See Zen's Greetings & Stress Management Tips

I really appreciated the idea of shifting the attention toward the practice of creating safe space in stressful situations (esp. during the Thanksgiving holiday). I suppose there's no better time to practice this skill than this period leading up to finals. So here are a few helpful tidbits from my FB feed that helped me to hone my super stealthy ninja stress management skills. 

❦~ Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh ~❦
We can learn to build safety with our in-breath and our out-breath, with our steps, with the way we act or react, with a smile or a word, with our effort to restore communication.
You cannot feel safe with the person who lives with you if you cannot communicate with him or her. You cannot feel safe when the other person does not look at you with sympathy, when you are not capable of looking at him or her with compassion. Safety can be built with your way of looking, your way of smiling, with your way of walking. It can build confidence. Show the other person that you are truly not harmful, that he is safe in your presence, in the way you think, the way you breathe, smile, and walk. Everything you do is peaceful. So by expressing your peace, your compassion, the other person feels very safe. And when the other person feels safe, you are safe. Safety is not an individual matter.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh ~
❧~❦~❧~❦~❧~❦~❧~❦~❧~❦~❧~❦
{{{{~The Mindfulness Bell Has Sounded~}}}}
Please pause and breathe joyfully three times

c/o Soulful Nature

❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈
❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈
 ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈
  ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄
  ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄
  ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄
❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈
❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶     ❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶*❄*✶      ❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈✶❈



Stress Management Tip #1: Value your own sense of self worth and surround yourself with those who bring out the best in you. Seriously, when you're not feeling your best, it can be extremely beneficial to keep the company of those who can act as excellent role models for you. 

 You were meant to sparkle. Let your spirit shine!
~ Christine, The Brighter Side of Life

 c/o The Brighter Side of Life

Stress Management Tip #2: Remember those who have supported you even when you didn't feel like your best self. Rather than vent to those people, find a creative way to express to that person, how much you value their support. Pouring you energy into love and appreciation for someone you may have neglected is a great way to spread good karma, boost serotonin levels, and build an effective support group.

 

"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."
- Paulo Coelho.

c/o Lessons Learned in Life 

Stress Management Tip #3: before, even when the current option seems unfamiliar or unsettling to you. As long as you're willing to learn from your mistakes and to commit to a path that you believe will provide growth for you, you can always find the guidance you need that will inevitably lead you down the path that's best for you... even when things don't always work out as planned. Have Faith enough to trust the process so that you can be open to receive any good that CAN come to you. Have faith and trust that the answers you need that will eventually come to you. By remaining present and being aware of the abundance of possibilties that exist before you, you can discover or create opportunities you may not have noticed

 

 Stress Management Tip #4: Be Mindful of how you manage your time, as chance tends to favor the prepared mind. ; )

c/o Obligations (1950): Coronet Instructional Videos

 Stress Management Tip #5: Don't forget to mind your manners. Remember: "A bad attitude is like a flat tire; you can't go anywhere until you fix it."

c/o Improve your Personality (1950): Coronet Instructional Videos 

  

Begin each moment well and so serenely that you can't be too dragged down by your old nonsense

 c/o Positivity Toolbox

Stress Management Tip #6: You can create this kind of connection with others, simply by remembering to be thoughtful. : )

c/o Exceptional Living

 Stress Management Tip #7: Listen to Marvin Gaye 

#heavensent : )

 

"If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else." -Marvin Gaye

  c/o Gossip Gone Good

Stress Management Tip #8: pray, meditate, go for a run, sing, or do anything that allows you to bring tranquility to your mind. once you can quiet your mind, you can bring your attention back toward something constructive, creative or anything else that will bring you cheer

 

 Every single thing you experience,
Every bump you encounter, every joy, and
every sorrow ~has been placed upon your
path to aid your consciousness into evolution.
~ Sheila M. Burke/ Zen-Sational Living ~

Stress Management Tip #9: The secret to building a strong faith (albeit, in a higher power, or in yourself) is this: Learn how to ask for what you need and who to ask for help that can help you find what you need... but don't expect them to do everything for you... but if you look in the right places you will inevitably find anything you could ever need ; )

