Calming the Jaguar Within

That knot in the pit of your stomach. 

That tightness in your chest. 

That chaos that is your mind. 

We’ve all been stressed, some of us are more prone to feeling it than others, the red warning light is permanently on. 

Stress has many symptoms; Shortness of breath, irregular heart beat or chest pain. Painful joints or maybe back pain. Tight jaws, sweaty palms, headaches. Too tired to do anything, yet at night you cannot rest or even sleep. Overemotional? Anxious? Rage, anger, fear, worry…yep, that’s stress.

When we are stressed, our adrenaline system kicks in. 

Walnut sized glands on top of the kidneys start flooding our body with stress hormones called adrenaline and cortisol. 

This initiates the fight or flight, and faint or freeze response, basically causing disharmony within your body. 

It was great back in the day, when a sabre-toothed tiger shows up! 

Our eyes would widen, our heart beat quickens, blood goes to the major organs to fuel the body, our breath naturally increases, increasing our oxygen levels, and we run, or we fight. 

When we run away, we also began to burn those toxic hormones, therefore reducing the stress in our bodies, until we eventually calm down and begin to relax. 

You only have to watch a couple of ducks fights in a pond, they finish fighting, frantically flap their wings, and then they calmly swim along the still waters.

In modern times, we unfortunately have forgotten how to flap our wings, we have forgotten how to release the stress, and even more unfortunately, our children are now forgetting. 

What do we do instead? 

Well, instead of running away from it, we sit in front of our sabre-toothed tiger at the computer, or we gaze at it longingly on our smart phones. 

We internalise it, caging it up, while we allow our tiger to gnaw on our legs.

The longer these hormones are in our body, the longer you are stressed, the higher our blood pressure goes. 

What with this and the toxicity of the hormones, we are increasing our chances of heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and many other stress related disorders. 

The change in chemicals within the body lowers our immune system so we catch anything and everything, and it has been said it could even increase our chances of getting cancer. 

If that doesn’t make you want to reduce your stress level, cortisol speeds up the ageing process! Shock horror!

So how do we eradicate these poisonous toxins once they are in our bodies? 

Firstly, we should look at stress from a higher level, a shamanic level. 

When we are in ‘our stuff’ stressed and anxious, we are reacting from the mammalian part of our brain, a mammal, like a jaguar. 

Just imagine yourself as a powerful jaguar.

You stalk in the dark, eyes wide, ears pinned back, teeth bare and claws ready to draw like a flick knife. 

You’re feeling everything, sensing everything. 

Nothing is what it seems, you trust nothing. 

Memories of past wounds and past fights are played on repeat inside your mind, as you frantically look for an answer to a problem that may show up, accessing the same irrational response, looking out for danger. 

Stressful? Crazy? 

Let’s not get into the psychological madness of the human being.

So how do we temp this jaguar down from the tree?

TRE is a safe and wonderful way to release the stress that’s locked within your muscles and tissues. Trauma Releasing Exercises, helps us re-member how to shake our bodies, how to tremor. 

Shamanic healing sessions are great as they will ultimately remove the energetic blocks that are causing the stress in the first place. 

But what can you do in the meanwhile?

Drink plenty of water to flush out the toxins. 

Work out, burn those poisonous hormones, sweat them out! 

Tai Chi. 

Yoga, meditation, chanting, sleep, they all work.

One way I use to shift yourself out of your current mood into a different perspective is the 777 breath.

It is used in our shamanic practise to shift our consciousness out of the mundane into a different state of consciousness. 

During ceremony, the pauses in-between breaths actually open up small windows in time and space, making ‘time’ more elusive and malleable.at its basic level, it reduces stress levels and eases pain and migraines.

Find a comfortable position, seated with back straight.

·         Rest hands on hips to block the flow of energy around the body. (When we breathe, we breathe in through our nose, allowing our tummy’s to rise, and as we breathe out through our mouths our tummy deflates; this is how we should be breathing naturally)

·         Begin by taking in seven sharp breaths in to fill your lungs with air.

·         Hold for the count of seven.

·         Breathe out through the mouth to the count of seven.

·         Hold for a count of seven.

·         And repeat, do seven rounds only.

Try it, see for yourself, have the experience.

I love using hand mudras, the Kali mudra is the best mudra for releasing stress, coupled with chanting and visualisations it is a powerful de-stresser.

Decoupling this fight or flight sequence within our endocrine system is tricky, but we shaman have a beautiful technique that actually does this. 

We realign the heart and sacral chakra, harmonising the energy flow. 

Meanwhile we pulse our own energyfields, matching that with the frequency of the earths, so that your energyfield also resonates with it. 

A disconnection with the earth, our mother, causes a great disharmony within our spirit. 

What we do at a mythic level, is call our eagle back home to roost, we temp our jaguar back down from that tree, to be held in the loving arms of our mother, the earth.

Whatever technique you use, use it. If it works, do it. A wise man (5^th grader at school) once told me, “Mr Cox, you should try lighting a candle and think of all the nice things in your life.” never a truer word said.

For anymore hints and tips on reducing stress levels, drop me a line, and follow me on Facebook or Instagram @Thebeardedshaman and if you are local, join me for a healing circle, I will teach you all I know!