,
But what our heart really feels.
So staying in this place,
As we begin to breathe together again,
There's almost a hundred of us together and we're going to amplify the unify field by collectively breathing,
Counting in six and out six.
And as I focus on counting,
You focus on feeling yourself fill up with gratitude,
With joy,
With love,
With bliss as you breathe in.
As you breathe out,
Feel every cell of your body become filled with those emotions,
Letting it wash over you,
Breathing in,
Filling up with it,
Breathing out,
Letting it flow effortlessly across your whole being,
Remembering intentionally focusing on these positive feelings,
The true nature of who you actually are.
So with your hand on your heart,
I invite you to take a deep breath and just sigh and release anything else that's been coming up that you're ready to let go of.
Breathing in two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six,
Continuing on feeling gratitude,
Breathing out,
Letting it wash over you,
Feeling the warmth and the goodness and then letting your awareness come back into the hand on your belly and remembering even as your attention stays in your heart,
It can also come down and also be in your abdomen.
You can feel yourself breathing as you feel yourself as a being of love.
So we've started here in this place of gratitude because when we feel stressed,
We need something we can come back to.
We need an anchor that will help us to right ourselves when things get all topsy-turvy and that is what you've just cultivated.
You've cultivated a breathing technique that helps you to create coherence between your head and your heart and you've created a safe place inside of you that feels so resonant,
So authentic,
So true because it is the essence of who you are.
And when we are experiencing stress,
We are experiencing stress in the body physically and we are experiencing thoughts that are creating stress.
But the really important thing to remember is that thoughts are not facts.
Thoughts are not real.
What you can remember when you feel stress is that you have the awareness by pausing.
That's how real relief starts.
It starts with a pause like,
Whoa,
I'm feeling stressed.
I'm going to take a breath.
I'm going to pause.
I'm going to do this counting in and out in six.
I'm going to come back to my heart.
That's where we start to get real relief.
And then the R of real relief is to recognize.
So in this moment,
I want you to think about the most recent time you've been stressed.
Maybe for some of you,
It was watching the presidential debate tonight.
Maybe it had something to do with a colleague at work,
Or maybe it has to do with your family or your health.
Whatever's most recently caused you stress,
Letting that come to mind,
As long as it's not a really intense,
Stressful event.
We're not trying to really dig into like a 10 year,
Maybe something like a three or a four.
And I want you to go into that stressful point where you,
That moment where you're like,
I'm stressed.
And just in your mind's eye,
Say to yourself,
I'm stressed.
And then here's the really important part.
That phrase,
I'm stressed can be shifted in a very small way to make a huge difference in your life.
Instead of saying,
I'm stressed,
I am stressed.
You can shift to,
I feel stress.
Stress is not your being.
You remember your being,
You just experienced the truth of your being.
Stress is not that.
Stress is something that you are feeling and experiencing,
But it is not who you are.
And just that one remembrance,
Recognizing that you're stressed,
It's just a feeling in this moment can give you some spaciousness to think like,
Oh yeah,
I am stressed right now and I have been stressed before and I will be stressed again,
But it's not the end of the world and it doesn't last forever.
That's what we do when we recognize.
We actually name,
We help our amygdala to start calming down by naming.
I feel stressed.
And not only do we recognize that feeling of stress,
We then recognize what is the story here?
What am I saying to myself that is causing me stress?
What am I,
Is the story that because my boss didn't answer my email,
I now think that I'm in trouble.
There's an assumption.
There's so many ways in which our thoughts create so much pain and suffering in our physical bodies and in our emotions,
But our thoughts are not facts.
So we can recognize,
Okay,
This thought is creating this stress.
I see my stressful thought.
And just in that recognition,
We find freedom because we can choose,
We can evaluate,
Is this thought just my perception?
Is there another way of looking at this?
Does it have to be this way?
And then we can recognize,
Oh,
Okay,
There's a story here.
I should slow down.
