“DO YOU FEEL OVERWHELMED? TURNING STRESS INTO A GATEWAY OF AWAKENING” FROM TARA BRACH
“DO YOU FEEL OVERWHELMED? TURNING STRESS INTO A GATEWAY OF AwAkening”
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“There’s a reason so many of us are reporting overwhelm and that anxiety and overwhelm is spiking globally. Actually, there’s a perfect storm of reasons, and seeing it makes it less personal, gives us more perspective.” – Tara Brach
Stress and overwhelm are not just personal crises; they are collective experiences that mirror the chaos and uncertainty around us.
We know that feeling everything so deeply is part of being a fully alive human being, but it can feel paralyzing, making it difficult to focus or make decisions. In this podcast from Tara Brach, she will invite you to investigate what’s underneath the overwhelm, what’s underneath the intense stress. She’ll help you look at how you respond to strong stress, by dividing it into two categories and meditative approaches. This will offer you a moment to catch your breath, ground a little bit, and reset. She has a way of calming even the most heightened of nervous systems.
“Even if you yourself are not in the middle of a war, or the target of violence, or dealing directly with climate catastrophe, [your] nervous system picks up the violence and the suffering. Our society breeds anxiety and stress.” — Tara Brach
DESCRIPTION: “Stress and overwhelm are spiking around the globe. This talk explores how we can practice with the arising of stress in ways that calm our body and tap our capacity for full presence, wisdom, and love.
(4:05) Tara: “There’s a reason so many of us are reporting overwhelm and that anxiety and overwhelm is spiking globally. Actually, there’s a perfect storm of reasons, and seeing it makes it less personal, gives us more perspective. And part of it really comes down to the pace of change. Whether it’s technological, or social or political or environmental, it’s accelerating exponentially. And it’s more than our nervous systems can integrate. Past centuries, change didn’t happen that fast… In a very basic way… there’s this existential anxiety.
(7:50) Tara: “This social conditioning fuels anxiety; it fuels a sense of personal deficiency. We go around having this idea of how life should be. We’re always measuring things and thinking there’s a gap between how life should be and what’s going on—how we should feel, or we should behave, or we should exercise, or we should eat. We’re always rating it and trying to improve. There’s that undercurrent of never enough.
(10:17) Tara: “Overwhelm, this high relief-resistant stress is very much in the atmosphere… it’s not personal. And when you’re experiencing intense stress, if you can just keep in mind how many of us are breathing that same air and feeling that same experience, if it can shift from my stress to the stress, it actually is the beginning of waking up—of holding it with more perspective and having some more choices in how you respond… Even if you yourself are not in the middle of a war, or the target of violence, or dealing directly with climate catastrophe, [your] nervous system picks up the violence and the suffering. Our society breeds anxiety and stress.
(12:19) Tara: “Full overwhelm—it’s like the freeze in fight, flight, freeze and the trauma response—there’s no agency… And it signals a need for very full resourcing: grounding, finding a place of safety, often the support of others, a real break from stimuli. So you might just investigate for yourself, and if you realize it feels overwhelming but it’s not full overwhelm, it’s actually helpful to notice that and sense there is some agency. This is a big stress… but there is some agency to respond.”
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