How to lose Stress: love your Work

Due to the construction of our Ayurvedic restaurant, the big change that this brings along and additionally of course all the work that we usually do with our retreats here, the emails and messages, I have been very busy these days. Sitting down in peace in the evening, finally thinking what I will write in today’s blog, I notice how the experience of time is so very different during different periods of life!

When you have nothing to do, time seems to stretch and it flies by when you have lots of things to do and would like to have more than 24 hours in a day! When you are absorbed in what you do, you get a surprise every time you look at the clock – it is always later than you expected.

You could get stressed by this. It gets later and later, you have all those things to do and the pile of tasks doesn’t seem to get smaller! On the contrary, again and again there is another issue, another problem or you realize that you forgot about something and now have to do extra work to cover it! You start disliking each of those pieces of extra work that you get, no matter what it is. It adds to the tasks, it adds to your stress – so you don’t like it.

It is no wonder at all that this atmosphere of work makes you short-tempered and angry. If someone else points out that there is some work left to be done, you are quick to reply rather sharply – which you may regret immediately. At the same time however you can well justify your reaction: doesn’t the other one know how much you are already doing and how little time there is for it?

The consequence is unfortunately that work doesn’t get done well in this way. With this stress, you miss important details, you don’t do it well and you would be unhappy about the result if you had the time to look at it properly.

I don’t let this happen with my work. I refuse stress, not only because it is not good for health but also because I love what I do. I want it to be good and I really enjoy it, so I don’t want to spoil both the process of creating it and then the result by something stupid like stress.

It is said that meditation is against stress. I think so, too, but in another way. You can protest now, saying that you don’t have the time to sit around quietly and do nothing. In my way of meditation however, you don’t need to that.

I believe meditation is when you are aware of what you are doing. I usually love meditating in this way throughout my day. I love what I do and that’s how I do it with full awareness, even when there are so many things to do that I just keep on doing whatever is coming up, one thing after the other. So many things that I realize in the end of the evening that there are still too many tasks that need to be done. I get into it and I enjoy it.

I would suggest you to do the same. Love what you do. Take your time for it to turn out well. Enjoy working!