The Tao of Stress: How to Calm, Balance, and Simplify Your Life (15 page)

This movement releases tension in your hands, arms, shoulders,

and legs. It also opens up and relieves tension in your neck, chest, back, and abdominal cavity. It essential y al ows your entire body—

neck, arms, legs, shoulders, back, chest, and abdomen— to stretch

at the same time.

Conclusion

This chapter focused on how excessive or deficient desires lead to chronic stress and compromise the natural functioning of mind and body. This is especially the case in regard to sleeping, eating, and exercise. You learned several exercises and practices that can assist you in eliminating these problematic desires and the chronic stress associated with them. The next chapter looks at how we get entangled in the affairs of the world and how this entanglement leads to chronic stress.

But before you read on, take a deep breath, smile, and congratulate yourself for continuing on the Taoist path to relieving your chronic stress.

Are you beginning to see and feel yourself becoming more calm and balanced? Do you notice that you’re simplifying your life? Remember, the key is to practice!

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Chapter 7

Not Getting

Entangled in the

Activities of the World

This chapter looks at how chronic stress may be related to and controlled by our interactions with the various activities that make up our world. To what extent do our activities in the world, such as working, socializing, pursuing recreation, volunteering, and so on, lead to and maintain our chronic stress? While each of these areas may be, in and of itself, important for our overall health and well- being, excessive involvement with any of them can put us out of balance. And in addition to these more basic activities, in the modern world we also have endless options to interact with the world through technology, such as through texting, tweeting, blogging, and using the Internet. Becoming entangled with these activities also puts us out of balance. We become chronically stressed, compromising our physical, psychological, interpersonal, and occupational functioning.

Entanglement in the activities of the world can be so insidious that we don’t even recognize it as a potential source of chronic stress. How can socializing, helping others, volunteering, and so on possibly be a source of chronic stress? To a large degree, these activities become stressful because we don’t recognize how excessive involvement in them eats up our time— time that we need to devote to other areas of our lives if we are to be in balance and healthy. When we believe that what we’re doing uncorrected proof

The Tao of Stress

is good and beneficial for others, we may sacrifice our time and remain blind to how this entanglement is harming ourselves and may also be harming others.

In addition, when we cannot engage in the activities we’re entangled with, we often appear to go through withdrawal. Once again, we are out of balance. We may become irritated, angry, distractible, hyperactive, anxious, depressed, unable to focus, and so on. Our thinking may be compromised. We may have physical symptoms such as headaches or

stomachaches. Our sleep and eating may be negatively affected. Our personal and work relationships may suffer.

Taoism and Entanglement

In Taoism, it’s clearly recognized that entanglement with the various activities of the world leads to significant problems and chronic stress. It puts us out of harmony because our excessive activities cause us to lose our root and center. Just as practicing wuwei is a Taoist solution to the problem of interfering with ourselves and others, practicing
wushi
, or not getting entangled in the activities of the world, is a Taoist solution to the problem of being entangled with, controlled by, and enamored with the activities of the world. In both cases, the first step of the solution is to simply become aware of the fact that we have a problem.

Martha’s Story

About six months ago, at the suggestion of a number of friends,

Martha bought a smartphone. She discovered how easy and

enjoyable it was to text. She loved texting and often got up early and went to bed late so she could text her friends, who were

scattered all over the country, and let them know how she was and

what she’d been doing. Her life began to revolve around texting.

She texted when she ate, and to make more time for texting, she

started eating mainly prepared foods, including a lot of fast food.

Whenever she got a chance, she even texted while she was at

work. She started getting frustrated with anything that took time

away from texting.

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One morning when Martha’s alarm went off, she reached over,

dazed and groggy, turned it off, and fell back to sleep. Sometime

later her phone rang with a specific tone that let her know

someone was texting her. She rolled out of bed, picked up her

phone, and read the text. It was from a coworker:
u
r
late
4 work.

where r u?
Martha panicked and looked at the clock. She was already half an hour late for work. She had been late for work

three times in the last two weeks. In addition, her boss had

expressed concerns that her work performance was going

downhill.

Martha’s head started to throb. She could feel cold sweat all

over her body, her stomach was churning, and she felt drained. She texted back:
I
m
on
way. Traffic.
She then noticed that her wrist was sore, her fingers and thumb felt stiff and painful, and her neck and shoulder were painful. These aches and pains were getting to

be a regular occurrence and sometimes persisted for an hour or

longer. She threw on some clothes, grabbed an iced coffee drink

from her refrigerator, and headed down the stairs of her apartment, texting her friends about her current status as she went. She

missed the last step and fell into the wall, bruising her shoulder and knee. She was relieved that her phone wasn’t damaged.

Martha got into her car, put her phone on the seat next to her,

and began hurriedly driving to work. Her phone rang while she

was driving. She looked down at it and saw that it was another

text from her coworker. As she reached for her phone to respond,

she was hit broadside by a car. She had just driven through a red

light.

Practice Examining Your Entanglement

with the Activities of the World

This exercise will help you bring possible entanglement problems to the surface so you can examine them as potential sources of chronic stress. Begin by reflecting upon your activities in the world. What are you involved with? Working? Volunteering? Surfing the Web?

