In recent months, there have been many people who’ve shared with me experiences of extreme stress that have entered their lives.  It’s happened so many times that it has caught my attention.  It seems that we are in a time when, for some people, lots of stuff is happening that requires adaptation and responses above and beyond the usual call of duty.

For example, one person I know had his bank accounts frozen because of an error on the bank’s part and, with lots of ripple effects as checks bounce and his credit rating suffers, it has taken many weeks to straighten out the error – and many hours of stress and strain.  Another person I know has found herself confronted with a death in the family and a move to a new city all at the same time, which has just about put her over the edge.  Yet another person is dealing with health challenges at a time when one of her children has just gone off to college, adding the stress of dealing with a health crisis to the adaptation of a profound shift in her family.

As I listen to people talk about the increased stress and strain they feel, the increased demand that they adapt to more challenges at one time than are usual for them, I became even more aware that I’m experiencing the same thing in my own life – that we’re all sharing a similar quality of being stretched and then being stretched some more.

And so, for this week’s experiment, if you’re finding that you’re more stressed than usual or, even if you’re under the usual demands of life, I invite you to revisit the practice of allowing yourself to soften in the presence of, and flow through, what life brings to you.  In other experiments, I’m sure I’ve talked about the value of allowing water to be a teacher.  If you take time to watch water, you’ll notice that water doesn’t struggle.  It moves where there’s an opening and, if it runs up against a block of some kind, it moves around, under or over it and continues on its way.  Even if it becomes contained in a pond or lake, it evaporates and rains down somewhere else.  Water continually adapts itself to its environment and just keeps moving, or settles in until conditions change and then starts moving again.

Using water as your teacher, notice what happens in your body, and your thoughts and feelings, when you drop into a “no-struggle” attitude to what life demands of you these days.  Notice what it’s like to engage the next thing as just the next thing, the way water meets what’s in front of it and then moves on.  The capacity to soften in the presence of stress is a great gift to yourself, so I invite you to experiment with what it’s like to become aware of tension or struggle and then to imagine that you’re softening around it.  You may discover that each encounter with a challenge offers the kind of stretching that actually enables you to engage the next one with greater ease.

It’s useful to remember that to soften doesn’t mean to ignore or discount the enormity of what you may be asked to do.  Instead, it offers a way to move through challenges without adding to the stress and strain of doing so.  The things that present themselves to us need to be dealt with in any event, and when we can meet them with a willingness to release struggle and allow ourselves to flow into what’s in front of us, we offer ourselves a gift of greater ease than we might otherwise experience.

As with all the experiments, remember to allow whatever judgments may arise to move through and move on without grabbing hold of them, fighting with them, or feeding them in any way.  And, as always, remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion, because – at the very least - these experiments are an invitation to become more aware of how you engage your life and how you contribute to the quality of your daily experience.