I should check in and see what's going on.
So then that leads us to the E of real relief.
And the E is to experience what's real inside.
What's real inside is not the story in your mind.
What's real is in your body.
And what we're going to do now is look through four different places in the body where stress normally starts.
We can usually find stress in these four places along with many,
Many,
Many others.
But one helpful hint is once you recognize that you're stressed,
Give yourself a little bit of love.
So before you dive into,
Well,
Where's the stress in my body and can I find it in all of that instead?
Bring your hand to your heart and recognize,
Okay,
I feel stressed and I can come back and feel safe in the anchor of my heart.
I can come back and feel safe and anchored in my true nature because even when I have all these shifting emotions and I feel stress,
I can remember that I am a being of goodness.
I am a being of love and light and joy and gratitude.
So anytime during the process of getting real relief that you feel super overwhelmed and you think you can't do it anymore or it just feels like too much,
Just pause and come back into your heart and into your basic goodness.
And then when you feel ready,
Go back into the practice.
And the next step in the practice,
The letter E,
Is to experience these different places where stress shows up.
So calling back to mind your most recent stressful event and just checking in in your own body and seeing if you can find it.
Just shining the flashlight of awareness here,
Seeing is there stress in your abdomen?
Do you feel knots or clenching or tightness or burning in your belly?
Stress often shows up that way.
It can make you have digestive issues.
And if it's there,
Let it be there.
And if it's not there,
Keep going,
Shining the flashlight up into your chest.
Sometimes when we feel stressed,
It feels hard to breathe.
And if we go more specific into what's happening in the body,
You might notice there's some constriction,
There's some tightness,
There's this sense of just stuck or it feels maybe cold or maybe for you it feels really hot.
There's so many ways it could show up in your chest.
You might feel your heart pounding or it might feel like you're barely breathing.
So seeing,
Experiencing what is real,
But experiencing it not from a place of,
Oh no,
Like freaking out about it,
But experiencing it as the observer with so much love and compassion because you remember the truth of who you are.
You remember that this stress is not you.
And so you're curious about where in your body is it showing up and here's why.
This might be the most important thing I'll share with you during this practice.
Your stress is showing up to give you a message.
It is trying to protect you.
It is trying to keep you safe.
It is trying to get your attention so you can come back into your equilibrium so that you can have balance again,
So that you can have joy again,
So that you feel safe and secure and loved.
Your stress is showing up to help you.
And when you experience the stress as it's coming up in your body and you keep going in this process of real relief,
You actually give it an opportunity to finish this cycle that it's going through so that it can eventually leave.
But let's explore two more places before we go on into the next step.
So the next place you might feel,
I almost said fear,
But I guess fear and stress are very intertwined.
Where you might feel stress is in your throat because sometimes when we feel stressed out,
We feel constriction,
Like we can't breathe or we can't say what we need to say or we're word vomiting and we can't stop talking.
There's so many different ways that we react to feeling stress.
So just noticing if there's tension in your throat,
In your neck,
Maybe also in your shoulders,
It might feel like you have the weight of the world pushing down physically on your shoulders and that might be showing up in your upper back or it might be even showing up in your lower back,
Like all the way down.
This weight is so heavy.
It's crushing you.
Stress can show up in all those different places and stress can show up in your face.
So seeing if your jaw is clenched,
Seeing if your eyebrows are furrowed,
Seeing if you're holding your breath and just being curious about,
Wow,
This is what stress is like for me today.
It's not always like this and it doesn't stay for too long,
But it's here in this moment to show me something.
It's here to keep me safe,
To protect me and to help me.
And that leads us into the A of real relief.
And the A is to allow it to be there.
And I know you might be thinking,
I don't want this to be here.
Like why aren't you telling me how to make it go away?
I remember feeling that same way.
And the magical thing about the human body is it's so intelligent.
It gives you signals for you to pay attention to.
