Q: Can you suggest your top ways I can let go of stress I don’t want to carry into this new year?
A: Having the desire to let go of stress is a great way to begin a new year. There are many techniques to help reduce stress, and you requested the top tips, so I will give you what I believe to be the top suggestions to pave the way for many other strategies.
Your soul wants to be light, not burdened with heaviness, so releasing stress is a way of domesticating your ego, as the ego is a pack rat. The soul can become weighed down by all of the ego’s possessions through perception and material means. Letting go of stress is a way of releasing possessions, attitudes and beliefs of the ego.
The following are some initial steps in releasing and reducing your stress:
- Respond and Breathe rather than React. Our ego is prone to reacting o a perceived threat out of defensiveness and insecurity. Become aware of how you act under duress and choose a more appropriate response. Allow your soul to respond rather than your ego to react. Easier said than done. With awareness, each time you encounter a stressor, breathe, practice patience and learn to respond rather than react. Survey the situation, review your options and act accordingly. It is such a powerful shift that you will like.
- Surrender Your Ego. Once you learn to let go and surrender, your mind, body, spirit and emotions will all work together in harmony and integrate the wholeness of you. You will detach from your emotions long enough to observe your behavior and how it can impede progress toward your self-awareness. Surrendering the ego is the first step necessary to claim responsibility and begin to resolve the stressor at hand. Take a moment to reflect on some issues you have now. As you reflect, become the observer and ask yourself which of these issues you are able to detach from, surrender, and work on to resolve.
- Notice and Follow your Dreams. The soul uses the unconscious mind to communicate to our conscious mind through thoughts, memories, insights, and dreams. It was psychiatrist Carl Jung’s opinion that dreams were a way to deal with our daily situations that can help us resolve problems in our waking state. Remembering dreams is not always so easy, however it can become a skill that can be effective with some practice. One way to begin Is to write down the dream and play with the dream fragments and see if they can be encoded. By increasing the fluency in the language of dream symbols, and processing their messages, we release the stress that holds us captive. In fact, it was Jung who suggested to follow the insight of your dreams, for to ignore these messages, just because they may seem irrelevant or incoherent, is unwise and unproductive to the soul’s growth.