Relax the impossible standards you put on yourself.
A reclamation of the word: Relax.
Don’t worry; you’re wound up too tight; chill out, calm down, won’t you just
Relax!
Being told to relax when you’re not almost always has the opposite effect: it winds you up even tighter. As they say in meme-land,
“Never in the history of calming down has anyone calmed down by being told to calm down.”
Perhaps, like me, you’ve been told to calm down as a way to stem the flow of your truth-telling, to minimise what you’ve been through, to ignore the seriousness of which you are taking something and/or the place that you’re in.
Don’t rock the boat: relax.
Be nice: calm down.
Don’t be inappropriate: relax.
Don’t be so forward: calm down.
I wouldn’t say that: relax.
It didn’t hurt that much: calm down.
I’m sure they didn’t mean it: relax.
What you’re saying is making me uncomfortable: calm down.
And listen, when you’re experiencing stress and anxiety, pain and fear; when you’re activated, and life seems like a marathon of adrenalin, a sense of calm is what you need; I’m sure you would welcome some peace; I know that if you could find a way to relax, you would.
But when being told to relax and stay calm is just another way to shut you down, it does not create a sense or place of peace.
Instead, what people most need when they are in a state that is not calm and relaxed, is not to be told what to do, but to be held in grace, to be listened to and heard, to cry and shake, and to cry and shake, and to cry and shake. Calm and peace are created not in the absence of challenge and trouble, but by travelling all the way through them, making space for them to express, to run their course, to shake their way out of the body.
When people tell those of us who find ourselves stressed, anxious, afraid, worried, tired, overworked and done to relax, they’re doing so to keep their our own fractured and wound up state pushed out of sight and seemingly out of mind; to pacify and ignore their own underlying, bubbling fears and worries.
Maybe what needs to relax is our propensity to know all the answers.
Perhaps we should relax our standard of perfection and allow the full human experience space to be lived.
What if we calmed down about the anxiety we experience and just held ourselves in grace whenever it showed its face?
Relaxation is a place of repair, not a place devoid of trouble. Calm is not a more valid experience than anger or fear. When we moralise emotion and create a hierarchy of experience, we actually diminish our capacity to relax our nervous systems and create a place of calm within ourselves and amongst others because by needing life to be a certain way in order to find peace, we push peace further from our grasp.
Relax your ideas of what is good and bad.
Relax the impossible standards you put on yourself.
Relax the way you judge yourself.
Relax the way you hold others to a standard higher than your own.
Relax the expectations you have of God and the world and yourself.
Welcome the calm of radical self-compassion.
Allow the calm of grace to be present.
Welcome the calm of acceptance.
Allow the calm of not needing life or yourself to be anything other than what and who you are, and how it is here and now.
Relax from the idea that being stressed, anxious, worried, and afraid is too much, inappropriate, sinful, unfaithful, inconvenient, and wrong. Calm comes most keenly when we allow ourselves to be where we are. Stress moves through us much faster when we show up to it with loving awareness instead of demoralising judgement.
So lean in and listen: do away with the idea that being stressed, anxious, worried, or afraid is somehow bad, and allow truth to be told in the wild ways it will. Relax into it. Ignoring or banishing what you’re experiencing will not make it better; compassion creates room for peace.
CONSIDER THIS: Tension arises from who you think you should be. Relaxation happens when you allow what is to be.
From the upcoming series "A Reclamation of Words" this week, with a subscription, in the App.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
