Emptying The Stress Glass.
There are times in life where we can feel that we have no control over what is happening and that can feel overwhelming, stressful or hopeless and fearful.
To help me with noticing this I came up with the idea of the stress glass.
Imagine our life experience is a glass of water. The glass is life – and the water in the glass are our feelings of stress, fear or hopelessness.
At different points in life, the glass might be quite empty, and so we don't really notice how full or empty it is, its just a glass of water.
At other times, it is almost to the top. At that point, we can really notice how full it is. Just one more thing can fill the glass to overflowing-and what might happen then? We don't know when the flood will happen, but we might be really afraid of the mess if it does happen.
If we take a closer look at the glass, we could notice something else about it. The water comes into the glass from different places.
Some of these places might always be there, they can't be removed or changed. Finding ways to accept this water in our glass can be really difficult and sometimes too difficult.
Some of the water comes into the glass comes from other places and we start to notice that we can choose whether this water comes into our glass.
The small drops might seem unimportant-and so why bother with them? But each drop counts and so if we can stop these coming into our glass, we have more space to deal with the other, bigger things we are facing.
There are also the things we can do to make some of that water evaporate.
These are the things that relax us, nourish us, let us play, connect, laugh, have peace.
It is easy to dismiss these when we feel overwhelmed by the fullness of our glass, but perhaps that's just the moment when we need them?
