Overwhelm is growing. Personal admin feels like a full-time job. Work is precarious, money worries sit constantly in the background, and the news delivers a new crisis every morning. The hamster wheel has no pause button.
If you live in the modern world and don’t feel stressed, there’s something deeply wrong with you. Stress, unfortunately, is normal. And when it builds into overwhelm, most people tell me what they want most is calmness.
When I ask people why they come to meditation, calmness is at the top of the list.
Calmness isn’t a thing. It’s the absence of a thing
We tend to think of calmness as something we need to add, like a new skill or a new feeling. It isn’t. Calmness is the absence of everything that gets between you and your experience of the present moment. Undistracted, unchanged, unmitigated present moment experience.
What gets in the way is baggage: worrying about tomorrow, replaying what someone said, repeating the infinite to-do list. Take that away and what’s left is stillness. That’s the eye of the storm. The wind and rain can howl all around you, but at the centre of the storm, there is calmness.
It helps to separate three things that often get muddled together:
- Calmness is about the mind: calm thoughts, calm emotions.
- Relaxation reduces tension in the body, the tension that stress creates.
- Focus is what you’re primarily aware of in this moment.
These things are all connected. Stay tense, and you maintain the stress. Lower the tension in the body and the stress comes down.
As stress comes down, anxiety reduces, and you become calmer. All of this is achieved through focus.
The science: why overwhelm takes over
Our bodies are built for a different world. Our ancestors faced a lion, ran, and that was it. All over. We were nomadic hunter-gatherers for a reason: we could walk away from many threats and stressors.
Modern threats are persistent. Money, careers, family, difficult neighbours, the endless procession of global crises. So the stress response never really switches off, and stress then becomes chronic. Chronic stress switches off many non-critical body systems, unfortunately including your immune system.
Your nervous system only has two states: stress on and stress off. And the stress ratchet normally goes one way. Click. Click. Click.
When we reach overwhelm, something else happens. The mind becomes more self-referential. The emotional brain takes over, and brain fog arrives, adding to our problems. The mind becomes intractable, fixated on an outcome and stuck in a groove. This is why advice like “just reframe it as a challenge” doesn’t cut it when things get really difficult. It’s like telling someone in a storm to “just ignore” the wind and rain.
What does help is an alternative focus. A different place for the mind to connect with.
The art: practices that are thousands of years old
Around 2,400 years ago, Patanjali wrote that yoga is stilling the mind’s fluctuations. For the first thousand years, yoga was meditation. One of the first postures described is to sit as comfortably as you can. Yoga was all about meditation. The movement part came later, in the Middle Ages.
Here are the tools I teach for finding the eye of the storm.
Check in with your posture. If you want the easiest way to reduce your stress, this is it. Stress has a shape: head down, squinting, frowning, jaw clamped, shoulders hunched, hands up in front of you to protect your vital organs. Watch the commuters in the morning, and you’ll see it. So learn to reverse this stress posture. Elbows by your sides. Head balanced comfortably. Rest your tongue against the back of your top teeth. Check in with your shoulders and release the stress with your breath.
Extend the out-breath. Breathe in, stress. Breathe out, relaxation. This is how the body balances your stress system. This is at the foundation of pranayama, the ancient practice of extending the breath. Making the out-breath slightly audible lengthens it and moves the body toward calm.
The breath is the quickest path to calm.
Use a mantra if the mind won’t settle. When the mind is really intractable, repeating a familiar, comfortable phrase in the mind gives it something to hold on to and moves away from the inner critic.
We are lifting the needle out of the groove.
Learning to sail
I like to think of the mind as an ocean. You don’t know whether the water will be calm, a storm is coming, or you’ll be stuck in the doldrums with no wind. You can’t control the weather. But the better a sailor you become, the more you can handle difficult conditions. Before you know it, you’re sailing over those huge waves, and it’s just another day.
And when you need to, you can steer into a harbour. This is when meditation becomes a refuge.
There’s a lovely old image of a candle in a storm lantern. The glass protects the flame from the wind, and the flame becomes clear and still. When the mind wanders, the candle flickers. Your practice is the glass that shelters the mind’s inner flame.
The waves don’t disappear. Every so often the water is still choppy. But the surface becomes calmer.
Be patient
People are often looking for a silver bullet. There’s so much impatience around nowadays. Some practices work instantly, such as the out-breath and the posture check. Others are a slow burn. You build your calm one moment at a time, first for one minute, then five minutes, then half an hour.
Practise when you don’t need it. Fix your roof in the sunshine. Then, when the storm arrives, the tools are in place, and your subconscious remembers.
Calm Under Pressure: a training day in Bromley
Finding the Eye of the Storm is the first of four modules on my Calm Under Pressure training day, on Saturday 14 November, 10:30 am to 4 pm, at Bromley Common. Over the day, we’ll practise these tools together, along with the other modules I am introducing this month:
- How to Rest Deeply in a World That Never Switches Off
- From Stage Fright to the Spotlight
- Dealing with Difficult People
You can find all the details for this special training day and book your place here.
Photo by Imkara Visual on Unsplash.
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