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Storm Before the Calm
Lynell Burmark and Lou Fournier
Thornburg Center for Professional Development
www.tcpd.org
Don't believe in stress management
- will leave this session with a new way to look at yourself and managing your life in general
Live boils down to HOW DO YOU FEEL
Epicurial nature of life is not what we take with us
Key is finding the positive side, not focusing on the negative
Balance of constancy is key
Constancy and Change are at ends of a continnum, fulcrum is stress
- constancy provides sense of balance, contintuity
-- thinks you are thankful for
"normal state of mind" is quite relative
- normal is between depression and exhilaration
- we always bounce back and forth
- we tend to think of this as normal
- 'normal' is very subjective term
are very different ways to look at images depending on our state of mind
there is no such thing as mistakes, just lessons we need to learn
to discover what your visceral desire is, get a question in your mind and think about what you would decide heads or tails. Then flip the coin and figure out what you were hoping it would be when the coin was in the air.
There is a red badge of courage for being the most stressed out person in the school
key is if you feel good about what you are doing
At a physiological level stress make you stupid (like acid being put into your system)
- you have none of your brilliance available to you
- McGill Univ tests on elderly folks with lots of cortisol in their systems, part of their brains were a lot smaller
- this is because of flight or fight response
Techno Trauma (technology as a source of stress)
- great cartoon of someone at pearly gates with place to enter userid and password
booth 1964 at NECC: the knowledge box is great
- type in standard, grade level, go find the lesson plan you want
Children laugh on average 400 times a day
- adults average 15 times a day
What have we lost from age 4 to 39?
- we have lost a lot of laughs
Because we don't focus on the real important things in life
Average of people who think toilet paper who should go over make $32,000 a year more
We believe that rather than stress being the presence of something, it is the absense of something
You can't get more DARK - it is just the absense of light
- can't increase dark except by decreasing light
- this is more than a simple metaphor
spiritually this is very close to the truth
Stress is the ABSENCE of RESOURCEFULNESS
- we feel stress when we feel inadequate to the challenge, because I don't have the resources to deal with this
Humor is meant to open the heart and the mind
- need a greater sense of our own capacity to find resource
There is no such thing as stress management-- you don't manage dark, you deal with dark by getting more light
Stress is the guage of perceived personal resources
Body doesn't care whether the stress is real or imaginary
- we always put imaginary obstacles in our way
Fear drives a great deal of the human condition
- we are creatures of misperception to a great deal
- by changing how we focus on things (our perceptions) we change the way we experience stress
Dr David Hawkins, book "Power versus Force"
- has map of human consciousness
- spreadsheet of the human condition
- arbitrary logarithmic scale
Emotionally we tend to evaluate things very quickly
- two pathways: sensory perception comes into Amygdala, goes to Thalamus, get fast track reaction to triggered memory emotionally activated, activation of stressor chemicals
The heart sends far more signals to the brain than the other way around
- heart has far more impact on our well being
- heart sends 1 of 2 kinds of signals, either 'incoherent' and leads to scatterbrained state, "coherent' signal is smooth - when we 'get it together' we are experiencing that
Incoherent signal - fear, anxiety, anger, every emotion we tend to think of as negative is associated with this
Coherent signals - go with all emotions we consider positive
We have power in our hearts, physiological measurements of emanations from heart and brain
Simplifying your life is a good idea
Having a pet lowers your blood pressure (by petting it)
Having a significant other
first grandchild
Emotions: you have to bank something in so you can make a withdrawl later
You determine tomorrow's choices to some extent by the choices you make today
Exercise: you are too old not to exercise!
Music is key: in context of stress workshop, not just quality to sooth and calm, psycho-aucustically, effect of the sound on the body
Analogy to the wind that brought down a bridge, due to sound
- sound is immediately carried to every nerve in the body
High bass is sonic valium, it discharges cerebral energy
- needs counterbalanced treble
- it will drain you
We believe life seeks unity
- is grove of aspens in Utah with a single root system, 1 tree growing in many places
the 2 should be as one
Can induce this coherent feeling by focusing on core heart feelgins
- appreciation, love, caring, compassion
Talk about constance in the midst of all this change
- this must have come from a higher source than ourselves
It is often easy to feel like our lives are lived like the surface of the sun, solar flares, intensity of the human condition, on fire, can't get too close, people will sense the heat and intensity of our lives
we should live our lives in a way only that they see our light and feel our warmth
The book Storm Before