Ashok Gupta says starting the Gupta Program while stressed is fine, even helpful. He recommends active retraining exercises like the "stop, stop, stop" seven-step process and the "New Groove" technique from Session 14, which rewires your response to triggers by loosening bodily tension and activating your parasympathetic nervous system.
People say, oh, Ashok, I've got a lot of stress right now. Should I wait to do the Gupta program? I say, will stress ever go? It's all part of a natural part of life. In fact, it's pressure. We experience pressure. That's objective. Stress is our emotional response to pressure. So stress is always an internally generated experience. And therefore, the stress that we've come across in life, we need to have a new perspective on it. We need to have an exercise or different exercises to help us manage that. So you can use a stop, stop, stop, the main seven step process to deal with stress. And in session 14, I give you another exercise which is called the New Groove technique. And the New Groove technique is literally creating a new groove in your mind in relation to a trigger. And that trigger could be a situation, a person, a thought, a physical experience. Those are the physical triggers. And you go through the four steps, all beginning with S. And you're able to retrain your brain around those triggers. And as part of that, it's also, as you come across these new experiences, learning to train your nervous system to no longer be in that state of anticipation and just be flowing. And what that does is that often enables detoxification. When we let go of that tension in our body, it allows your parasympathetic nervous system to kick in, because there's a constant communication with your prefrontal cortex, your limbic system, and your physical body through the vagus nerve. And so when you're stressed and anxious up here, it translates into tension in your body, which comes back to your brain, telling your brain that we are in danger because there's physical tension. So there becomes another loop. We're breaking lots of loops here. But when we physically and consciously loosen the tension, that it tells the brain that we're not in danger, that we take advantage of.
