Stress Relief Using Today's Methods

Welcome friends and beautiful people.

If you've never listened to my work before,

We have discussed many topics from Zen to Yoga to Tantra to Anxiety to Loneliness,

All kinds of things.

So I have quite a few tracks here on Insight Timer.

But today we're going to talk about stress and my insights into stress and how I deal with stress as an adult.

But also young children can benefit from this too.

Our children also deal with stress on many levels.

And what we have to learn in life is that if you don't have a release valve,

If you don't have a way to relieve some of that stress in a safe and peaceful manner,

Then it can build up through repressions inside of yourself and you won't even feel it.

You won't even know that you're bottlenecking this stress down into you and pushing it deep down where you can't see it and you can't feel it anymore.

But it just keeps building up and building up.

And eventually if you don't take care of it,

Then you'll explode and you'll explode maybe through anger.

Any little device will work to allow you to explode onto somebody.

And that's really not the best way to handle things.

It's bad for you.

It's bad for the other person or any other person involved.

You can take your stress out in so many different ways,

But what I want to teach you today is that there are methods that these modern day gurus have come up with.

And I've experimented with some of these methods and I've actually taught these methods also to other students and friends of mine that anyone that felt like they needed it.

So a little history.

Everybody knows if you've listened to me that I surf a lot.

I consider surfing my main go-to sport,

If you want to call it.

I don't know if it's really I consider it a sport,

But it is.

But anyway,

I surf every chance I can get.

And that is my,

Not really escape,

But it's the release valve.

So when you go surfing and you go out in the water and you're out in the elements and all you can think about when you're out there in the water is catching that next wave.

And then it becomes so still after a while.

After you catch a couple waves you get filled with stoke and you're filled with bliss and happiness and then your mind is completely free out there.

Your mind is stripped of all the stress.

Everything that's on shore stays on shore.

While you're out in the water it's just you and the ocean and the next wave and then the next wave until you get your fill.

And then you come in and you're completely stress free from that moment on and then you can face all the life on land again.

I think it's because of all the surfing I did and the snowboarding and all the other super adventurous adrenaline rushing things I've gotten into.

Even skydiving is a great stress releaser.

Even skydiving you can say it's the closest thing you're going to feel to God without meditating.

It's just those three or four minutes of your life are either going to be the best three or four minutes of your life or they could turn out to be the worst.

Luckily for me they turned out to be my best and I just did my first night jump a couple days ago and that was just amazing.

It's like on the movie Bill and Ted's Second Adventure where they both die and they're falling through this eternal blackness and you're just falling and falling and falling.

That's the feeling of night jumping.

You leave the plane and everything's black.

You can't see nothing.

Anyway,

There were four people that jumped out before me.

I was the fifth one out of the plane and I couldn't see nothing.

It was just so black and so dark.

You could see lights from some of the surrounding businesses but I thought I'd be able to see something but there was nothing to see.

Back to the subject.

These natural stress relievers like surfing and skydiving or snowboarding or even skateboarding or anything like that,

Anything that can take your mind away from the subject helps.

It relieves some of the pressure.

I started meditating around 1994 I think it was.

I was having sleep issues and that created a lot of stress in my life.

Being able not to sleep at night for sometimes one or two nights in a row created so much stress and so much anxiety and so much pressure on me.

I still found time to go surfing and the energy to go surfing if I could but I was just tired and it was horrible.

I was drained and just filled with all this stress.

But the surfing did help when I could do it.

But anyway,

I started meditating on my own for a couple of years and that meditation maybe because I'm a surfer because I had that also going on for me I was able to sit still in meditation.

I was able to just sit and calm my mind,

Become still and become silent and still my mind and come out of that with such bliss.

Because of this meditation that you do,

You don't need as much sleep at night.

Because during meditation what happens to you is you have more time consciously stilling the mind than you would at night because at night you're probably going to be dreaming for six of the eight hours you sleep if you get that much sleep.

You're going to go under a lot of stress.

So for me it was a unison of life.

I had a natural stress reliever dealing with things but then there's also that in the subconscious that still need to be dealt with and having the meditation helped me out quite a bit.

But this gets interesting so hang on just a second.

After a few years I started going to New York City to visit a person that sold books because I collect a lot of books,

A lot of spiritual books and mostly Osho's work.

So I've got hundreds of Osho's books and a lot of them I've collected from this lady in New York named Satya Priya.

And Satya Priya not only sold the books,

She held what they called active meditations.