Stress Management Tip #10: Don't Chase people, esp. when you're feeling down. Those who want to be in your life will make an effort to stay, and those who don't may have genuinely given you all that they were capable of giving. So forgive yourself, love others with an open hand and do the best you can with what you have. Appreciate those who can afford to stick around and for heaven's sake; lighten up. There's no better way to empower those around you than to cherish those who take time out of their day to spend time with you by giving them someone positive to be around (or to think about)

Sometimes when the wrong ones leave it hurts, there's just no getting around it. ~the mess

c/o A Beautiful Mess Inside

AND FINALLY:

I leave you with quite frankly, the only life skill you will ever need; the skill for which all other stress management tips are but preparation: Cherish your relationships. The one you have with yourself must be healthy if you plan to extend yourself well to others. And the health of this relationship is really best sustained with how you learn to repair your most important relationships and maintain your relationship to your values and God (or however you define your higher power; the source that brings out the best in you).

 

 c/o Precious Family Forever

Season's Grievings

One of the most difficult parts of working at any work college is learning how to navigate other people’s stress patterns, especially toward the end of the academic year.  Tensions ride high, for those who hold high expectations, particularly as students’ energy levels and initiative become inverse toward those expectations.  Often times, students become overwhelmed, and by this point in the semester, the faculty and staff must juggle accommodating those needs, albeit negotiating how to allocate the remaining tasks for the semester or work around students who may be at risk or suddenly develop special needs, like athletes game schedules or a family health problem makes your job a little more complicated, or your own life outside of work even gets a little bit too life-y.  I’ve noticed a pattern that seasonally, grandmothers have the tendency to get very ill during the weeks leading up to finals.  

When all of the obligations we tie ourselves to begin to spread us too thin, we first begin to cut the activities and little indulgences that we often find to be restorative and edifying – promising ourselves that when things “finally” slow down, we will take these hobbies up again.  And suddenly our focus shifts more toward staying afloat by steamrolling through our assignments through hell or high-water.  We begin to lose ourselves; through sleepless nights, missed breakfasts, and that repetitive panicked morning rush to class, back and forth to the office, just trying to stay afloat as we spiral down the path of frustrated guilt, anxiety and self neglect – all the while knowing that all it takes is one small snag to make everything we’ve worked so hard for unravel… and that we’re increasingly closer and closer to it.

Empathy, slowing down, focusing upon the present all become attributes that we view as unobtainable luxury; an indulgence we can afford to immerse ourselves in, when all the while our brains and intuition long and crave for that.  If we don’t find ourselves shutting down, we find other ways to make ourselves unavailable using other forms of self-resistance.  We become angstier, angrier, easily affected by others’ lack of accountability and frustrated.  We occasionally discover accumulated resentments that we didn’t even know were there.  It’s as if the change in weather crams us deep down inside ourselves, and although we long to burst free from the flurry of our unresolved obligations and complications, and each day becomes harder than the day before. 

Needless to say, I naively thought I had found the secret toward avoiding all of that.  Work/Life balance, that’s the secret to managing your own stress.  I teased one of my more scattered students juggling a sport and physics major (a somewhat impossible feat at this college) about his time management skills, chiding that “chance favors the prepared mind.”  What I found, however, is that even though I had found a way to reduce my own stress levels, by setting clear boundaries, limiting myself to one service activity, and going home every day at 5 (or somewhat close to it), the anniversary of the murder of my brother’s roommate (which took place right before Thanksgiving) did leave me a little unhinged.  I didn’t realize it until a week later, that in addition to navigating the misdirected anger of some of my co-workers that I was also grieving the loss of my family.  My brother and his family moved across the country just so that he could feel as if he could finally walk safely down the street again without having to look over his shoulder – ironically, enough the very reason I had moved to Kentucky to be near him, because I felt the same kind of anxiety (due to previous challenges with domestic violence) back home.  All of this time now, and the freedom to enjoy it, and I’d lost the one relationship I wanted to salvage because some disgruntled intruder had disrupted his peace at home. 

