In the heat of a situation that brings stress, worry, fear or heartbreak, we are capable of being conscious enough to tell ourselves to wait before we react, but it’s not easy to do.

The easier thing is to let our mouths run, to let our hearts pound, to let our fists fly.

Deep, meaningful emotions strike us and we are tempted to react. Yet, society demands that we stop and take a breath—or we would all just be chemical reactions flying off the handle every time our emotions ignite. So we learn to stop, breathe and consciously identify our feelings:

This is fear.
This is anger.
This is desire.
This is complacency.

With this identification, we can train ourselves and our awareness to hone in on the emotion, know that it will pass, and refuse it to allow it to get the better of our decision making. We can avoid the mess that results from a hasty reaction if we are wise enough. When things are good, we are sailing through a peaceful existence, letting our worries roll off our backs, gliding gracefully along—and then something rocks us. Our guts get twisted in the choke-hold of our thoughts and feelings, and suddenly we are on fire.

But the stop, the question and the breath can help us control ourselves when we probably most need it.

With practice, we can inherit a knowledge of how to handle those potential “rabbit holes” and avoid mistakes, regret and downright obnoxious behavior. And, just when we think we have it down (to where we don’t even need to stop and breathe) we have to remember that we can forget.

We can slip, or get lazy. We can think that we are so trained, so practiced in the fine art of rational behavior, that we don’t need to maintain it on a conscious level anymore. But we do. We need to continue to bring to the forefront of our minds the value of keeping our cool when our emotions are boiling over. Call it meditation, yoga, self care, therapy, exercise, practice, it is all the same; it’s maintenance.

It’s a constant state of thought, intended to maintain a state of being. It’s remembering not to forget. Lose the weight, keep the muscle. We do it for our bodies, but for our hearts? Our minds? Our souls? We forget.

The reason people work out is to maintain a physical appearance, general health, to slow the aging process and for most of us, to sustain the mental health that exercise naturally provides. The more the mind of the person sweating and building comprehends, the more the spirit craves the high that comes. Chemically, called endorphins, mentally called stress-relief and soulfully called clarity.

This physical act, when married to a spiritual partner, can be a person’s cure all for of life’s enemies: insecurity, depression, anxiety, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and the list goes on. Yoga is the most congruent way I have found to pair both body and mind for a journey of well-being that understands the relationship between our shell and our core, separated by life’s true force: breath.

So we stop, we take a breath.

We acknowledge that our bodies and our minds take on our surroundings, and instead of fight or flight, we lean into them. We pause to understand what we are feeling and we hold it close enough to allow it to do its work by motivating us to action.

And in that place between feeling and reacting, we connect. We see exactly who we are for just a moment. We are the soul inside the experience. The being inside the body. If we know to maintain that balance, that marriage, then we understand the process. Our body senses our world, our minds receive messages and send our emotional responses, and then we have a choice: we can stay connected and allow our spirit its turn to be heard, or we let our actions be taken back to the body where we then speak, flip, freak, get crushed, make mistakes and create regrets.

Maintenance is the hardest thing to do for ourselves because we think we have learned our lesson (the first time, maybe, but at least after the second or third for sure). We believe we have grown above, past or beyond the things that have always caught us up in the past. We trick ourselves into a false security that because we have achieved Goal X, we are now safely beyond the requirements to sustain it.

We say things like, “I worked out for four months, lost 20 pounds, and feel great. Period.” In reality that statement should say, “I learned the value of exercise, and maintain my well-being by practicing every day and staying active in my new lifestyle.”

Marriages fall apart when spouses become complacent or careless, when we no longer understand that the work is what makes it work.

Friendships are lost when we can’t feel the need to reach out or connect because the other person will always be there. We suddenly don’t care that those jeans we worked so hard to fit into again don’t quite hold us anymore, at least we got back in them once. Whatever the reason, we stop working, we stop exploring and practicing what we need to do to stay with the program. Our breath becomes more shallow, we forget to breathe completely.

We let old habits (even the ones that died hard) slip back into our lives and we forget to remember that they really don’t belong there anymore.

Our once automatic responses to our spirit’s foes can absolutely be trained out of us, and yet those old nasty habits return simply because we forgot to stop, take the breath, and connect the body and mind to the soul. We didn’t ask the question: what is this feeling? How should I handle it? We have not maintained our ability to be wise from our experiences.

The solution is actually quite simple: Just stop, breathe, and let your soul be free.

Relephant: 

4 Keys to Responding Instead of Reacting.

Author: Toni-Ann Yates

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Axel Naud/Flickr