Stress isn’t your enemy: Five questions that change everything

The hummingbird doesn’t apologize for its racing heart.

I’m watching one hover outside my window right now, wings beating at impossible speed, somehow perfectly still in space. Its entire existence is what we’d call “high stress”—constant motion, endless vigilance, metabolic fire that would kill a human in minutes. Yet there it floats, radiant with life force.

We’ve made stress the villain of our modern story. The enemy to defeat, the toxin to purge, the chaos to control. But what if we’ve got it backwards? What if stress isn’t the problem but the invitation? What if learning to dance with intensity—rather than running from it—is the very skill that makes us most alive?

For thirty-five years, I’ve sat with people in the depths of their unraveling. In ceremony circles, corporate boardrooms, kitchen tables where families face their hardest truths. The ones who transform aren’t those who eliminate stress. They’re the ones who learn to meet it with curiosity instead of resistance.

The great stress myth we’re all living

We’ve been sold a lie wrapped in wellness packaging.

The story goes like this: stress is toxic, the root of all suffering, something successful people transcend. Instagram feeds overflow with perfect morning routines designed to float above life’s messiness. Meditation apps promise inner peace as if it were a destination you arrive at and never leave. The message is clear—if you’re stressed, you’re doing life wrong.

This mythology has created a secondary stress more damaging than the original: the stress of being stressed. We shame ourselves for our human responses to a demanding world. We treat our nervous system’s natural intelligence as personal failure.

But here’s what decades of working with plant medicine and human consciousness have taught me: stress is information. It’s your system’s way of saying, “Pay attention. Something matters here.” The Amazon jungle doesn’t apologize for its intensity—the screaming howler monkeys, the sudden downpours, the constant dance between predator and prey. It thrives because of this aliveness, not despite it.

Modern life presents us with stressors our ancestors never faced: information overload, digital overwhelm, the collapse of traditional meaning-making structures. But the response to stress? That’s ancient. It’s the same system that helped your great-grandmother survive famines and your great-grandfather navigate wars. The problem isn’t that we experience stress—it’s that we’ve forgotten how to be in relationship with it.

The wellness industry profits from our alienation from our own humanity. It sells us the fantasy of a stress-free life while keeping us dependent on external solutions. Real freedom comes from befriending the full spectrum of human experience, including the parts that feel uncomfortable.

Question one: What if stress is your system’s intelligence speaking?

Most of us treat stress like a smoke alarm we want to disconnect rather than a fire we need to understand.

Your nervous system has been millions of years in the making. It can detect threats before your conscious mind catches up, mobilize resources in milliseconds, and coordinate complex responses across multiple body systems. This isn’t malfunction—it’s masterpiece.

But somewhere along the way, we decided this ancient wisdom was inconvenient. We want to think our way out of feeling, strategize our way past instinct, optimize our way beyond our own biology. It’s like trying to improve a river by making it flow uphill.

I remember working with a CEO who came to me burned out and breaking down. “I can’t handle the pressure anymore,” she said. “I used to thrive on it, but now it’s killing me.” As we dug deeper, we discovered her stress wasn’t about the workload—it was about working against her values. Her body was staging a rebellion, not against challenge, but against compromise.

Her stress was trying to tell her something crucial: the life she was living wasn’t aligned with who she was becoming. Once she learned to listen to this intelligence rather than medicate it away, she made changes that transformed not just her stress levels but her entire relationship with power and purpose.

Your stress has a message. Maybe it’s telling you that you’re growing beyond your current container. Maybe it’s pointing to relationships that drain your life force or work that feels meaningless. Maybe it’s simply saying, “Slow down, you’re moving too fast to feel what’s real.”

The question isn’t how to eliminate stress, but how to develop a sophisticated relationship with it—to discern the difference between stress that’s breaking you down and stress that’s breaking you open.

Question two: Where are you fighting reality instead of working with it?

Resistance creates suffering. This isn’t spiritual bypassing—it’s physics.

When you clench your fist and punch a wall, what hurts more: the wall or your hand? The wall doesn’t suffer from your resistance to its existence. But your knuckles sure do. Most of our stress comes not from life’s challenges but from our war against the fact that challenges exist.

We live in a culture that promises control over outcomes if we just find the right system, the perfect technique, the optimal strategy. This sets us up for a lifetime of frustration because the one thing we can’t control is the uncontrollable nature of existence itself.

I’ve watched people stress themselves into paralysis trying to manage variables that exist far beyond their influence: other people’s reactions, economic conditions, global politics, the weather. Meanwhile, the one domain where they have actual power—their own response—goes untended.

The ancient Taoists had a phrase: “wu wei”—action through non-action. Not passivity, but intelligent responsiveness. Like water that doesn’t fight the landscape but finds the most efficient path through it. Water doesn’t stress about rocks in its way; it flows around them, over them, through them. It gets where it’s going by working with reality rather than against it.

This doesn’t mean becoming a doormat or abandoning your goals. It means recognizing the difference between what you can influence and what you can’t, and putting your energy where it can actually make a difference. Most stress dissolves when we stop trying to control the river and start learning to navigate it.

The spiritual warrior’s path isn’t about conquering life’s challenges—it’s about developing the flexibility to dance with them. When you stop fighting what’s happening and start working with what’s available, stress transforms from enemy to ally.

