My recent post have been about herbal and aromatic ways to help reduce your stress levels. Today I am taking a different approach and talking about another way to help calm the mind and body.

Meditation

Before you decide to click off the page WAIT! Please. There are many forms of meditation.

While most people immediately think of Tibetan monks, I would like to share a practice known as Mindful Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). It was first introduced by John Kabat Zinn, a Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts.

MBSR is about bringing your mind and thoughts to the present moment and acceptance of who and where you are. The Institute for Mindfulness-Based Approaches writes “The experience of mindfulness means to be present in one’s own life and to meet every moment as it really is – with all its richness, its joys and sorrows.”

What does this all have to do with stress reduction?

Take a moment and think about how chronic stress rears its ugly head in your life. Do you lie awake at night with your thoughts running a marathon? Do you hyper-focus on a past event, a conversation, or something you did or didn’t do? Can you feel the tightness in your chest just thinking about it?

This is a stress response. Our bodies are built with a natural stress response. We need the flight, fight, freeze, or fawn response to protect ourselves from dangerous situations. Our brain does the calculating and releases hormones that send the message to our body systems to do something. In the case of flight or fight our adrenaline starts pumping, our heart rate and respiration increase and we prepare to survive. When the threat is gone, our brain tells our body to chill back down. Chronic stress response is what happens when our body does not return to normal.

MBSR teaches you how to consciously break through the stress response and return to the present moment, lowering your heart rate and returning your body systems to a relaxed state.

There is more to the MBSR program like basic yoga poses and a totally relaxing fully guided body scan. I encourage you to explore it further here with a 10-minute guided exercise with John himself.

Pre-Covid, in-person classes were taught regularly around the world, culminating with an all-day meditation retreat. I was lucky enough to take the 8-week course through the University of Massachusetts. I can tell you personally that I still return to the breathing exercises that I learned in that course when stress and anxiety try to take over.

A Google search for chronic stress will yield multiple articles on the detrimental effect it has on our bodies. Google Scholar and Pub Med will bring you to more scientific articles and studies. A little dry reading but worth checking out.

Chronic stress is a killer

Events that happened in the past cannot be changed. How we process and deal with them in the present, can.

Today’s constant bombardment of bad news and horrific headlines are meant to keep us in a state of chronic stress. It is imperative for your health that you turn off the media and negative influencers. It is time to take control of your response to the past, the present, and the future. You can do this. Learn the techniques of being in the present. Try some new relaxing herbal tea blends. Try learning about some calming essential oils and how they can help you in acute situations.

In The Complete Book of Essential Oils and Aromatherapy, there is a whole section reserved for stress blends. The recipe below contains common and very easily found essential oils. *Always buy from trusted sources that have eco-friendly, sustainable, and fair trade business practices.

Emotional Stress Level I
Blend I pg. 97

10 drops Sweet Orange (Citrus sinensis)
15 drops Geranium (Pelargonium graveolens var roseum)
5 drops Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)

Add 15 to 30 drops to one ounce of lotion or carrier oil.

I will add, this is a high 5% dilution when using 30 drops to one ounce.
I always like to start low and work up with dilution rates. My suggestion would be to start at 1%. You can always increase the dilution. Add the following to one ounce of lotion or carrier oil.

1% dilution

2 drops Sweet Orange
3 drops Geranium
1 drop Lavender

Personal Inhaler
Add the essential oils directly to your essential oil inhaler.

5 drops Sweet Orange
7 drops Geranium
3 drops Lavender

Experiment with the perfect drop count for you.

Sources for essential oils
1. Aromatics International
2. Rocky Mountain Oils
3. Starwest Botanicals

Full disclosure, I am an affiliate with these companies. If you use my link to purchase your oils I will make a small commission. There is no extra cost to you.