Mind Yoga: The simple solution to stress that you've never heard before
Mary Schiller presents Mind Yoga, arguing stress comes from your thoughts, not external events. She describes the first mental pose, "Look Inside," where you notice anxious thoughts without reacting. She shares how recognizing a thought about money made her stress vanish instantly.
Chapters
Hi there, this is Mary Schiller with thedailyprinciples.com, and I want to thank you for joining me on Facebook, whether you're watching me live or you're watching this on the recording. I really appreciate you being here. So the subject of this short talk is mind yoga, which is the subject of a new book. I know this might be in reverse for you, I'm not sure, that I just released on Amazon. I'll start by explaining in just a minute or two the reason why I wrote this book called Mind Yoga. In my 2 years of coaching people so far, I have seen such prevalence of stress in people's lives. Hi, Juliette. It's It's been kind of amazing to me how many people are really dealing with chronic stress, and I can certainly relate to that because most of my adult life was filled with chronic stress. I was even diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, so I'm quite familiar with the impact of stress on someone's life. Hi, Athena. Hi, Jeff. Nice to see you all here. So I wrote the book Mind Yoga, and I'll show it again even though it might be in reverse for you guys, because I wanted to give people a simple way to understand what stress actually is and then an even simpler way to deal with stress. Most people have no idea what stress is really coming from, so that's going to be the subject of the remaining few minutes that I'll Oh, it isn't in reverse. Oh good, Juliette, it's in reverse when I hold it up, so that's good to know. So in the book Mind Yoga, I have what I call 3 poses that are kind of like 3 steps to understanding stress and relieving it. So the first pose, which I'm going to talk about on this live stream, is look inside. Now when I first realized the mistake I was making with stress, it was kind of like one of those duh moments. I realized I had lived my whole life not understanding where stress was actually coming from. I would look around at my life and I would say things like, gosh, my job is really stressful, or, you know, this relationship is really causing me a lot of stress, so or, you know, it's really stressful being sick, or whatever it might be. And I'm wondering if in your life that sounds familiar to you, because most of us speak that way. And it's really interesting how when you start to listen to that, you'll hear it very frequently, that fill in the blank is stressing me out. Occasionally we might say say, "I'm stressing myself out." And that is when we actually have it right because that's what's really going on. So this first pose of Mind Yoga, Look Inside, asks us to look at the real source of stress. And the real source of stress is always coming from the same place, and that's from our own thinking. So stress doesn't come from a job. It doesn't come from an environment. It doesn't come from another person or an event or anything like that, even when it really looks like that. And believe me, I understand how convincing it can look. It can really look like stress is coming at us from something on the outside, but that is never the case. The only thing that's ever causing us stress is thinking that's going through our heads and we're listening to it and assuming that it's telling us something real. So I'll give you a recent example of this. I was having some stress a few days ago, and within about a minute, I realized that I was, you know, feeling kind of anxious And I heard the thoughts going through my head at that moment, and they were saying things like, "How are you going to take care of these financial obligations? Don't you know that you need to pay these bills by X date?" And I could hear my thinking. It was quite loud, and it was almost like it was yelling at me. And I sat back and just kind of laughed. Because it was like my thinking was telling me I was supposed to be stressed. But as I mentioned in the book, just because we have thoughts that tell us we should be stressed doesn't mean we have to agree with them. So the second I realized what was going through my mind and that that was creating this feeling, it all just dropped off. It was almost like I had pressed a reset button. And the stress that I was experiencing for that minute or so just vanished into thin air because I saw right away that the stress wasn't coming from some bill that I got in the mail. It wasn't coming from, you know, whatever my bank balance happened to be at that moment. It was coming from my own head. And I can't overemphasize enough how big this is to see. For me, in terms of my history with post-traumatic stress disorder, this was life-changing in a way that is really hard to describe. I had believed for literally decades that my stress was coming from events that had happened to me in the past, and I thought that because I couldn't undo those events, that I was going to have to live with this kind of stress the rest of my life and figure out some way to cope with it. And that's what I've been trying to do for 25+ years. When I finally realized that the stress I had been experiencing was simply coming from momentary thinking that was just kind of coming in randomly, it was almost like, well, hey, If that's the cause of my stress, I don't have to listen to what my thoughts say. I don't have to react in the way that my thoughts seem to be dictating that I should react. So what would happen if I just didn't? What would happen if when I had some kind of thinking that created that, that kind of pit in my stomach, what would happen if I just kind of sat and did nothing? And what I noticed was that it passed very quickly. The less I gave it any weight, the less attention I paid to it, the faster it moved through and the quicker I felt better. So this first pose— I'm using pose in air quotes because it's not a physical pose— of looking inside, to me, was really life-changing. And looking back on it now, and I mentioned this in the book, I feel kind of silly for ever imagining that stress could come from anything on the outside. I started to look at things very differently. So if I used to say, you know, my job is really stressful, I started to kind of break that apart and go, well, how could a job be stressful? Like, where would stress actually be in a job? You know, would it be in the office somehow, in the air? Would it be at my desk? You know, where would the stress actually be living? And then I started to think it was really silly. It's like, you know, does it come from the people? Are they sending me stress like in the form of stress germs that I'm somehow catching? And all of a sudden, this whole scenario that I had about what stress actually was just completely fell apart. And I knew for sure that the notion of stress coming from inside my own thinking was actually true. And as I mentioned in the book Mind Yoga, I, I want people to test this out. I want people to experiment and see, is this really true? Is the stress or whatever I'm feeling coming from inside my own mind? Am I kind of creating it? And, you know, just see what happens when you start to, to play with that. One way you can test it, and this is kind of fun, is let's say there's a person in your life who you believe is the cause of stress. Well, you'll notice that the person doesn't have to be in the room with you. For you to experience that stress, right? So if the person isn't in the room with you and you're feeling stress, where do you think that stress is coming from? It's coming from your own thinking. The beautiful thing about what I write about in Mind Yoga is that the way we're designed as human beings is to be able to release these feelings very easily simply by doing nothing. That was the other part of my own experience with PTSD that was incredibly freeing, was I noticed that the less I did to try to manage stress, the less I did to interfere with this natural process, the quicker that stress just disappeared. And so I'm telling you from personal experience that the, the best way to quote unquote deal with stress is to know first of all where it's originating, and second of all, as I talk about in the second and third poses of Mind Yoga, is to allow it to just pass on through you without trying to do anything about it. You know, our feelings are our feelings. They can't do anything to hurt us. And the more we see the source of those feelings, the easier it is to sit with them and allow them to move on through without reacting to them. So I would love for you to take advantage of downloading the book if you're watching this live today on the 23rd of May, 2016. The Kindle version is available for a free download today, and I would also love to hear your comments and thoughts about what I write about in the book because it's, it's a really big and important topic to me, and I know that if what I write in there can help me, it can definitely help you. So I hope you have found this helpful, and I hope to see you online again. And please pick up the book and let me know what you think. I really truly hope that it's as life-changing for you as it has been for me. Talk to you again soon. Bye now.
