Stress, Fear, and Love

I've noticed something of a pattern in the office these last few weeks. Most clients have described it as stress, and being that they are coming into a massage therapy practice, that doesn't seem so odd. The pattern though seems to be much more specific than just "stress" and in my experience, patterns such as these usually point to something in the collective consciousness.

Since I've been in practice, I've seen this happen quite a bit, not only as a therapist, but even while supervising the student clinic. As I'd go from treatment room to treatment room to sign off on student charts, the first hour would bring a hallway full of right hip complaints. The next hour would bring a hallway full of left shoulder complaints. And so on. I was never sure what the point was, but I always sensed some quantum phenomenon was involved.

In these last few weeks, it has seemed that stress for most people breaks down to a single, more defined collective emotion: fear. Given media headlines these days, that shouldn't be too surprising.

Taoism teaches that there is only Yin and Yang, two opposing forces upon which all nature is reliant. Newton's Third Law of Motion echoes a similar concept: for every force, there is an equal and opposite force.

Fear has such an opposing force. It is called love.

This was never more evident to me than during the days following September 11, 2001. I was living in New York at the time, within the sight and smell of the toxic black smoke that filled our skies for days. I was also a student, in the last year of my program at the New York College of Health Professions. I wasn't licensed yet, and so I was not allowed to volunteer for MERT (the Massage Emergency Response Team that mobilized at Ground Zero to support the rescue workers). I could only offer my hands to my fellow classmates in school, though my teachers had asked me not to. This was because at any given moment I would find myself overwhelmed with tears. But I insisted that I needed to treat, that treating somehow grounded me. And it did. The tears would immediately stop the moment I was hands on. My teachers didn't understand it, but they agreed that treating was not only healing to the person on the table, but healing to me as well.

It was some nights later, while in Neurology class, when a classmate tied it together for me. We were now being plagued with headlines about anthrax being found in the city, in a building where one of my classmates worked. The fear was palpable. What else? What else that was familiar, trusted, and safe about our lives would be taken away from us?

Our instructor decided to forgo his Neurology lesson that night to allow us to share and sort through our emotions. Everyone's words resonated fear. Then there was Julian, a quiet man in his mid-thirties. So quiet, I'm sorry to say I don't recall his last name, or much else of what we might have ever discussed in school. But I'll never forget Julian's words that night. In the midst of the panic around him, he simply stated, "There are only two emotions. Fear and love. And we have the choice right now to choose love."

The class grew still. And I don't know about the others, but it was a moment of illumination for me. I understood why treating my fellow classmates grounded me. In that moment, when my hands were upon them, fear didn't exist. My focus has shifted to love.

And I realized that though the world would never be the same again, we could still choose how to respond to the darkest and most frightening of moments in our lives, even a moment as dark and as frightening as the terrorist attacks on that bright and clear September morning.

Headlines today about our various collapsing systems have many of us feeling like we have a foot on the brake and on the gas at the same time. Overwhelmed, we label that feeling as stress. And it's not just people who are experiencing signs of stress. We see evidence of the planet's stress in earthquakes, wildfires, floods, and the hemorrhage of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Work stress. Family stress. Financial stress. Geological stress. We feel all of it, don't we?

But rather than panic at the headlines and feed the energy of fear, we can pause and breathe. We can choose. We can break the pattern.

For every force, there is an equal and opposing force.

By choosing love, we can help to shift the collective consciousness away from fear.

Holistically yours,
Maria G. Troia, MSEd, LMT, NCTMB, CH
Founder and Director
East-West Holistic Healing Arts
Old Town Scottsdale, AZ
www.EastWestHolistic.net