downsizes…our political party loses…someone we dearly love is sick or dying… the post office is closed on Sunday…the air conditioner breaks down…our favorite restaurant closes—and the list goes on. The world according to ourselves in not happen- ing! We think that if only we could control and orchestrate the life around us, then we would be stress free. Yet, to our dismay, the world, if anything, is even more resistant to changing than other people are. We find out the hard way that if we persist in demanding that life unfold on our own terms, we always lose, and that we are left feeling disappointed, resent- ful, and unhappy. At this level of understanding—that stress is our enemy and the causes of stress are external to ourselves—we have few choices but to hop onto the stress treadmill. We alternate periods of frenetic productivity interrupted briefly by activities we find relax- ing to temporarily replenish our stock of energy. We do a lot of moving back and forth, but we don’t really seem to get anywhere, and there doesn’t seem to be any end product of meaning, en- richment, satisfaction, or new learning. Is there no hope then of ever getting off of this treadmill? Albert Einstein says that a problem cannot be solved at the level at which it was created. Is there another way of perceiving and understanding stress? What if stress is actually a primal force of nature without which life could not exist? What if stress is the creative life force energy itself? What if stress is our teacher knocking at our door? What if stress is delivering to us the chal- lenge to our personal status quo that we most deeply need?


Creative Stress versus Negative Stress If these things are true, then on some level stress must be our friend, not our enemy. And, we would need to look inward at ourselves, not outward. Instead of blaming someone or thing “out there,” we would step up to take responsibility for who we are in the stressful situation, and attend to what it asks from us. James O’Dea, in his book Creative Stress, distinguishes between what


by Sandy Seeber, LPC Research tells us how damaging prolonged


stress can be to our bodies, and that virtually all major diseases have a stress component. For most of us, knowing these things compounds our misery.


Now we not only feel stressed, but we also feel stressed about being stressed!


he calls “negative stress” and “creative stress.” In a nutshell, he says that we experi- ence negative stress when we close ourselves off and resist this universal force we call stress that is always coming towards us. We experience creative stress when we open to this force, allow (but not necessarily like) it, and find the part of ourselves that is willing and courageous enough to say “yes” to it. Then, we move toward it, not away from it, en- gage it, and permit ourselves to be changed by it. Yikes! Change? Really? Let’s think


of it this way. Most children are terrified of monsters, yet fasci- nated by them. Though few adults are afraid of monsters, the same dynamics reappear in a different form we call stress. Stress always takes on the terrifying face of what we fear the most—Be- ing alone? Financial ruin? Death—your own or the loss of a loved one? Rejection? Losing control? Embarrassment? Feeling help- less? Being judged unworthy?


Shame? Humiliation? Losing?


Being incompetent? Being attacked? Being wrong? Being wronged? Illness and disability? Uncontrollable pain? The list goes on. No wonder it is so difficult to find the part of yourself that


says yes to stress! Just as in childhood when monsters always seemed to hang out in the scariest, darkest, and most hidden places, stress always seems to bring with it a challenge to venture out of our comfort zone into what is unknown. Many years ago during the summer when my daughter was five years old we spent our two week vacation in a cabin on a lake. Although she was a good swimmer, up until this time she had only swum in a pool. She was both terrified and fascinated by the lake, with its dark waters, wave motion, live fish, and seaweed. Every day she would walk all the way down to the very tip end of the dock and


Natural Triad Magazine


JUNE 2012


29


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