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When the going gets tough

How often do we go through situations where it feels like life, with all our commitments and pressures, starts to spin out of control and that we are barely able to hang on to one thing that needs to get done let alone ten.

And you're sitting in the middle of a tornado with your body's being slowly crushed by the pressure around you while you're trying with all your might to grab hold of fragments of your life spinning at high speed around you.

I'm sure with a little introspect we all know exactly what I'm talking about.

In today's day and age, stress is probably the no 1 cause of muscular and physiological aging and deterioration.

Whether in exercise or life the moment things gets tough we tend to tense our body, neck pain , back ache, shortness of breath and weight gain to name just a few side effects, sets in, in the last hope of having any control over our life or movement execution while our mind is the one that runs around like a lost child frantically trying to grab hold of some idea or focus point to keep it all together.

So the first thing everybody tells you to do is breath, and maybe try a bit of meditation. It all sounds great but what if breathing is the one thing you are unable to do and what if meditation is just not your thing?

Let's try something even simpler than that.

JUST MOVE

By movement I don’t necessarily mean exercise I mean go for a barefoot walk in the surf, stand in your garden and swing your body, roll on the floor or crawl around.

When mentally and emotionally stressed the best thing we can do for ourselves is to FREE our body and FOCUS our mind.

By doing a simple movement like crawling slowly or balancing on one leg, we need to focus on the ONE task at hand and relax our body so that our nervous system can respond to the feedback it receives from our muscles to keep it balanced. We soon learn that when our body is restricted and tense keeping our balance is not an easy task and controlled movements becomes hard work.

So if traditional meditation is not your thing, slow down and just let your body do the talking. By slowing down every movement, our nervous system starts to fire at 100% and the body starts healing and realigning itself naturally and reflexively.

And as a result, a fired up healthy nervous system helps to focus the mind and relax the body.