I couldn’t even take a harsh scolding at work this time of year with a grain of salt without being reminded of just layers and layers of messy memories, before I found myself spiraling along with everyone else into an epic inner battle between my need to overcome these obstacles and my (what would be understandable) subconscious desire to:

make sense of why I felt so toxic

fix the problem

and use every coping mechanism I could think of to be happy again.

Consequently, despite my best attempts, my brain was on overload and some of my efforts turned out kind of pathetically.

  

In fact, it wasn’t until after I’d spoken with my brother’s wife and realized that even she had buried herself into a nest of obligations and alienating resentment at work in order to allow herself to allow herself the space to love and accommodate my brother’s needs from a distance, that I realized how my efforts would be best be served.  

According to the two books I was working through, Psychology of Religious Knowing and the Wisdom of Yoga (I had to take a break from Ed Underwood’s book, “when God Breaks your heart” because it was a little too intense), I discovered that I would be best served to find a way to make peace with the fact that I felt bad and then use that time as an opportunity to shift my attention toward creating positive associations, rather than feeding any residual guilt.  And the results worked well.  It appears that this newfound discovery also aligned with what God wanted for me as well, as the Sunday Sermon at my local church talked about how we ensure that we heal our misplaced hurts in ways that can enable us to be more understanding and more comforting to one another (b/c evidently lashing out at people has become a norm in our society – which is weird b/c I tend to be more like those people who goes into seclusion whenever I feel too drained to give effectively), so that was at least helpful to learn so that I don’t take it personally.  

Which is good!  Because I found that being able to release that expectation of feeling valued or disappointment when others misplace their anger toward me allowed me to see those who have extended kindness as a blessing – once I realized that civility was not an entitlement in this day and age, but a privilege –because frankly, I’ve grown quite accustomed to people treating me with kindness and courtesy.  Maybe it’s just something I take for granted, but ever since reading Cloud and Townsend’s book on boundaries, I make an effort, through the behavior that I model, to establish those boundaries early.  I also defend them firmly but respectfully; even when I need to wrestle with myself a little bit.  There have been several afternoons where I have forced myself to walk away from an activity that I was excited about, but a bit afraid of, because I didn’t want to condition myself to respond to negative self talk, or any personal view that I deemed to be remotely derogatory.  I have an understanding that we all have the tendency to accept the love that we believe we deserve.  So I am always looking for positive reinforcements or affirmative inducements to condition myself to develop the skills I need.  

Here are a few helpful reminders I found that helped me to navigate this tough period effectively.

 Seriously, put your search engines to work.  Just as your search crawlers and search engine optimization tools like Google has that sometimes creepy connection with the ads in your Twitter and Facebook feed, similarly, you can manipulate your search engines to life coach you through the tough times by being selective about which material you interact with in those feeds.  If it inspires you, brings you cheer, or makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, be sure to click like.  When you don't know what's wrong with you, do searches online to see if you can pinpoint the answer and watch how your feeds begin to pour in self help information or inspirational messages that appear with eerily pinpoint accuracy.  Don't believe me, check out my next post; stress management tips that popped up in my feed when I was using this method to try to figure out how to manage stress better this Thanksgiving.  I just wish I had have thought of it sooner, I might have saved myself A LOT of money during my pre-black Friday retail therapy.  (Damn you express, for holding that 50% off sale 3 days early, thus capitalizing upon my fear of retail stores around the holidays and my secret desire to self soothe with shopping).

Also, don't be afraid put those endorphins to work.  Exercise, a good support network, the realization that what you don't have can be a tremendous gift and give you the freedom to take care of yourself can help you navigate the holidays.  If you know how to stimulate your serotonin levels effectively, you can find a multitude of ways to biochemically trick yourself into feeling happy without the use of mind altering drugs.

Scott Adams once said that "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."  I believe the same can be true when you allow yourself to take ownership of your emotions

and know which ones to keep.

