completing the stress response
It’s Saturday. Morning. A face still warm and moist from a generous lather of almond oil post steamy shower. The wrap of skin, a meeting point of a warming inside as a belly digests fluffy pancakes cooked with ghee and wet lips linger with the sweet and spicy milk of Cacao and Chai. A droning drum of repeated mantra is rolling in and around a body as the leaves gently swirl.
Exhale.
Shoulders growing space beyond ears. Diaphragm relaxing into waves of movement. A gentle increase in the reception of hearing follows a widening of ear canals. The passage of breath knows no dis-ease.
Rest.
A break from the taps of letters onto a laptop to release a bowel motion signals digesting.
Rest and Digest.
This place.
Where a body and a mind rest in the same need. And a paradox of biology needs no attention. Perhaps contrastingly different, of a day of physical labour, or a day behind the laptop. These fullnesses, that begin to ask difference of us to be with. To be with them in the world.
Yet another fly rushes itself into my left nostril. Frustratedly I swat it away with a forced exhale and a lazy gloved hand, knowing myself in its desire to take shelter from the heat of Australian midday sun. I swing my Pottiputki into the sand 1.5m from my gumboot. With a weighted effort, I free my foot from the embrace of liquidized bog and follow it to the next hole. My muscles groan and sweat sticks my tights to the back of my knees. I hear the shriek of crows, the heaviness of my own breath, and the rhythmic clanking of a Poti into the ground, the opening of its base, and the closing back up after the plant has been deposited. There’s a spontaneous yet predictable clanking of Poti’s around me that melodises like a prison chain gang. Everyone's heads are buried in the hypnotic task, enchanted by repetition into a trance of relaxed focus. Or rather we’re not focused, and that’s the wondrous portal opened up by entering transient hypofrontality. Flow state. Where our brains can… unfocus. Trusting in the knowing of what is next. Widened in the familiar. Rested in the doing.
I notice waves of my mind reaching and grasping for stimulation, input, information, a familiar needing to be doing something …. “productive” when in a monotonous task. A podcast, an audiobook. Yet, in witnessing that rush, like a fly in its desperate attempt to escape suffering, I knew the sameness nothingness was exactly what my mind needed. So I leave space for my mind to get bored, and to begin to sort, file and spontaneously awaken to awareness and memory.
At the end of the 8 hours, I arrive home and crawl onto my mat to stretch a tired body and then carry my body to the bath. As I sink a little deeper, lowering my chin to touch the warm water, my muscles drinking in the magnesium like Spongebob in Sandy’s Treedome, I notice a rested mind. That feels spacious, and open.
I reflect on these two parts held within the one whole. To be experiencing mental rest, in the same body that feels tired, to other days in that week.
I sit in front of a laptop, feeling my heart throw itself against my sternum, breath captured in the top of my ribcage, and a diaphragm that is frozen in intensity as I tend to the demands of a new contracted virtual admin role. The shape of my body stays in an upright seated position, fingers hovering against a keyboard encouraging shoulders to lessen the meeting ground before ears. Not moving, yet so much moving inside. The buzz of my mind, responding to the flashes of new messages needing attention, remembering frontal lobe processes learnt a few days before, firing with a rush to do ‘good’ for my new boss. After 4 hours I close the laptop screen and lay back onto the ground, stretching my legs that gasp a large inhale of space in the front of my hips.
My mind feels kapot.
Like a prickling grain of activation that has then flickered out.
It feels full and empty.
And in the same whole, I notice a rushed need yelling from my body to get outside. To walk, to stretch, to dance, at this point… anything! I am leapt up from my back, I chuck on some shoes and leave the house. My pace is quick, as I begin to notice the crunch of stones underfoot. When even that doesn’t feel fast enough, my feet begin to break into a jog, that then cascades into a sprint.
Now I am sprinting.
Away from what? I do not know.
To where? Until I need to stop I guess.
After some time, a burning heart and tired muscles begin to slow my feet down. My breath heaves into regulation, slowing and lowering breath by breath. As I feel my awareness widen, beyond the rectangle circumference of a screen, I begin to take in the leaves tickled by the wind, the many colours of green, and the sweet smell of Australian bush.
I turn around and head home, canceling a familiar tendency to walk until I finish the loop around the lake, feeling a completion in my need to be moving. And a heavy want to rest. And that is exactly it, completion. Completion of a stress response in our body that can require activation to access rest. Following the law of chemistry, energy is never created or destroyed. So when we are experiencing an increasing rise in adrenaline in response to a perceived threat, blood and energy is pumped to our extremities, preparing them for movement. Yet our body might remain still. We then wonder why we can’t sit still, rest, or meditate, troubled by this tired but wired feeling.
Down-shifting from work, challenges, activation, stress, life, is imperative to living an embodied presence. It is our personal responsibility to complete the needs of our body, so we can be here, really be here, with our loved ones and our own self intimacy.
So if a busy mind can be rested through receiving no input during monotonous doing with our physical body, in activities such as driving, washing the dishes, walking, planting. And an activated body can be rested through discharging the built up energy in our muscles through movement such as shaking, sprinting/running, dancing, full body squeeze and release.
What is it that you feel you need today?
