I was feeling irritated today with the way my day began. One unkind word or downright mean-spirited word from someone and there goes all my efforts to start the day on a positive note thinking of all I am grateful for. My thoughts on gratitude were more about feeling grateful that I didn’t have it in me to slug the crap out of someone. Ok well, I suppose that could be a positive as well. I am truly not one given to harming anyone. I usually take it out on myself and end up in a battle of stress with my efforts in self-care.

So, I spent the better part of the morning angry and irritated while the other person went happily about their life for that day as far as I could tell. When I was sick and tired of feeling pissed off with no one for it to land on but myself, I decided that the best way to let it go was to get back to being ME! I didn’t have to waste my day as a garbage dump for someone else’s anger. I knew if I sat down to meditate I would likely just fall asleep. So instead, I got myself into an alpha brain wave state and quietly contemplated what exactly it is to be ME.

Just that action led me back out of the other person’s anger and into a place of rediscovery of my own experience of life. Basically, I thought about what moves me, what I care about, and how I communicate and in what ways I feel I am unique. It was a simple exercise but one that reminded me of just how important and powerful it is to be ourselves, to be authentic.

The other thing I was reminded of by all this is how one little ripple in a pond can affect the entire pond. One unkind word set me off! One simple exercise brought me back to my power. We are truly all connected. But even more important, we have the power within ourselves to impact others, to impact ourselves and to change what is not working for us.

When I am not so tired, I like to meditate or chant. When I am tired or lacking energy I like to do things with motion, like ballet stretches or T’ai Chi. Yoga is great too but I am less familiar with it. In any case the idea of any of these practices is to re-center oneself, refresh and re-energize.

It occurs to me that many people these days are under extreme pressures and stress because of the many traumatic things going on in our world right now and the huge changes we all must make to come through these things safely. There is extraordinary sadness and trauma that has come with each event. And moving through it all to create a better world for us all to live in will continue to take extraordinary measures, clarity and strength! At the bottom of it all experiencing some degree of STRESS is the one thing most of us can probably relate with and agree on at the moment.

My purpose is not to lead a revolution, only to lead one within myself and share with you all a way to do that. So, I can only really comment on what we can do within ourselves to refresh and keep moving forward to a better life and better world. As crazy as it may sound, make stress your friend! Let your experience of stress lead you to what the issue is inside yourself, and that is where you will find your solution and pathway out of it.

Life is stress. If we use it to dig deeper, find solutions, strengthen ourselves and learn something new it has become a benefit. If we use it to dwell on what is wrong or complain and remain unhappy we have turned the opportunity of stress into DIS-stress! Try thinking of it as a springboard that is going to lead you to a remarkable quantum leap in your life in some way.

This may not solve the larger problems in the world, at least not immediately. But it can give us the energy and clarity to go on fighting for what is right and good in this world. We can’t fight for change, either inward or outward, if we are so easily brought down by someone else’s moment of anger or defensiveness as I was for a while this morning.

I encourage you to dig in to YOU and all the best things about yourself. Be authentic and be bold in your ability to care about self and others. If you have trouble reaching in to that, try letting meditation lead you there. Why? Because meditation is the language of your own subconscious mind. And your own mind will not lead you wrong.