The book I’m reading on
healthy aging devotes an entire chapter to stress and how it can harm our
bodies. We obviously can’t
eliminate stress from our lives, but we can modify our stress response.
In
the two years since my car accident, I’ve kind of taken up meditation. I say “kind of” because I do it for
awhile and then don’t. This morning, for example, I have a sick child home who
was well enough to take the laser pointer and shine it on me to make the kittens
pounce on me while I was meditating.
It’s hard to focus when that’s happening.
I’m
not talking about meditation in the middle-eastern Buddha sense. I mean
mindfulness, where you sit quietly for about 15 minutes and focus on your
breathing and the sensation of your body, like relaxing your shoulders. If any
other thought comes into your mind, you are supposed to ignore it and go back
to focusing on your breathing.
This simply gives me a few minutes of doing nothing, which is so rare in
our culture and yet so healthy. Remember the days as a child when you’d sit on your back porch step in
the summer and play with a dandelion, just spending time blowing the seeds
across the grass, and maybe watching a bug crawl across the sidewalk? I imagine that’s close to meditating
and some days in the summer I simply sit on our swing outside and watch the
birds.
But
this active form of meditation, of making time to focus on your body and your
breathing, has really helped me.
Once you capture the feeling of being that relaxed, it’s easy to take a
few breaths during the day and recapture the feeling, throughout stressful
moments.
Stress
is toxic to the neurons in our brains. It’s a major cause of heart disease,
inflammatory disease, digestive disorders, headache and other ailments and
chronic conditions. It can make us
tired, dizzy, and achy. Unchecked, it destroys our body.
If
Christ is in us, we need to take care of our bodies, inside and out. It’s a
command.
Here’s
a sobering verse:
Don't you know that you yourselves are God's
temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?
If
anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred,
and you are that temple. 1 Corinthians 3:17.
What
do you do to keep your “temple” healthy for God?
