Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits by Martine Batchelor

Author:Martine Batchelor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861718924
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

Stress

I did not have acute stomach pains for many years after I left Korea. I thought I was relatively free from this physical habit until I experienced its psychological component. One day I was surprised to feel pain in my stomach again. Where did it come from? The food was fine in Europe and I did not overeat. But looking at my emotional and mental states, I saw that I was anxious because of planning our departure for our first long trip to South Africa. I was constantly mentally rehearsing packing the house and our luggage, and trying to remember what I should not forget. All this created an underlying stressful anxiety, which produced acidity in my stomach, and thus the pain. As soon as I became conscious of the mental worrying, I was able to let it go when I realized that this was what was causing the pain and also by seeing it was unnecessary. I needed to do some planning but not to worry about it. My task was to dissolve the exaggeration and the proliferation but not the activity itself. Thus I had to creatively engage with the exaggeration and the proliferation themselves, which meant mainly not to constantly remember to remember to pack this item or make this note.

When we start to understand our physical habits and their connection to our emotional and mental habits, we can learn to navigate among them in a less painful way. Stress is a combination of mental, emotional, and physical conditions meeting the outer environment. Its physical effects are signals to address what we are inflicting on the body. If we have pushed ourselves too hard, after a while our body reacts. There is only so much the body can endure.

In terms of stress, it can be useful to look at tiredness. What do you do when you are tired? Physical tiredness stresses your system. If you are the angry type, you become irritable; if you are the passive type, you start to feel hopeless. The feeling becomes the signal to the physical pattern. I used to find myself in irritable moods looking for targets for my irritation with unpleasant consequences for people around me, until I looked beyond the irritability and saw the tiredness. So now if I feel irritable, I look at the body first. If I see that I am tired, I try to find a way to rest, which has the effect of swiftly lifting the irritable mood.

Intense mental rehearsing can have a strong, stressful effect on the body and often people with this habit will be likely to have stomach ulcers. Intense mental fabrications can make us fearful and high strung, which also will have an effect on the heart. To succumb to a depressed mood will make one listless and keep one indoors so that one does not go outside and exercise. It was fascinating to watch a psychologist on television encourage a woman prone to obsessive behaviors and unfounded fears to go to the gym for an hour, and to see the difference that simple action made.

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