Stress storm

This morning is a tough one.

I'm consumed and distracted with anxiety and mania involving this upcoming court case with my landlady.

I don't have the concentration to stand. Or I don't believe I have the concentration to stand. I'm having some autistic moments.

I try to program my mind into iterated relaxation.

I listen to my hypnotherapy tape.

I try not to panic about my mother coming over today for a birthday dinner.

I repeat my hypnotherapy mantra. I am capable of whatever life throws at me.

I go and re-read my entries on stress.

I discover a post I wrote about going deeper. So I go and set my timer fr 20 minutes of going deeper. Soon enough I am surrounded in magnetic calm. In this place I know that I am capable of letting go of unecessary, debilitating stress.

I know it.

But it's still hard to keep it going throughout the day.

I will remind myself that this calm is available to me whenever I need it today.

Christmas Eve

This is the celebration that is supposed to cheer us up during the darkest time of the year. But I talk to my mother and she is so tired. I find it exhausting too. Seems to me it should be the time when we are sleeping, not partying. Does that make me a Grinch?

But I could use some more sleep. Read an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about circadian rythms. I've always known this, but the article claims that they will be the next big trend. Chronomotrists, or something like that. People who coach you into healthier circadian rythyms.

I suppose that's what I'm doing here. Waking up at dawn. But going to sleep early. I know what an effect that has on my life, and still I don't do it. I'm addicted to electric lights, televisions, all the things that mess with my natural sleep patterns. I've read that you can lose weight just be sleeping earlier.

Today I sank a little deeper into my posture. This squatting, with your hands above eye lever is supposed to distort your sense of time. And true enough, the hour I meditate in the morning seems to pass much faster now. While I'm in this kind of trans state I try to visualize myself getting really, really tired near eight or nine o'clock. All I want to do is start getting ready for bed. I lose interest in television. I can barely keep my eyes open. Maybe I can hypnotize myself into an earlier sleep time. Wouldn't I rather be alert all day, than entertained for a couple of hours at night?

It seems simple, but until you feel that alertness as a daily fact in your life, for an extended time, then it's hard to keep it up.

going deeper

After the great circle the next posture in my cycle is "going deeper." I sink down lower, let the gravity loosen my hips and my spine. My hands rise and I begin to feel a magnetic energy create a pathway to my brain.

This increases the tension in my body, but like a good stretch it also releases it. I feel like I'm stretching my brain. But after it's stretched I feel a calm. Kind of the calm you feel after an orgasm. But this is more sustained. It feels like my hands are holding the calm in place with their magnetic energy. And all I have to do is surrender to this calm. The fact of this calm. Just surrender to it.

This is surprisingly difficult because we don't think of calm as a fact of life, or a sustained state of being. We think of life as sustained stress and suffering, relieved from time to time by moments of calm. But when I'm in this state I feel that it's really the suffering that is artificial. This calm is the state we are naturally programmed to feel. The stress is a result of cultural programming.

I'm not saying that's true. But that's what it feels like when I'm in that state of being, and I make a choice to step out of it and back into the culture of stress that I've been born into.