I Am a Baby About Stress

I used to have what most people would acknowledge as an objectively stressful job: corporate litigation associate ("CLA"). When a CLA says s/he is sooooo stressed out, people pretty much credit that as legitimate. But stress is so subjective. I had incredible stress and anxiety about going to school when I was 11. School was horrible, and trying to manage it all in my head was exhausting. I remember once being yelled at for complaining about stress because I, a child, couldn't possibly understand what stress is really about. I was so offended by this dismissal that I've tried to keep a little bit of compassion in me for people's expressed level of stress no matter how silly it sounds. It's sort of like this: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02022007

Anyway I was recently helping some friends with a festival they were organizing, and oh lordy did it stress me out. There were emails to answer and things to coordinate and follow up emails and meetings and phone calls and all that crap, and I just was not handling it great. At one point I drove myself to a grocery store parking lot and took a nap in the car until someone called me wondering where I was because they needed help with the stuff I was supposed to be helping with! Pitiful!

Why was this so stressful? I just left an objectively stressful job, and have nothing to do but nurture myself for a living, and I should be relaxed enough that I can manage my own subjective level of stress just fine - but I just wasn't fully up to the task of being on the ball for this festival. I'm going to have to figure out some kind of way to be a productive, obligation-having (and money-earning) person on the planet without it making me get fetal all the time. How?

In yoga class sometimes when we're doing a pose we're given super precise instructions on how to do it just perfectly, and it's super difficult. And this might mean that you can only lift your leg an inch or something. Then the teacher will present the looser, less precise version of the pose, and holy moley you can lift your leg three feet! So then comes the next instruction: keep your leg in the position of the loose pose, but bring yourself back into the difficult, more precise pose. Through this kind of exercise you begin to ask your leg to imagine having both the freedom and ease of the loose pose AS WELL AS adhering to the precise, more difficult expression of the pose. So this is my analogy for life: life is pretty manageable when I have no obligations, and I feel pretty happy over all. But I'm going to have to acquire some kind of stressful obligation in the future in order to comfortably subsist. So from the loose position of low-stress life, can I bring myself into the more difficult, high-obligation expression of life and yet hold on to the happiness I am trying to cultivate? (Buddha says yes, btw) I think so but it'll take a lot of work, I am still "learning" to be happy in spite of various stressors in life. It's tricky.