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you feel more relaxed?
    Given the close relationship between breathing and chronic
    stress, you may want to periodical y focus on your breathing throughout the day. When you do so, ask yourself what your breathing pat-
    terns are telling you. You may wish to write about some of these
    experiences in your journal.
    Guan
    A major cause of chronic stress is preconceived biases, filters, expectations, and judgments about what we unrealistically fear is going to happen and how it will make us feel. In this way, we are negatively impacted by our thoughts long before the feared event has a chance to occur. This threat- based thinking, which generates racing thoughts because of the self- generated and usually unrealistic fear, activates the fight- or- flight response. Then, if we should happen to enter the feared situation, we are already stressed and uncomfortable. This physical and psychological reaction has nothing to do with our actual experience of the situation because we’re reacting to what we believe we are going to feel and experience.
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    uncorrected proof
    Basics of Taoist Meditation
    Because of our expectations, judgments, and rigid and inflexible
    threat- based thinking, we are constantly interfering with ourselves. Mind and body are agitated and fragmented. We aren’t integrated. As a result we, don’t allow ourselves to be in the present, where we can experience and gain insight into the actual situation. Instead, we just stress ourselves out.
    The Taoist approach is quite aware of this rigid and inflexible thinking and judging that fragments us, interferes with our ability to actually experience the present, and leads to chronic stress. It advocates guan, or natural observation. This means observing from a detached, unbiased perspective. Practicing guan provides us with insight not only into the world around us, but into the mind and body. It means engaging the world in the present, without the mind galloping all over the place. It means experiencing all aspects of our world without the filter of judgments that lead to chronic stress. As such, it is a way to help reduce chronic stress, since it involves being free of any expectations or judgments about what we are going to feel or experience in the future.
    We’ve all had fleeting moments when our minds weren’t agitated,
    distracted, and racing all over the place. We were fully in the present. We weren’t fragmented. For a moment, we weren’t chronically stressed. This may have occurred while watching a sunrise or sunset, listening to the birds, listening to music, feeling the wind, going with the flow in some physical activity, or being at the ocean and smelling, seeing, and hearing the waves crash on the shore. Our senses were enhanced. We had a
    feeling, if just for a moment, of being truly alive and integrated with the world around us. Even if we didn’t know it, in that moment we were practicing guan.
    In Taoism the goal is to develop this perspective, increasing it from occasional mere glimpses to a regular occurrence. Interacting with the world and ourselves through guan is a process that must be developed and cultivated through practice. The aim is to make guan the norm.
    It will take time to develop your guan. As you continue to practice regularly, it will become easier to implement and will start to become the norm rather than the exception. At that point your chronic stress will appear to be melting away.
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    uncorrected proof
    The Tao of Stress
    Practice Eating with Guan
    When we eat, we tend to be engaged in multiple tasks in addition to eating. We may be watching TV, listening to the radio, engaged in a conversation, thinking about something, reading something, talking on the phone, working, or driving. Our minds are full and bouncing all over the place. The process of eating is on automatic pilot.
    We aren’t ful y engaged with just eating. As a result, we aren’t real y aware of simply eating in the here and now. We are distracted