Separateness And Stress
There is a separation
between the athletic efficacy on the basketball court between me and Kobe
Bryant. Though I did not have a robust passion for hoops, I played
organized basketball most of my youth from elementary school to college.
I was an athletic, decent basketball player but I was no Kobe Bryant.
There is a drastic difference between his abilities on the hoop court and what
I was able to do. I could have gotten better if I had put the work in but
it does not necessarily mean that I would have been as good as or better than
Kobe. What it may mean is that there was/is a difference in our
kinesthetic ability, passion/interests, focus-level for basketball, etc.
This is no different than Serena Williams and me with tennis. She would
crush me on the tennis court. Katie Ledecky would swim around a pool
three times before I finished my first lap (this may actually be true
lol). I am sure that somewhere in the world there is a 10 year old
spelling bee champion that would prove that “I” am not smarter than a fifth grader.
My point is that, at some point in the life of a person who recognizes
that they have a great quality, skill, or ability, they may recognize a difference
in themselves that widely separates them from many other people. This
has been my experience in dealing with stress.
Even before becoming a mental
health professional, I would listen to other people’s problems and though I
would be authentically compassionate and empathetic towards them, their
situation was a mirror that showed me I was different. I was dealing with
some of the same stressors and traumas as they were, sometimes worse, but how I
dealt with them was acutely different. While other people did not appear
to be able to process, remove, or experience their stress in a way that allowed
happiness to flow back in, I would find a way to experience my problems by
letting them experience me. I remember hearing Deepak Chopra
say, "I am not in the body, the body is in me. I am not in the mind, the
mind is in me.” My soul seems to exercise this philosophy when it comes
to stress via understanding that I am not in stress, the stress is in me. I
am not in the problem, the problem is in me. This ideology can
significantly reduce stress because it can take the negative power of the
stress away. When I refer to ‘my soul’ exercising this idea, I really
mean that. Sometimes we get caught up in philosophies or techniques and
what happens is that it makes us too cerebral – to the point where we
intellectualize things and lose the soulfulness of “being.” In the same
way that Kobe has a natural ability to perform kinesthetic movements on the
court, probably because he was born with that gift, I feel like I naturally
deal with stress very well. Eckert Tolle talks about the separateness
between your ‘me’ and ‘yourself’. For example, in counseling I
will ask people if they ever sit and listen to the thoughts in their
head. Many times they will say yes, which shows that humans have at least
two separate entities within themselves. This idea is not original to Tolle
but it does shine a light on an idea that hits home with me regarding my own
experience of stress and connects it to the point I am making about natural
ability. When I have had a new stressor in my life and I did absolutely
nothing about it, no techniques – NOTHING, in the past I have experienced
myself (think Tolle) enough to realize that my body goes into some sort of
spiritual immune system cleanse where it will begin to fight off whatever is
bothering me, even without me making a concerted effort to do so. As I
think phenomenologically, I postulate that all humans have a reservoir of this
somewhere within them. It is just that I have found mine…or maybe, mine
has found me. So, just by me naturally being who I am, it seems as though
I have an inner ability to deal with stress in a way that puts me in the gifted
range on the stress-IQ bell curve. For you non-statisticians (myself
included) that means that I am above average (again indicating a separateness
from most people).
The philosophies and
psychological sciences that I use allow me to take my abilities to the next
level which has propelled me even further ahead of the curve to the point where
people now call me an expert in nontraditional stress management.
I teach my clients and groups strategies such as the power of inviting
rejection where I give a few brief vignettes, one about my manual lawn
mower that has taught me, and still teaches me how to use the stress of
rejection as my conduit to success. Other skills such as emotional
intelligence, the power of powerlessness, the art of having
difficult conversations, the advantage of letting go, the virtue
of self-reliance, the value of fearless courage, the leverage of
symbolism, and last but not least – one of my favorites, empathetic apathy,
all allow me to help people gain the ability to significantly reduce or
eliminate negative stress. What is empathetic apathy? It is a term
I created to expose an ignored, but very helpful tool in relieving
stress. I define it as a state in which a person is kindly unfeeling to a
situation due to the understanding that the situation may have to occur for a
greater good. I give several examples of this during my seminars because
the term peaks peoples curiosity. I am passionate in discussing empathetic
apathy 1) because I want people to fully and clearly understand it for the
peace it brings and see that it is not a cruel way of being, and 2) I want
people to experience how it can connect a person to their higher self. I
think that recent civilizations have painted an erroneous picture of kindness
which has blinded the masses of seeing kindness on a continuum. I look at
kindness like a basket of fruits, they are all fruits but most of them feel and
taste different. Kindness is kindness but depending on the situation it
may look, feel, and be experienced differently.
In the beginning of this blog
I addressed the idea of stress and separateness because there is a difference
in how some of us deal with it. However, problems in life are the very
thing that connect us together because we all have them in some form no
matter if you are Kobe Bryant, Katie Ledecky, or Jane Doe. Problems are
not prejudice, they affect us all. With that said, no matter the
stressor, as humans we still have a consciousness, subconscious, and sometimes
unconscious desire to be happy and my goal is to help people become better
mothers, fathers, children, partners, friends, professionals, and people by
assisting in the process of turning ones stress into their strength and ones
problems into their power. If you are curious about the information
you’ve just read or interested to bring this discussion seminar and training to
you, please feel free to contact me at PerspectVeLLC@yahoo.com,
visit my website at www.PerspectVe.com, or call me directly at (412)592-2291.
This workshop is
especially highly recommended for:
Executives &
Administrators / Nurses & Pharmacists / Mental Health Workers
Parents / Actors &
Actresses / Military Personnel / Law Enforcement / Event Coordinators
Educators / Medical
Professionals / Laborers / Sufferers of Mental Health Disorders Business Owners
& Entrepreneurs
© April 10, 2017 PerspectVe
LLC
