Anti-anxiety Tool of the Week: Stop Wearing Your Shoulders
as Earrings
That's what my massage therapist told me, many years ago. And I still need that advice.
When our fight/flight response gets triggered, our muscles tense up. We stiffen our necks, hunch our shoulders--way up there sometimes. These responses are usually pretty automatic. However, just as our brains send messages to our bodies (e.g., danger ahead, tense up those muscles so you can fight or flee), our bodies can also send messages to our brains (e.g., it's okay, the danger is not immediate, you can relax a little). We may not be able to stop those body responses to stress, but we can become a little more aware of them when they happen.
And we can make decisions to move our bodies in ways that send calming messages to the brain. So, if you're wearing your shoulders as earrings...drop them down a little...and see if you can relax a bit. And maybe take a minute to get a heating pad, or one of those rice or bean bags you can heat in the microwave. Ahhhhhhhh......
This tool is from the fifth Toolkit. Here's the Index of all toolkits. And The Mini-Toolkit: For Those with Little or No Time.
Stories in Miniature: Tiny Toolkit of Quotations #2
As I said in the first quotation toolkit, I like quotations because they can be a bit like tiny stories, complete with a conflict or problem and some sort of resolution, or perhaps an unanswered question. Plus they're nice and short!
Seems to me life's like that. If you don't take risks, you get nowhere. If you do, they may go wrong, and then where are you? And half the time, when things happen, they happen first, before you can even think about 'em.
Dorothy Sayers
The Haunted Policeman
Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but non-attachment. If given a chance to turn back, I would not take it. Therefore the decision to go ahead is my own responsibility, to be accepted with a whole heart. Or so I write here, in faint hope that the words may give me courage.
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard
Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.
Lao-Tzu
The Tao Te Ching, #78 (translation by S. Mitchell)
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk
The mystery of grace ...it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
Anne Lamott
Traveling Mercies
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.
Meister Eckhart, quoted by Matthew Fox
Wrestling with the Prophets
Quietly awed into silence
by what I understand but cannot tell.
Borne by grace downstream
where I can see but cannot say.
Robert Fulghum
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
And just for fun...
How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?
Satchel Paige
Until next time,
Dawn
Photo credits:
Sleeping cat, Victoria Tromina, unSplash
Confused person, Alexzus More Angulo, unSplash
Lake and mountains, Daniel Sessler, unSplash
Monkey, Paolo Nicolello, unSplash
Mother and daughter, Cristian Newman, unSplash
Sandstone formations, Martina Missar Tummeltshammer
Mother and newborn, unknown
Sandstone and river, Omer Salom, unSplash
Baby eating, Derek Owens, unSplash