‘Someday we’ll live like horses The lyrics in this song recorded by Elton John and Luciana Pavarotti challenges us to someday live like horses, taking down fences, removing the barriers that exist inside of us and between us. In doing so, we may live more freely and joyfully. I believe this is one of the lessons that horses and nature teach us’ Jackie Stevenson
Try to experience doing as living. For me this feels like using a computer or driving a car or talking with someone as simply being an animal – a friend once called me “a large male mammal” – moving through its day. The sense of living then moves to the foreground, with doing as a matter-of-fact, no-big-deal, expression of embodied life. It’s a subtle shift, but a powerful one’ (from Just One Thing by Rick Hanson)
Thomas Hubl discusses stress also as integration and evolutionary stress that can help us integrate and grow, if we can be present enough to know and discern what may be part of past baggage imposing on current challenging or demanding situations and interactions. Our past experiences can be like movie commercials imposed on the movie or an orchestra from the past playing within current moments.
‘… Integration or shadow stress is a signpost to our past. For example, we go to a job interview and we’re stressed before. Maybe we’re excited, maybe we’re afraid, maybe we feel we need to be a certain way. Whatever it is, there’s an underlying dimension of emotional or feeling awareness that is probably not fully included’
‘Difficult’, like ‘stress’ is a label that we put onto situations that are actually not stressful – they’re something else that we could name more clearly. An amazing practice is to see that all the situations in our life that we call difficult, stressful, or challenging, are actually signposts for growth’(https://www.themysticsguide.com/transforming-stress-part-2/?inf_contact_key=036c0fe0c18bb9050f502a7e7dd25bd9fed130acbfcf44d217d138a47670ef98
Sometimes I open an e-mail and an inspiring story warms my heart. One of these stories is from Natalie Ledwell, Australian author, speaker and entrepreneur. It had to do with her trip to Liberia to help children, through her personal growth kids program, become inspirational figures in their community. She herself received a lesson as she confronted her fear of meeting the Minister of Education. She writes: ‘A few days after I got to Liberia, I had the honor of meeting with the Minister of Education to implement personal growth studies, which is my children’s curriculum in Liberia!!! Needless to say, I was VERY nervous to meet him! And while I was sitting in a room waiting to meet with him, I could feel the fear running through my body – so I surrendered to it. In other words, I would allow my body to feel the fear but at the same time I visualized the whole meeting and the outcome I wanted – and that’s what got me through the fear! The truth is, I could’ve stayed in that fearful state and let it get the best of me. But instead, I chose to visualize a positive outcome and I remind myself of my WHY. Why was I there in the first place? When you’re reminded of the ‘the why’ you’re able to detach yourself from that situation and suddenly the focus is on the end result and not on you. Or, in this case, in the 2 million children who just came out of 40 years of war and wanted to have better lives’.