Transform Stress Into Power

When you transform your stresses into power — you can turn things around in the best manner possible.

- Dr Mark J Tager

I have a confession to make. I hate the term ‘stress management.’ Why? It frames stress as an enemy, and an undefeatable enemy at that. The term ‘stress management’ has a victim-centred feeling to it. Life dumps challenges on us, it says, and we simply have to cope with them. Being told to manage one’s stress is like being told to keep one’s head above water: the ‘duo’ sounds like exhausting exercises with no end in sight.

This, I think, is pretty unfair to our old friend ‘stress.’ Stress is a natural and normal force of life. It is the energy that powers accomplishment and achievement. On a psychological level, stress arises in large part as a natural consequence of our desires and expectations. We have expectations for ourselves, we have them for others, and others have them for us. We want to be good friends, better lovers, and excellent parents. We want the best for our children. We want to impress our bosses. If we are the boss, we want to be impressed by people who work for us. This is a thriving economy of expectations. It’s what makes the world go round.

We are all energetic beings, in a literal sense. We are beings fuelled by energy. The mitochondria, the essential component of our being at the cellular level, are our energy-producing organelles. I personally have always found it poetic that our heart contains the most mitochondria: a heart cell contains 5,000 mitochondria, a liver cell 1,000, and a brain cell 400.

We can detect the vibration of these various organs through modern medicine — the EKGs, CAT, MRI, PET and ultrasound scans that are routinely used in conventional medical diagnoses. In complementary medicine, we recognise these differences in vibrational energy being reflected in the chakras and the meridians that course through the body.