Mindful Moments with Erin
Take A Pause
Ep 17: Changing Your Relationship with Stress
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Ep 17: Changing Your Relationship with Stress

Know the difference between a reaction and a response
Niàn Life: Changing Your Relationship with Stress

The mindful approach to managing stress is quite unique and can feel quite counter-intuitive.

Rather than distracting ourselves from stress or relying on an escape route, mindfulness recommends that we turn towards stress instead, and work with the distressing experience.

This is when we discover that we have agency in how we want to engage with our stress triggers, and that we don’t have to react emotionally.

Instead, we can take greater ownership of our experiences and learn to respond more thoughtfully and skillfully in times of stress.

In this Take A Pause session recorded live on 28 July 2024, I guided the TAP community in the practice of changing our relationship with stress.

We mindfully listened to an excerpt from John Daido Loori’s writing “Getting to the Bottom of Stress” found in the book “In The Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times”, and practiced noticing stress reactivity during difficult moments in our meditation.

We explored pausing in the present and learning to observe any internal reactivity, and intentionally choosing how we would like to respond to our experience from moment to moment.

At the end of the session, I addressed a few thoughts and feedback from the community about our practice.


Practice Begins: 08:40

Reading Begins: 13:09

Meditation Duration: 20 minutes


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A Few More Reads of Wisdom:

Discussion about this podcast