Running on Fumes

02.18.09 am

Oh boy, I am extremely exhausted. I didn't make it to bed until 3 am. i may need to rethink this whole hair thing. I love it, don't get me wrong, but I wanted to twist it up last night and realized that I was sort of at the point of no return and had to wash it at 1 am or risk spending several hours prying through it after it dreaded up.

you'd think after having such a poor classroom showing yesterday i'd have wanted to be as well rested as possible in order to greet my long day, but in all honest, vanity has gotten the best of me in the lieu of petty conflict, and if I am to appear to be gracious and look fabulous when I do it, a couple of hours of sleep was a concession that I was certainly glad to make.

You'd have probably laughed at me yesterday as I banished myself to the library's research carral for 4 hours literally buried in a mound of homework. i didn't even have time to write my grandmother who'd sent me a bit of mail. i just recorded a thank you on my portable webcam and extended my gratitude to her and went back to drawing icons for my chinese vocabulary words up on the white board so that i could make a mental association with them. yeah, visual kinetic learning methods.

anyhow, here is the course rundown for my day yesterday

mth 125

i struggled with the assignment last week and waited until the last possible moment to hack out the problems and ended up with only having about half of the assignment done. fortunately my TA made the same mistake, so there will be a bit of leniency as we both realized a bit too late that we'd been assigned with approximate 3 hours worth of work and interpretaion. whuh oh. i let him know right away that i was going to probably need extensive help to get caught up with the review, but all in all i am very happy with the class. one of the guys in the class complained that he didn't care for our professor's teaching style, but i love it. i'm female so i love having the cross correlation of definitions, diagrams and real world models used. plus, she audio records every lecture and posts a written transcription of her notes on blackboard. perhaps that's why she can get away with assigning 3 hours worth of assignments. i also enjoy that she has a relatable sense of humor and sucks what could have been any form of anxiety out of the room. the class feels much more supportive and this could be because she is my age, but i feel as if the class takes on more of a study group feel than that of a boring old lecture.

chi 102
would have been great. i'm almost caught up on the dialog and drills, but I came in late because my advisor took forever to converse with me while i was trying to get my add/drop form signed and i never took the time to finish my stroke tracing worksheet that was due. this is also another lesson as to why i shouldnt wait until the last minute to do things. It certainly won't happen again.

i spent the rest of the day at work prewriting an article on Dr Vibert White's Lecture, "The Black Presence in the Middle East: A Contemporary and Historical Analysis" or something like that. Now I just have to wait and see how they hack my story up. some of the quotes were rather long.

On that note I will mention that I did keep the audio from the story of the infamous question and answer session in which Naji, my nemisis thought that this would be a great opportunity to refute the speaker's argument by asserting that there were no structural or institutional disparities that existed in the middle east because the color of skin was not an issue and then proceeded to think, and i'm not sure why he thinks this is okay, use the word "ni-", "the n-word" and then finally just went out and dropped the n-bomb. only in berea can a some jerk get away with something like that and not find themselves in a flaming car cascading into the ohio river or something. this isn't the first time that i've adressed this issue. over the break i expressed concern with one of the faculty members of hearing internationals use the word and the response was adequate, but it just continues to keep happening and i am not only disheartened but also beginning to really understand how generational privilege of not being exposed to this kind of racist behavior has sheltered me from how common it all takes place in this community and beyond.

unfortunately the events that i wished to attend; the gymnastics and dance exhibition, the primitive arts and tech informational meeting, and the social documentary "the rich have their own photographers," had to be curtailed and put off because of my poor classroom performance today... my way of negatively reinforcing the behavior. i did a fair amount of reading and processing instead and i think i'm going to write my health analysis on overcoming adrenaline addiction and stress management for one of my wellness goals.
http://eport.maricopa.edu/published/i/ha/iharkleroad/tdocument/1/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Adrenaline-Addiction-Can-Kill-You=&id=1342503

i did get my physics club flyer done, finally. i missed the meeting over the weekend. here is the final copy. now i must go eat breakfast and catch up on the reading i need to do.

this website is pretty cool. i just thought i'd add it as a resource. http://www.uusu.org/content/index.php?page=3695

other things of note:

flamenco music


not as good for studying as samba or bossa nova, but still very enjoyable



a bit cheesy, questionably offensive, but entertaining to watch



very helpful and will be noted in the future