Many years ago I knew an Alexander Technique teacher who was also a Buddhist. He once said something which I have pondered on and returned to many times over the years. He said:
Stress is not a bad thing. Everything needs stress to stop it falling apart. It’s when stress becomes distress that things go wrong.
The image he used to explain this statement was a bridge. Two forces keep a bridge up: tension and compression.
Tension is what happens to a rope during a game of tug-of-war. It undergoes tension from the two sweaty opposing teams pulling on it. This force also acts on bridge structures, resulting in tensional stress.
Compression is what happens when you push down on a spring and compress it, and by squishing it, shortening its length. Compressional stress, therefore, is the opposite of tensional stress.
When compression overcomes an object’s ability to endure that force buckling occurs. When tension surpasses an object’s ability to handle the lengthening force then snapping happens.
Compression and tension exist in all bridges and they are both capable of damaging part of the bridge as various forces act on the structure. It’s the job of the bridge designer to handle these forces without buckling or snapping.
The best way to deal with these powerful forces is to either dissipate them or transfer them. With dissipation, the design allows the force to be spread out evenly over a greater area, so that no one spot bears the concentrated brunt of it. In transferring force, a stress is moved from an area of weakness to an area of strength.
So you can see that it is balanced stress that actually keeps the bridge up. The same tension and compression keep us standing on our feet. There is, for the most part, no actual “rest state” in the body. The extensor and flexor muscles are involved in the maintenance of a constant tone while “at rest.” In skeletal muscles, this helps maintain a normal posture.
This got me to thinking about the etymological origin of the word “distress”. It’s over 600 years old and derives from the Old French “destresse” meaning “circumstance that causes anxiety or hardship”, which in turn comes from the Latin “districtus” which means to “draw apart or hinder”. It was only in the late 13th century it started meaning “anguish, suffering or grief”.
As discover means to un-cover so distress must mean to unstress (a word which is not recognised by Spellcheck by the way!) when forces are not in balance and therefore things fall apart.
In the same way, when all those stresses and strains which we are dealing with in our daily life get out of balance, that’s when things fall, or draw, apart. And that’s when we can’t cope, so perhaps the first thing that is in order is a little reframing, to stop looking on all stress as bad or debilitating.
It is interesting to note that what is stress to one person is not stress to another as each person’s response is going to be different. Some people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of a terrible incident or a battle in a war whilst others survive mentally unscathed. Some even thrive, experiencing what is now called post-traumatic growth, which helps develop the four resiliences:
1. Physical resilience;
2. Mental resilience;
3. Emotional resilience, and;
4. Social resilience.
Or to put it another way, those who are under stress do not necessarily collapse. For example, American World War II hero, Admiral Edward Rickenbacker said:
Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.
We all have to find balance in our lives and, because we are not bridges, what is balanced for one person is not the same for someone else. So perhaps for all of us, a little bit too much stress is not a bad thing. It helps us find our edge and just maybe our edge is a little bit further away than we thought. We all need to test ourselves a little to see where the edges of our stress are so that we don’t get too comfortable.
And although she is talking about Buddhist meditation, Pema Chodron makes a similar point about being careful not to get to comfortable with where we think we’re balanced because:
[Her] strict practice is still pretty relaxed … so strict practice is good for me … Very relaxed practice doesn’t show me as much because it doesn’t show where I’m out of balance.
And the flip side of this is true; that someone who is militant and precise in their practice might need to practice in a relaxed, loose way. “Everybody is different,” she says.
This also accounts for the fact that sometimes in what you think is a perfectly innocent conversation with a friend, you suddenly find your head being bitten off. You don’t know what’s going on in that person’s life – the things that have happened to throw the delicate balance of tension and compression off-kilter.
Aikido helps us with this as it teaches us to appreciate good and bad stress. In our practice we know when we are “leading” our partner, if we get too far ahead, we start pulling and then we feel an unpleasant tension in our arm, as well as a pain in our shoulder.
We also learn that when there isn’t enough balanced tension between ourselves and our partner and our arm collapses and uke doesn’t move, or worse, takes control of our centre.
And of course, it also shows us that everyone is different! The tension we use that is effective with one person, is completely ineffective with someone else, so we learn to adjust.
This, I think, is a very positive attitude to stress. To start with, if we recognise that it is necessary, that it exists to hold up bridges and our bodies and that it makes our aikido techniques work, it may stop us getting sloppy at work and in our relationships. It makes us pay attention. And if we stop fearing it, it will challenge us to push ourselves further than we thought we could go.