Your soma - body, mind and spirit - reacts beautifully to stress. The problem is, it doesn't hold up well when we don't come down from the stressor. It adapts for a time, but wasn't designed to handle it long-term.

There are physical effects of stress in the body that go along with fight or flight. In our multi-part series on stress during the holidays, learn first what happens to the body when stress starts.

Are you depressed? Anxious? Sitting with trauma? Living with chronic stress? Dear one - you aren't alone. And there are tools to help.

Sometimes, when I look back at the pictures from this summer, I get a little mmm... confused. I don't recognize that woman in the picture. And it's not just because I was 25 pounds lighter (I don't have a scale, so it could be more.) It's because the way she was in the world is SO different than the way I am in the world now.

Stressed? Try this 3 Breath Practice. Invite some calm throughout your day.

The important thing isn't how your body looks...it's how it feels. It's being able to sense how it feels.

Do you like to do things, make things, create things - and has that creative side of you slipped away because of life, lack of time, feeling tired?? What lights you up?

You know how people kind of turn up in your life when you need them? The exact right person at the exact right time shows up to help you on your journey?

There's this place I used to go when I was heartbroken. Come to think of it, I was doubly heartbroken - doing the longterm healing from a divorce...but also from a later relationship that beat me up a bit. I was out of touch with myself. I was out of touch with my inner voice. I was in pain and it hurt to wake up every day and get through it. I was sad, depressed and low. So low.

I have this daughter. She's quite exceptional. From the moment we met, she's been teaching me life lessons. I knew that she was here for me to learn from. Around five years ago, before I decided to become a yoga instructor, I had a hard time keeping my worry, overwhelm, fears in check. To put it delicately, I would drop my basket pretty regularly.

The place of ultimate comfort

Mirror Work. It's super weird, but REALLY powerful work.

When I was 9, my dad took me on a GRAND adventure…we left our South Dakota home to fly to Bombay, India. From Bombay, we rode an open-air bus 50 miles to Ganeshpuri, India. We arrived at an ashram where people from all over the world came together in a communal living facility to study meditation, chanting, service and study.

"Ban OVERWHELMED from your vocabulary. Refuse it entry to your psyche." This was what I heard in a podcast a couple of years ago by Danielle LaPorte. Then she said, “I think when people use the word OVERWHELM, they are hanging out in EGO.”

What scares you? I used to be AFRAID OF EVERYTHING. The unfamiliar made me want to just hide away. As I look back, I realize I’ve spent the 2nd half of my life dancing with fear. Trying to get familiar with it and then tell it to “Piss off.”

There is so much happening around us – locally in the Twin Cities, nationally, internationally. It’s enough to make you want to bow your head with the weight of it. It’s hard not to feel helpless, hopeless, afraid. I don’t know much, but I know this:

Do you think we hold things in our bodies? Physical trauma sure. What about emotional trauma? Do you think we kind of stick stuff away in little boxes? In our minds, certainly. But what about in our bodies? Do you think we can have issues in our tissues?

Most people who know me well know that I don’t like crowds. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but somewhere along the way the noise and the number of people around me really started to affect me. I started avoiding places that were Loud and Crowded.

The book was so beautiful and simple and it helped me to remember that during tough stuff, you can find simple things to be grateful for.

The title of today’s sermon is from a bit of today’s Gospel from John - “Joy Made Complete in Themselves”