Stress is Love and “awaring”

I asked my body what its experience of stress is.   I explored the steps involved in the Thinking at the Edge protocol and found much to my amazement that what I came up with was very different than the starting point although nothing was lost in the exploration.  The following is my conclusion thus far.

Stress is Love……   When directly experienced without  mental constructions or abstractions, the body’s felt sense of stress reveals contracted spot(s) which is/are inherently awaring and loving. These aware spots are calling us to enter into intimate contact with them.  Each of these seemingly separate spots are delighted when received by the larger field by means of our attention and respect. They want to merge with the Whole.   When welcomed, these contracted spots open and soften to the degree of existential trust.  Inhabiting the entire body all at once and feeling that the space inside the body and outside the body is one continuous space, creates the necessary trust. The more each spot is received with love, respect and curiosity,  just as it is, regardless of degree of expansion or contraction, the more the relationship deepens into a moving forward openness.  Stress, experienced from the body’s felt sense of contracted awaring spots, is a call for existential trust in fundamental wholeness.  When we heed this call, there is a sense of homecoming and a certainty that we belong to ourselves and one another.

–Claire Arnesen, psychotherapist, Sonoma, CA