The ZEN of Stress Management

        If you are of a certain “vintage” you remember the brightly-colored paperback copies of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

        I read it, but I must confess that I didn’t “get it”.  In fact, I only recently heard a definition of “Zen” that I do understand.

        During pledge week on PBS, they aired some talks by Eckhardt Tolle. He defined Zen as “doing one thing at a time”.

It made me think about “Zen & the Art of Stress Management”.

        As with many things, when it comes to stress, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It seemed to me that doing just one thing at a time might be a good way to avoid stress in the first place.

        I decided to try doing just one thing at a time. Wow! What an eye-opener that was. Try it yourself and I’ll bet you’ll be surprised how “alien” that feels.

        We Americans are busy, busy, busy. We can’t afford to do just one thing at a time. There’s much too much to do! Or is there?

Stress takes a toll on our health. All of those fight-or-flight hormones flood our systems and their effects are many. The stress response can be life-saving in truly life-threatening situations, but it does not do us much good (and probably does us much harm) when the stressor is not imminently dangerous.

So give “zen” a try. See how it feels. Doing one thing at a time can slow life down enough that you might even be able “to stop and smell the roses”.

 http://www.eckharttolle.com/eckharttolle