How you sit, stand, walk and how hold your body during the day relates to stress and relaxation. Simple exercises and shifts in movement relieve tension from the body. How do you feel when you hunch your shoulders and lean your chin towards your desk? How does your lower back feel when you lean your pelvis forward? There are exercises to relax your jaw , stretch your neck and relax your chest. As you become aware of your posture while sitting, you recognize which exercises to use to take stress off the upper part of your body.

It is not surprising that stress plays such a crucial role in our experience of ourselves and our mental-emotional states. So how you relate to gravity critically effects our experience of stress, distress, and relaxation. How you use your muscles to hold your frame, to walk, move, run, stand, sit, breathe, etc., makes a lot of difference in how calm and centered you feel during your day.

Techniques To Try

Breeze Into Breathing

Let's test and see if you are aware of how breathing effects your emotional state. Think about something which makes you feel anxious. Bring the anxious thought —your pictures, sounds, and sensations of that anxiety fully into you as you fully continue breathing. As you do, breathe the anxiety in and out. Breathe it in fully, with acceptance and appreciation for its positive values and meanings. Breathe it out just as fully, feeling relieved that you can fully release this anxious thought.

It is useful to realize that when you feel stressed, upset, depressed or frustrated, you constrict your breathing. In these emotional states, you hold your breath. in fact, you hardly breathe at all. So, in terms of breathing, and the Yoga of Breathing, we could do the following. Take a relaxed stance and breathe deeply and fully for a few minutes. Become aware of your breath, inhaling and exhaling. Pace your inhalation and exhalation of your breath to a count of 3. Now, notice how much more calmer and centered you feel.

Stepping On Stress Technique

Here is a simple technique to step on stress and literally let it dissolve from your body. Recall a stressful situation. Transfer the tension from your shoulder to your lower body. Instead of storing the tension in your shoulders and back, let the tension come into your foot or your right heel. The hand or side of the body that you use less often.

Walking With Awareness

How we move, the quality and nature of our movements, the power and depth of our moving, the flexibility or rigidity of such movement, etc.—these things highly qualify or define the very quality of our life.

Consider, for a moment, the quality and nature of your movements. What adjectives and adverbs would you use to describe the way you move through the world?

		Positive			Negative
		Gracefully			Clumsy
		Flexibly			Rigidly
		Easily			Laboriously
		Elegantly			Awkwardly
		Powerfully			Weakly
		Excitedly			Dreadfully
		Confidently			Hesitantly

And how does this relate to stress, distress, and relaxation? When we feel the psychological state that we call "stress" we almost inevitably tighten up our muscles. This, in turn, creates the physiological state that we call "tension."

When we are stressed, we often hold various muscles. Typically, jaw, upper back, legs, arms, stomach, etc. Later, we experience muscle tightness and tension. So if holding and constricting muscles (hence movement) creates and builds up "tension," then movement enables us to release such tension. This explains why movement works so powerfully as a de-stressor. Movements that occur in walking, running, and stretching re-energize the muscles as they experience non-holding and non-constricting states. Movement can also be done to the muscles as in massage. We can move the muscles around. In massaging we can find with your fingers "knots" in the muscles where holding and constricting has occurred and we can manipulate the muscles and squeeze out the tightness in the "knots." Movement can literally loosen you up!