And when you pay attention to them and you shine the light of awareness in those places and you will allow them to come to the surface on their own,
They start to shift.
So I want to see for a moment,
I'm going to stop talking and just allow you the opportunity to be with whatever you found in your stressful lived experience in the felt sensations in your body.
Allow whatever is there to just be there.
You don't have to like it.
But instead of wishing it would go away,
Or judging it,
Or making it wrong,
Or thinking it's a problem,
See if you can just allow there to be tension.
Allow there to be tightness.
For those of you who are wondering about having this practice for later,
I have a very similar meditation already uploaded on the Insight Timer that you could follow.
It's not for stress,
It's for pain.
And I have one for fear,
The one for stress is coming,
It's not released yet.
But don't worry,
You don't have to write anything down.
I promise you can do the lived experience of this and it will soak in and you can go back and listen to the other practices for now.
And I promise you will get the gist of it and you will be able to implement this.
So in the allowance stage,
This is when you allow life to just be what it is.
And as you're allowing it to be what it is,
You name again that there is tension here,
Not I have.
Sorry,
I shouldn't say it like that.
Not I am tense.
Not I am constricted.
My throat is constricted.
But there is constriction here now.
We take away the personal.
We just observe what's real.
And in allowing it to be there without any stories,
We begin to heal.
Our body naturally begins to change,
To shift,
To soften and to release.
The stress doesn't want to stay in your body.
It wants to be felt.
It wants to be acknowledged.
And it wants to be let go.
And that is the L in real relief.
So we are recognized.
We E,
We experienced,
We A,
We allowed.
And now we L,
We let go with love.
To let go means to not cling tightly to this story,
To not believe it's going to last forever,
To not believe the stories that are coming up around whatever is happening in the body,
But instead to invite the body to have more ease.
And one way you can practice letting go is by consciously breathing into the place in your body that feels the stress.
So you've experienced it.
You've allowed it to be there.
And now you're not saying leave.
I want you to leave.
But you're saying,
I let go.
Whenever you're ready,
I will let go with love.
So tuning back into that place where you were experiencing stress and seeing if perhaps it's changed already,
Just by being allowed to be there.
And seeing if there's another place in your body where you're still feeling stress.
And letting that place come into your full awareness and breathing into it from your heart.
This place where you have basic goodness residing.
Breathing into that place of stress from the place of basic goodness allows everything to let go as it will.
So feel that.
You're holding it with gratitude and love.
You're honoring that this stress came up so that you could learn something and so that you could move through it.
It's here as a teacher for you.
It's here for you.
It's not here to do something to you.
It's here for you to bring you back into balance,
To bring you back into your body,
To bring you back into the present moment and back into love.
And by love,
I don't mean like mushy,
Gushy kind of like romantic love.
I mean the purity,
The truth of your goodness.
The light that shines out of your eyes.
It's the love that this stress allows you to let in.
You can see beyond the stress and you can open your awareness to remember your humanity.
Your consciousness can be awakened through experiencing stress because as you recognize it,
As you experience it,
As you allow it,
And as you let it go with love,
You are healing yourself and you are waking up to your true potential and a remembrance of the basic goodness that lies just on the other side of stress.
Someone has a quote about,
I don't know,
I'll botch it,
But what I'm getting at is there's this quote of you either transmit or you transmute the emotions that you feel.
And this practice of real relief is giving you the power to take your life back so that you are not caught up transmitting stress to people that you love.
You're not transmitting it to your kids.
You're not transmitting it to your coworkers or your significant other.
You are transmuting the stress by coming back into a place of love and a place of gratitude for the present moment.
Because if you really think about it,
Your stress isn't here now.
Your stress is either about something that has already happened or about something that you think will happen.
Most of the time,
Your stress is not here now.
And sometimes when we think it's here now,
That stress is because we have a judgment of what's happening here now and we don't like it.
We either want it to go away or we want to hold onto it.
