Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Stress Busting - and Having FUN!

I’ve never done this before in my life: 240 pages, written, rewritten, edited and polished in a little over 6 weeks.  Georg F. Handel did his Messiah in about that long, but he was a genius.  Oh. My. God.  The newborn 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity is on its way now to bookstores, Amazon and me.  As I contemplate this blank page, I feel like a battery that is completely devoid of charge.  Yet, thinking about this amazing experience, I can feel psychic energy sparkling through my exhausted soul, and suddenly I’m a bit less exhausted.  Just enough to pick up my fingers and pour my soul out on the page.

Two hundred and forty pages, most of which is about creativity.  There are preliminary chapters about fun ways to breathe and meditate and walk and exercise, and there is a chapter on making plans and making sure that you execute on them – so important! - but the bulk of the tome is page after page, tool after tool, that takes you out of your worry mind, away from the tunnel-vision that stress creates and into the realms of divinity.  After all, in the beliefs of most faith traditions, there is a deity who creates the world from the raw materials at hand.   The Bible creation story, and the Babylonian Tiamat story that it cribbed from, involves breath and clay soil and the transformation of dead nothingness into glorious somethingness.  God is God because he, she or it brings forth life.  God is the Creator in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, the Norse pantheon and most animisms.  [Buddhism is the only major faith that doesn’t have a creator being.]  There is nothing that so closely mimics the divine as this simple path of creating something with your own hands and your own soul.

What flows through your mind and what frisson of excitement flows through your body when you first behold the works of YOUR hand?  Regardless of how imperfect it may be – and when you do anything for the first time, it won’t be the Pieta, so if you are perennially in the humor to tear yourself down, plenty of scope for it – it is creation.  It is beautiful in the same way that all newborn babies are beautiful.  The awe that overcomes you when you see the results of your work, the vision and the execution of your heart, your soul and your spirit resembles nothing else on Earth.  Even the transcendence you experience on the mountain top, or sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or driving down a road three feet away from a live bison isn’t the same awe as the awe of true creation.

Creation of any kind, whether it is a vegetable bed or an oil painting, puts you in a mental and emotional place that transforms your physical body as well.  The adrenal stress cascade stops or slows.  Your heart stops laboring.  Neurons remain intact and new ones are created from neural stem cells; your memory improves and the clarity of logic sharpens.  Your kidneys stop laboring; your immune system, especially the T-attack cells and the Natural Killer cells that go after cancer as well as outside invaders, generates its full complement of soldiers, ready to protect you from killers within and without.  Chronic inflammation quietens.   The chemicals that scratch the walls of your arteries and allow plaque to attach become fewer and far between.  All over your body, from your skin to your bones and everywhere in between, the deadly effects of stress are muted.
Time spent in a creative fog is time that exists outside of the normal minute-by-minute “real time” that we are all used to.  The first time you can put aside your OMG, I’m Doing It Wrong, I Know I’m Doing It Wrong thoughts and really deep-end in the process, narrow your thoughts and focus to simply what you are doing, you will sink deep into the Time Without Time.  Time simply ceases to exist as a reality. 

And the act of creation doesn’t seem to even involve you.  People have reported feeling as if a power took control of their voice, their typing hands or the hand holding the brush or the glue pot while the Real Me just watched.  They are absolutely right, if the Real You is your thinking, planning, analyzing Pre-Frontal Cortex, the part of you most active when you are consciously, logically trying to “figure something out.”  In order to create, you need to let your PFC step back [“take a nap,” in a hypnotherapy journey] and let the part of you that knows how to play and that knows the real agendas and the real goals of your heart take over.  This is the part of you that passionately wants to express those agendas and goals – dreams – in whatever medium you allow.  Let the real Real You come out to play, and to express to you what is truly Real, and you will have a gold mine of Truth about yourself and how you truly perceive your world and your life.

I’m not immune from the glorious results of allowing Truth to flow.  I thought my new book 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity was about health through blunting the deadly ravages of stress, and it is.  But if you look at the page count, and at the chapters that flowed out of me like a mighty stream, it is the power and glory of a life spent creating that the book is really about.  My subconscious was so insistent on this book that I bumped my planned 2017 releases to accommodate it, and I worked at a fever pitch to finish it, rewrite it, polish it, edit it and produce it in 6 exhausted weeks.  I mean, stress causes a lot of the problems that my work erases, but still – why?  Now, looking at the finished product in printed form, I know why.  My soul wanted your soul to create, and it produced a 240-page how-to guide to all the forms of joy that would fit into 101 tools, and still leave some space for breathing, meditation and the importance of moving. 

Want to learn more?  Come visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz or check out my Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies and join my monthly (or whenever I get around to it) newsletter.  I offer free and low-cost classes on Learnitlive.com as well as a free Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) for entrepreneurs who want to wake up every morning, do their self-care and then execute, execute, execute all day long, no wasted time, for the maximum income and greatest joy.  I also invite anyone who thinks they’re “not creative” to call me or buy 101 Stress Busters, and I invite people who’ve had traumas in their lives, to know that the impact on their lives today can be ended - permanently.