How to Clean up Your Mental Mess with Body and Mind Training?

The Path to Inner Peace.

“All over the world people are in some kind of mental, psychological, emotional pain.” – with these words begins a documentary series produced by Apple TV and the phenomenal Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry. 

The last 2 years in particular have shown us who we are and whatever was a problem for you before Covid-19, after, it has grown to even greater proportions. For many people, isolation and loneliness have become major stressors. Grief and sadness have become a daily occupation. Despair is not just losing someone. Despair is the loss of everything that matters in your environment. Children and teens have experienced this feeling when they were unable to go to a graduation ceremony, be with friends, and enjoy life. It has shaped who we are as a culture. Our culture has been put under incredible stress. Each of us has experienced the same phenomenon, but in different ways.

Now the war in Ukraine, people are dying in front of our eyes, there is so much stress, anxiety, uncertainty about the future. How to stay calm, when the media every day gives us even more violence, negativity, the worst scenario ever? How to organise the thoughts that seem like a battlefield? How to clean up your mental mess? 

Body and Mind training is the answer!

By body and mind training I mean yoga and meditation practice. In this article we will discuss how it can help us with combating the huge stress we are facing nowadays and its inspirations in human life.

Stress, Definitions and Symptoms

Did you know that Stress is responsible for over 90% of all doctor visits, according to the World Health Organization?

All over the world people have experienced stress, are experiencing it now, and will continue to do so no matter what their race, culture, class, how much money they make. Every day, stress and the mental problems it causes affect so many of us. Stress is a universal problem.

In short, it is the reaction of the organism to any experience of changes or challenges (stressors) by producing physical and mental responses in your body. 

Stress responses help us adjust to new situations. 

It can be a threat to human life, but it also sustains that life. It can have a very strong influence on the process of self-improvement. Therefore, in order to experience this “good stress” more often, it is important to understand, as the physician Hans Selye says: “it is not what happens to you that is important, but your reaction to that event”.  

We all think we know what it stress is, actually we call everything nowadays stress, but let’s look more closely at what is happening in your body during a stressful situation:

The body’s autonomic nervous system is like the motor of your organism. It controls your heart rate, breathing, vision changes and more. Its built-in stress response, the “fight-or-flight response,” helps the body cope with daily stressful situations.

When you have long-term (chronic) stress, continued activation of the stress response causes wear and tear on the body. Physical, emotional and behavioural symptoms develop.