And when we are rehashing the past,
When we're judging the present,
When we're rehearsing the future,
We're not really here.
And mindfulness is this beautiful opportunity to wake up.
We get real relief when we recognize the power of the present moment and how what is real in this moment is the breath.
What is real is the body.
And what is real is the true nature of love that lives within us.
So we'll sit in silence for a few minutes and just take in the transmuting of stress into love.
Yes,
Susanna has a really important question.
She said,
Chronic pain stress is here now.
What do we do about that?
And that is a beautiful teacher for me.
It has been.
The chronic pain did cause me a lot of stress.
And what I noticed is that the stress was coming from the stories I told myself about the pain,
That the pain was never going to go away,
That I was afraid of the pain,
That the pain was ruining my life,
That the pain was going to only get worse.
The Buddha called it shooting the second arrow.
Like that first arrow is the pain you feel of,
Wow,
This hurts right now.
And then the second arrow is like the exponential doubling of that pain of the suffering of layering the stories.
So with chronic pain,
Yes,
You might be experiencing pain right now.
And as you experience pain,
You can look into what pain physiologically feels like in your body.
For me,
I found it to be a lot of sharp like stings sometimes and other times it was a dull ache.
And we get caught up in the story of pain that it's always here.
And when we get caught up in that,
We're actually not present with the lived experience of pain where it's actually always shifting,
Even in really minute ways.
Sometimes it's throbbing and then for a moment it's not throbbing.
And then other times it's stabbing.
And then for a moment,
It's stabbing a little bit less and a little bit less.
And then there is ease.
And then it comes back.
It's an ebb and a flow.
And we're not trying to heal ourselves completely of chronic pain through using real relief.
But what we are doing is giving ourselves the freedom to really be with what is actually happening now without making it a problem.
Because that's what we so often do when we feel stress and we feel pain.
We really want it to go away.
And so we amplify it.
But when we amplify it,
We tighten and we tense around it.
And that actually makes it stay longer.
And that makes it worse.
So the opportunity that we're provided with when we practice mindfulness is an opportunity to open,
To sit back and to soften.
And instead of trying to make it go away,
We can experience that it is actually shifting,
Even if it's in the tiniest way.
And then we can send gratitude to ourselves for finally noticing that.
I remember the first time I had that awareness that my pain wasn't constant.
And I felt so relieved to just recognize that,
Wow,
For these 30 seconds,
I didn't feel pain.
And so it's about cultivating the gratitude for what is here now and recognizing the impermanence of all sensations of all feelings in the body.
And at the same time,
Remembering the true nature of goodness and love that is resonating here that we can access that is our true nature always.
So Susanna,
If you have a follow up question,
I would love to answer it.
But I want to shift into the ending of the real relief practice by just inviting you back into the same breathing that we started with.
So you've just done a lot of heavy lifting,
Even though you haven't moved a muscle.
You have shifted your awareness in a major way to get real relief.
Especially if you were feeling stressed,
And you had the opportunity to breathe into places in your body that felt stressed.
There's a chance that in this moment,
You no longer feel the stress in that place.
And instead,
You might feel some warmth or openness.
You might feel the little tingles or buzz of joy.
And so I want you to take the time remembering that negative experiences are like Velcro.
And we really like to stick with them.
But we have the opportunity to bring awareness to the good,
To those moments where the stress is gone,
To the basic goodness inside of us.
So we're going to go back and finish the way we started with the practice of counting in and out for six,
And focusing on what it is like to have even a little bit of real relief,
Even if it's not totally gone.
Giving yourself permission to feel,
Wow,
Something shifted here.
I remember a little bit more of who I am.
So breathing in,
And then sighing it out and letting go.
And breathing in this time and releasing as you focus back on the hand on your abdomen.
So breathing in two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out.
And this time shifting awareness into your heart.
Breathing in two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
In two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
And just sitting in silence for a moment and just feeling whatever is alive in you now.