Active meditations are something for this generation,

For your generation,

For the millennial generation,

For the Gen X,

For all of us that are basically alive and having to deal with the stress that life is inducing on us now.

These active meditations are for those that have active minds or are too stressed out to meditate or can't even imagine sitting still for 15 minutes and doing nothing.

So within these active meditations that a lot of gurus have come up with in recent times here,

They're split up into groups.

I never really felt the need to do the active meditations.

I'd heard of them before,

But I never felt the need because I surf and I'm completely calm and still and I can still my mind just by sitting still and getting into meditation without any techniques,

Without anything.

Sometimes I use like AUM or I say AUM Madhi Padmi Hum,

Which means the jewel of the lotus.

And chanting for a few minutes would help calm my mind and get me still and then I could meditate.

But I found out one evening after I bought some books,

Satya Priya invited me out to dinner with a bunch of meditators after they got done meditating.

And so it was cool.

I went and met these meditators and we went out for dinner and we were all having a nice discussion.

But one of the young ladies in the group said,

Hey,

Doug,

Have you ever tried the active meditations?

I mean,

I surf so I don't feel like I've ever needed them.

But I was just going through life and being completely blissful on my own.

But I said,

I'd love to try it sometime.

But I never got the opportunity.

I was only in New York for short periods of time at an art show.

But I was very interested in the meditations.

And one of the meditations that this young lady described to me,

And I've actually learned to do it,

I've learned to do quite a few of the meditations,

Like I said,

And then I started teaching them.

But it wasn't until that young lady kind of opened my eyes to what it does and what goes on during this meditation that I became interested.

But on my own,

A lot of surfers look at meditators or spiritual people as kooks.

And I would agree for the most part that spiritual people look a little loopy or something.

But this group of people were very grounded.

The meditators I talked with,

Some were engineers,

Some were scientists,

Some were teachers,

All different groups of intelligent people.

And what they shared with me,

Like I said,

It sparked an interest,

But I didn't have an opportunity to do it.

So anyway,

I was living in Virginia Beach at the time.

And I went back to Virginia Beach.

And I guess the timing was just perfect,

But there was a young man that had learned to do all the Osho meditations,

All the different active meditations.

And I met him and said,

Yeah,

Let's do it.

So one of the first meditations we did was quite an interesting one.

It's basically for like 15 minutes,

You push your hands in circles,

Like grabbing something off your chest,

And pulling it out and giving it to existence and making circles around the front of your body.

Just continually imagining yourself pulling energy out of your body,

Pulling negativity out of you,

And giving it back to existence.

And just through your mind doing this,

And practicing this for 15 minutes,

And then after 15 minutes,

Then the music would change and you would do the reverse.

You would see what existence has to give to you,

And you pull in circles the energy into your body.

And you put your hands and you place them close to your heart.

Then you make another big circle in front of you and you pull in and drag in all that energy and pull it inside of you.

And then there's a couple more parts to the meditation.

And in the last 15 minutes of the meditation,

You basically lie and you be still.

And the first time I did that,

I was just wowed.

I was like,

I felt like I had been missing something.

I thought it was blissful before.

I thought it was perfectly at ease and super happy.

And I was for the most part,

But this just made my spirituality grow even more.

It took me to new levels.

So now after doing that one,

I was quite interested in doing more.

So yeah,

I kept doing the meditations and going to the meditations.

And there's another one where you run in place or you jog in place and lift your knees up as high as you can.

Then you shake and you do all kinds of things.

And these things are a way for your mind to get occupied and get the stress out of you,

Get the anxiety out of you.

So if you run in place for a little while and then shake or scream or sit and say,

Who,

Who,

Who,

Who,

Who,

There's so many different things that these new gurus have come up with.

If you guys really would like me to do one of these,

We could probably do a live event,

Which would be really cool,

Where we could all get together.

I don't think anybody would see each other.

I would be able to see the group or something like that.

But I could guide you through these meditations and do them live.

And each one takes probably about an hour.

I personally feel like the ones that take an hour are a little bit too long.

I don't quite need that much time to get to stillness.

In fact,

I don't need anything.

I can just sit down and be still.

But there's so much more you could grow from and so many new heights.

Like there's a new Mount Everest around every corner.

And then,

You know,

Doing the meditation,

You go beyond.

So as a precursor to these meditations,

I'd like for you to get a small sample yourself,

But you have to kind of stay in a controlled environment.

So here's what you can do to relieve some stress real quick.

Find some music you can put on,

Some loud rock music or whatever loud music you like to listen to.

Something that makes you get up and feel like dancing.

But get up and turn the music up and make sure.

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