RamDev – Healing at the Edge – Ep. 47 – A Tantric Approach to Stress

RamDev shares a timely look at the science behind stress, and how we can use a tantric approach to keep our hearts open amidst uncertain times.

The Three Steps of Being with Stress in a Useful Way

1. Acknowledge your stress. Be Mindful. What does it feel like in the body?
2. Owning or welcoming stress. Open your heart of compassion.
3. Using your stress to achieve your goals. Using difficulty as an opportunity.

Uncertainty doesn’t need to slip into anxiety. Dale shares a study which exemplifies that if you believe that stress will cause illness, you are more likely to die than if you don’t believe that, and if you don’t believe it will cause illness, then you are less likely to die than someone who even has low stress.

“Being aware of your stress and not seeing it as a bad thing, or better yet, seeing it as energy, is better than not having any stress at all.” – RamDev

Tantra and The Mother (4:08)

Maharajji spoke about the Mother, that you have to understand the female principle in order to fully awaken to realize God. The Mother is this energy, it is life. Dale poses the questions: Can we have this relationship with the earth, with physicality? Can we devour the energy? By going deeply into the spacious heart, can we surrender as an approach to life? Can we have a love for life, a romance, and openness rather than a sense of poverty? Is it possible that we approach uncertainty, not with this feeling of poverty and inadequacy, but in having a full relationship with the energy of our lives?

“We are using the excitement of life, the stress of life, the adverse condition, as a way of creating a fruitful and rich life experience. We are exchanging the fixation on the content of our experience to a more subtle fixation on the energy, the aliveness, the sacredness in each moment, regardless of the content.” – RamDev

Further explore tantra and the Divine Mother Episode 153 of Ram Dass’ Here & Now Podcast

Transmuting Stress in “The Gap” (7:24)

Dale speaks on the notion of welcoming stress into our lives and creating a healthy relationship with it. When we can witness our lives beyond polarities, we can rest in a fullness and openness which can transmute stress and anxiety into pure energy. From that space of spaciousness, life and stress become much more manageable.

“With an open heart we can go beyond good and bad, pure and impure, and all of those dualities, to be with the essential quality of the moment, the sacred quality, the sense of being-ness that is easiest to notice in the gap, the place in between. If the mind can’t grasp it, that might be a good thing because it is not a mental process. It is a surrendering into the nature of things.” – RamDev

For more resources on stress and suffering, dive into Episode 120 of Sharon Salzberg’s Metta Hour Podcast

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Images by Addicted to Sucess and Geralt