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Gaming? Texting? Make a list of all of the major activities you engage in.

Next, answer the fol owing eleven questions for each activity you

listed. These questions will help you identify activities that may be contributing to chronic stress. As mentioned, in the Taoist approach the first step is to become aware of the problem. Simply insert each activity you’ve listed in the blank area in each question (you can do this mental y). Record your answers in your journal. When you’ve responded to all eleven questions for one activity, go back and

repeat the process for the next activity until you’ve worked through your entire list. This process might take a while, so feel free to work on it over the course of several sessions.

1. Does participating and engaging in consume

an excessive amount of your time, such that other aspects

of your life are affected negatively because you don’t have

enough time to attend to them?

2. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you notice any physical pain?

3. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you notice any problems with your attention, concentration,

memory, or thinking in other areas of your life?

4. As a result of participating and engaging in ,

do you find that you have problems with patience, anger,

anxiety, or depression in other areas of your life?

5. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you find that you aren’t getting enough restful sleep?

6. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you find that you are often tired or lack energy in other areas

of your life?

7. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you find that you skip meals or don’t eat in a healthy manner?

8. As a result of participating and engaging in , do

you find that you don’t exercise?

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9. As a result of participating and engaging in ,

do you find that your face- to- face interpersonal relationships

with friends, family, coworkers, and others suffer?

10. Do you find that participating and engaging

in negatively interferes with your job?

11. When you aren’t able to participate and engage

in , do you become stressed?

Answering yes to any of these questions indicates that you are

entangled with and negatively influenced by that particular activity. A yes answer sends a message about your chronic stress.

Reducing or Eliminating

Entanglement with Activities

The solution to excessive problematic behaviors is wushi: not being entangled in the activities of the world. To practice wushi, you need to reduce or eliminate excessive problematic behaviors and thereby simplify your life. The choice about whether to reduce or completely eliminate an activity depends on your situation, the specific activity, and the problems it’s causing.

Whether you reduce or eliminate the activity, you’ll get time back time that you need to devote to other areas of your life. It’s important that you use this recovered time in a way that’s beneficial for your overall well- being and health by restoring balance in your life. Of course, you must also be vigilant that you don’t become entangled in these other activities; otherwise you’ll get stuck in the same insidious trap.

Whether your goal is to eliminate the behavior or just reduce the

amount of time you spend engaging in it, the process is essentially the same. The major difference is that if you choose to just reduce the behavior, you need to monitor whether its damaging effects do indeed decrease.

For example, say you’re trying to heal a repetitive strain injury due to excessive gaming. If you choose the approach of reducing, not eliminating, the behavior of gaming, you need to closely monitor whether the
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injury and pain are improving. Depending on the overall negative impact of the activity and the intensity of your stress, simply reducing the amount of time you engage in the problematic activity may or may not be adequate. You be the judge.

When you first notice the desire to engage in the entangling activity or notice thoughts about it arising, simply exhale and let out a big sigh.

Then take three deep breaths and let out a big sigh each time you exhale.

If thoughts start coming into your mind while you’re focused on breathing, remember to practice guan and smile. Don’t engage the thoughts; simply acknowledge that they occurred without making any judgments about them, and then return to your breathing. If you’re focused on smiling and breathing deeply, the desire to engage in the activity will subside as you cease thinking about it.

The environment or context you are in may play a significant role in your entanglement with the activities of the world. To investigate this, maintain guan and smile as you scan your environment. See if you can locate anything in your environment that may be pulling you to engage in the entangling activity. Can you change your environment so the pull isn’t so intense, or perhaps even eliminate whatever is creating that pull?

If you can, make the change.

If this isn’t possible and you can’t avoid the environment, make sure you practice guan and smile whenever you enter that environment. This will help you change how you relate to that environment and the pull it exerts to engage in the problematic activity. Remember to focus on your breath, especially on sighing as you exhale, when you find yourself in challenging environments and notice the desire to engage in the activity beginning to arise.

By continuing to practice deep breathing, sighing as you exhale,

guan, and smiling, you’ll gradually start to reduce or eliminate the feelings, thoughts, or desires that contribute to engaging in the entangling and stressful behavior. Be aware that it will take some time. Don’t rush it. Be patient.

Tom’s Story

It was 9 p.m. when Tom dragged himself into the house. His wife,

Hannah, just glared at him and said, “Where have you been? Don’t

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you know what night this is?” Tom, somewhat startled, said, “I told you I was going to be working with the group this week on our

environmental awareness exhibit for next month. So what’s the

problem?”

Infuriated, Hannah replied, “ You’ve been spending all of your

free time this week, as you did last week, with that damn group.

The week before that, it was your world peace society. Before that, it was your end hunger organization. It never stops! We’ve been

talking about this for months. I’m tired of you ignoring our family.

You said you understood, and last Friday you promised me and the

kids that we’d all go out to dinner and a movie tonight. We waited for you, and not only did you not show up, you didn’t even call.”