How To Untrain Your Mind In Times Of Stress

Pre-modern medicines were built around the idea that our bodies mirror our landscapes. Our ancestors used metaphors of the earth, trees, and rivers, for example, to better understand our organs, chemistry, and humors. In the modern age, we also understand that we are affected by our surroundings. We are organisms who live in a culture. When the world around us feels unsafe, we internalize that in our bodies. Stress is a significant factor in many diseases and pain conditions. When the state of the world and our country have shifted into unprecedented and unpredictable places of clamor and chaos, how do we stay focused, driven, passionate, and positive? How do we stay calm? 

As a Jewish girl growing up in the 1980s in the American south, I all too often imagined what it would be like to have my civil liberties taken away, to be imprisoned, starved, killed. It was clear to me that in the recent past, forces in power had wanted my kind exterminated. It baffled me that people were just going about like normal with that knowledge, while also knowing that an incomprehensible Native American genocide had happened on this very land, and also that the atrocity of slavery had happened, still terribly recent in history, and the scales of equity and inclusion continue to be tipped out of reach from people of color. As a teenager, I was a raw nerve. I wondered about these things obsessively, and why people would hate each other when people on opposing sides of wars are all pretty much the same: people with children to protect, and elders to love, and babies to tend, and dreams to wish for. These aren’t uncommon thoughts and feelings and they are most likely familiar to many of you. Empathy is easy when you are curious about the lives of others, and welcome meaningful connections with people with whom you may not share heritage or culture, or personal history. 

How do we live a meaningful life when the world feels dangerous? When society feels hateful? When progress is impeded and backpedaling alarmingly? These feelings of being afraid, targeted, unwelcomed, condemned, formalize in our minds, and get held in our bodies. The stress we experience through hateful encounters and vicariously living them in news stories and through human connectedness, and the overthinking that often accompanies them—these lodge in our bodies. We carry the language that accompanies them, I will never be safe, or I will always be in pain, or I'm not healing fast enough, and so on -- we unwittingly carry these narratives of worry and fear and pressure as tension in our bodies. 

In Chinese Medicine, we look at patterns, and we look at repetition. The act of thoughts repeating themselves, obsessively, as in I’m not safe, I’m not safe, I’m not safe, is like a gerbil running in a wheel, spinning, burning, and entrapping. In Chinese Medicine, we can isolate that spinning wheel to specific parts of the body and we can shift the composition of the energy so that it changes and flows. This is what we do with needles, with our hands, with our herbal remedies. I want to explain to you that it is also something you can do with your mind. 

A radical self-care rests in the alchemy of your mind and your body and your imagination. It starts with conjuring a feeling of safety. And with appreciating the safety you have. When you appreciate what you do have, you honor your own experience and the experience of others. All we have in life, really, is each and every moment at a time. That is our experience. It builds into a collective. And what we have now, is now. Some call this presence or mindfulness or embodiment. It takes a bit of self-reckoning. 

So here you are now. You are safe in your body. You are safe at this moment. Your body is your home. At any moment you can look at what’s wrong or scary or you can look at what’s right and safe and well. You can get carried away with the what-ifs. Or you can be present with all you are satiated with, and all that is safe and well and working in your favor in the immediate moment. When we get carried away future casting tragedy or being hard on ourselves for things we can't change in the past, we cause ourselves suffering. We put ourselves into stress and we feel that in our bodies. We did this simply with our thoughts and imagination. We can also use our thoughts and imagination to lift us out of suffering and help us feel better. We call this self-regulation, learning to calm oneself down. Here's how. 

Take a moment to be in your body, to breathe fully into your body, to be wholly present, to say this is my skin, my hands, my legs, my chest, my neck, my head, my back. This is me, carried in this body, and I am no one but my own strong and true self. Imagine a radical new view of your body, as a haven, whatever image you like: a lighthouse, a cave, a planet, a holy place, or your grandmother’s kitchen. Pick something that symbolizes safety for you. Imagine your skin shifting into that imagery, of cave walls, or earth, or a field of wildflowers, or the wallpaper of your favorite respite—some image that surfaces in your imagination that you can utilize. Let your body transform into that place in your mind’s eye, and see a small version of yourself living there, in your body somewhere safe: around a campfire, or resting in the grass, or sitting at an altar, or laying in a cozy bed. This small self, a little version of you, is perfectly safe.

The small self is free. Imagine being the small self within you, embodied, senses alive, feeling the sun or the breeze on their skin, remembering the scent of orange blossoms and vanilla, the feeling of their feet in the sand—whatever sensory images you’ve chosen. Be the small self, present in their reverie. They are soaking in the safety. Feel it in your body now. Imagine that feeling of perfect safety and bring it you’re your body. Imagine it as a restorative salve within you. There is no limit to your imagination to conjure the feeling of safety. 

You know how worry, what I call catastrophizing, can immediately send you into a panic, and how your body can sweat and race and flush and rush, simply based on your imagination of a threat? This is the opposite of that. This is radical self-care employed by your own creative self and brought into your body. This is an antidote to catastrophic thinking that you can employ on your own. 

We are each a collection of experiences, memories, images, and perceptions. We are a composite of hopes and dreams and concerns, each living a whole life unseen inside our minds. We need to use our cognitive skills to keep ourselves whole. We can be more helpful to others, near and far, when we are composed and collected, and focused. That starts with the imagination. And bringing it into the body. We each have one body we take care of. Let’s stay whole by appreciating that body and softening into the safety it is given. Right now, you are safer than all those ways you’ve imagined being not safe. Right now, you are: awake, listening, learning, caring, attentive.

Your body is the place you come home to. Your body is your planet. Your landscape. Your own haven. Make it, in your imagination, so convincing that you really feel it. This is how you practice believing in yourself. This is a way to stay grounded in a place of chaos. Practice it, and let me know how you do. There’s a lot more I can teach you about it. And there’s a lot more I still want to learn. We can explore together. If you like this idea, and want to listen to some experiential embodied guided visualizations along the same theme, check out my public audio art project, BODY LAND METAPHOR MEDICINE, wherever you get your podcasts. 

Wishing you all the best in health and happiness,

Liz Greenhill, Licensed Acupuncturist 

Night Sky Acupuncture 

Portland, Oregon 

P.S. One more thing to think about…in Chinese Medicine, one solution to untangle the stuckness of overthinking is to take action as an activist. The other solution is to transform that stuck energy into creative expression. If you feel your wheels spinning, bring those ideas to the center point of your feeling of stuckness and see if you are inspired to take one of those avenues toward change.