All right, welcome. We're going to take a look at taking action now. So, first of all, do you recall my definition of meditation? What are the three parts? You can pause right now? look them up.

That's fine. Active, accepting awareness. The active part is important. When we're bringing meditation and mindfulness and meditation into our daily life, then we're going to be active. We're not just going to sit by anything that happens to us. Just let it let it happen.

Not necessarily. We can accept that things are happening. But we're not just going to be a target for everything. Am I my my Zen teacher? He reminds us to be open to things. be accepting, let things go.

But don't be a mug. You know, don't Be a doormat. So with our stress, we have a lot more, a lot more action we can take than we usually think we do. So let's take a look at what we can do. So remember, what we're doing here is we're training ourselves a little bit by little bit over time to move from a stress reaction to stress response. Our reaction is instinctual.

We feel stressed, we run away, or we get angry and yell at someone, or we we freeze. We just aren't able to do anything anymore. We shut down. So we're getting away from that, which is our animal side, which is perfectly normal, because, well, that's part of our biology. We're going from that to a stress response, where we can calm ourselves using concentration meditation. Look at the situation what actually happened, look at the facts, and then choose a way of responding Doesn't make it worse.

Maybe we can choose to get ourselves out of a situation. Maybe that's the best course of action. Maybe not saying anything, is the best thing to do at one time. Maybe telling someone no is the best thing. There's no I'm sorry, I can't do that extra work. I haven't I have more than I can handle right here.

And I'm concerned about my productivity and the quality of my work. Yeah, that's taking action. Remember, there's a big difference between ignoring something or running away from something, distancing yourself from it, and choosing to focus on something else. So ask yourself, what could I do to resolve my stress reaction, feeling stressed and you've looked at the situation you're a bit calmer You're able to see a bit clearer because you're calmer. What could I do? It's not necessarily easy.

In the moment, it can be difficult to remember just to breathe, just to breathe deeply, maybe to do a concentration meditation to calm down. That's difficult enough sometimes. So don't beat yourself up. This takes time training, and practice. asking yourself what could I do to resolve my stress reaction? Remember, we're not dealing with the story, not saying how can I resolve the story of why my boss hates me?

Like what on my desk Can I throw at them to avoid getting extra work? That's not gonna help? It's gonna make things worse. What can you do to resolve your biological reaction right now. This can be concentration meditation, as I mentioned before, slower breathing, calming yourself, does lower your heart rate and it starts to end that reaction, getting a bit of exercise. Our bodies can sometimes think that Oh, okay, we're running away from the tiger or the wolf.

Okay, no problem. And they Calm down, right? We burn up those stress chemicals in our bodies through exercise. walking meditation is a nice combination of the two. you're practicing calming yourself, calming your body, calming your mind as well. And you get a little bit of exercise to give your body the hint that Okay, let's rebalance chemically.

There are many things that you can do to resolve a stress reaction, and it takes time to figure out what really works for you. Be creative, and don't don't beat yourself up. If something doesn't work. That's just another just another victory. Okay, maybe next time I won't do this. Maybe next time I won't get huge coffee.

Another reminder, as I mentioned the beginning of this video, meditation active, you have agency in your life, you have the ability to do things. It sometimes it can be. It can be easy to feel like we're powerless. we're overwhelmed. We can't do a darn thing. We have more power than we think we do.

We do. And by practicing mindfulness and meditation, we're able to separate our thoughts or interpretations. from reality. We're able to address what we really need to address. We can work with our stress instead of why we think it's happening. Okay, I'll see you in the next video.