For a lot of us,
Myself included,
And again,
Doing this work is helpful for me a lot,
This idea that we can go through our lives and stress can be there.
Throughout much of our day,
But if we're not paying attention,
We're just not recognizing those signals.
And we don't even realize that we are caught up in these stress responses and we may even Begin to think that that's the norm.
That we get so used to feeling stressed all the time that that just feels like.
How it is.
And so to really begin to bring awareness to what we're experiencing,
Awareness into our bodies,
Awareness into our thoughts,
Awareness into our emotions and our behaviors,
Looking at all four of those dimensions of stress can be so helpful because.
The most powerful thing that I think awareness does is it gives us choice.
It creates a space that suddenly we can see what's there.
So I like to.
Say to people that we can't change what we don't see.
And if you think about walking around in a pitch black room.
And it's totally dark,
You can't see where you're going,
There's obstacles,
There's furniture.
You're trying to get from point A to point B.
It's going to be messy.
It's going to be,
You're going to bump into things.
You may be tripping,
Falling,
Probably not a pretty sight.
But if somebody hands you a flashlight,
All of a sudden the room's illuminated and you can see where you're walking.
And an important point here is that the obstacles don't go away.
They're still there,
But you can navigate with more ease.
And so that is the idea of the flashlight.
And I feel like the flashlight is really one of our most fundamental tools and one of the tools that I emphasize the most.
And when I'm talking about the flashlight,
It's obviously a metaphor here for part of what's already,
The good news here is what's already hardwired into our brains.
We have this awareness,
We have this ability.
To be able to see what's there.
We need to know how to access it and we also need to remember to pull out the flashlight.
It's certainly not gonna be any good if we leave it sitting in our garage.
So we gotta carry it in our front pocket and we have to remember to pull it out.
But what I'm really talking about when I use this idea of the flashlight as a tool is mindfulness.
This idea of carrying mindful awareness with us into our day.
And the definition of mindfulness there's a lot of definitions I like to.
.
.
He used Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition.
He is one of the.
.
.
People who really brought mindfulness to the Western world.
And he is out of UMass in Worcester.
He says that,
And I'm paraphrasing here,
But that mindfulness is really a particular way of paying attention.
So it's just paying attention.
On purpose in the present moment without judgment.
And if we can remember and practice,
And it really is a practice.
Being able to bring that quality of attention into our day,
That flashlight,
That awareness that's so important,
Then it really allows us to begin to see what's there.
To start paying attention to how we're showing up.
How are we behaving?
How are we responding to these various stressors and challenges on a daily basis that are coming up for us?
And there comes that space.
Once we see what's there,
We then have the space.
That pause to be able to choose how we want to react.
Or better yet,
I should say,
To respond to what's there.