Question three: How is your perfectionism creating the very chaos you’re trying to avoid?

Perfectionism isn’t about high standards. It’s about avoiding the vulnerability of being seen as human.

The perfectionist’s greatest fear isn’t failure—it’s being discovered as someone who doesn’t have it all figured out. So they construct elaborate systems of control, exhausting themselves trying to manage every variable, anticipate every problem, prepare for every possibility.

But here’s the cruel irony: the more tightly you grip, the more life slips through your fingers. The more you try to perfect your way out of chaos, the more chaos you create. Because perfectionism isn’t sustainable. It’s a strategy that works until it doesn’t, and when it breaks down, it breaks down spectacularly.

I’ve sat with countless high achievers who built their entire identity around being unflappable, only to find themselves having panic attacks in bathroom stalls. Their perfectionism created a prison of their own making—a life so carefully controlled that there was no room left for spontaneity, creativity, or authentic connection.

The alternative isn’t lowering your standards or becoming sloppy. It’s recognizing that excellence and perfectionism are completely different creatures. Excellence comes from showing up fully to what matters. Perfectionism comes from trying to avoid judgment by controlling outcomes.

Real mastery includes the ability to fail gracefully, to make mistakes without losing your center, to be caught off-guard without falling apart. It’s the difference between a rigid tree that breaks in the storm and a flexible one that bends without breaking.

When you give yourself permission to be imperfect, something magical happens: you become more capable, not less. You take creative risks because failure won’t destroy your identity. You connect more deeply because you’re not performing invulnerability. You actually get better results because you’re working with your humanity instead of against it.

The stress of perfectionism is ultimately the stress of trying to be something other than human. And humans, by design, are beautifully, necessarily imperfect.

Question four: What would change if you treated your stress like a teacher?

Every master has learned to find wisdom in what others see as obstacles.

Traditional cultures understood something we’ve forgotten: difficult experiences aren’t just random suffering but potential initiations. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek “krisis,” meaning decision or turning point. Every breakdown contains the seeds of breakthrough, but only if we’re willing to learn from it.

Your stress is offering you a curriculum specifically designed for your evolution. The patterns that trigger you most reveal the places where you’re still unconscious. The situations that overwhelm you point to capacities you haven’t yet developed. The conflicts that drain you show you where your boundaries need strengthening.

But most of us treat stress like punishment rather than pedagogy. We medicate it, avoid it, distract ourselves from it, or fight it tooth and nail. We never pause to ask: “What is this trying to teach me? How might this difficulty be serving my growth?”

I think of a woman I worked with who was drowning in caregiver stress, burning herself out taking care of everyone else’s needs while neglecting her own. Her stress wasn’t just about overwhelm—it was about learning to say no, to set boundaries, to value her own well-being without guilt. Once she saw her stress as a teacher rather than a tormentor, she could engage with the lesson instead of just enduring the pain.

The shamanic worldview sees every challenge as an opportunity to retrieve power that was previously unavailable to us. Each time we meet difficulty with consciousness rather than reactivity, we literally become more capable. We develop emotional muscles we didn’t know we had.

This doesn’t mean seeking out stress or romanticizing suffering. It means developing the capacity to extract wisdom from whatever life presents. When stress shows up, instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” try asking “What is this here to teach me? How might this serve my becoming?”

Question Five: who would you be if you weren’t afraid of your own intensity?

We’ve been taught to apologize for our fire, to dim our brightness, to make ourselves smaller so others feel comfortable. But what if your intensity isn’t the problem—what if it’s your power?

Many people experience stress not because they’re doing too much, but because they’re expressing too little. They’re trying to contain a wildness that demands to be lived. They’re compressing a creative force that wants to explode into form. They’re suffocating a voice that’s meant to roar.

Society trains us early to be “appropriate,” which often means suppressing our natural intensity. We learn to speak quietly, sit still, color inside the lines, follow the rules. By the time we reach adulthood, many of us have forgotten what it feels like to let our full aliveness move through us.

But aliveness isn’t polite. Creativity isn’t convenient. Authenticity isn’t always socially acceptable. And trying to live a passionate life within overly restrictive containers creates enormous internal pressure.

I’ve worked with artists who stressed themselves sick trying to create “marketable” work instead of the art that wanted to come through them. Entrepreneurs who burned out building businesses that looked good on paper but felt dead in their bodies. Parents who exhausted themselves trying to be perfect instead of real.

The stress wasn’t from their intensity—it was from the suppression of their intensity. From trying to fit lightning into a jar.

What if instead of managing your fire, you learned to channel it? What if instead of toning down your passion, you found containers strong enough to hold it? What if your sensitivity isn’t something to fix but a superpower to honor?

The world doesn’t need more people who have learned to make themselves small. It needs people who have learned to inhabit their full presence without apology. Your intensity might make some people uncomfortable, but comfort isn’t the goal. Aliveness is.

An invitation to dance

As I finish writing this, that hummingbird is still at my window, still hovering in perfect intensity.

The invitation isn’t to eliminate stress from your life—it’s to transform your relationship with it. To see it not as enemy but as ally, not as problem but as teacher, not as something to endure but as something to dance with.

This requires a fundamental shift: from seeing yourself as victim of your circumstances to recognizing yourself as participant in your own becoming. From trying to control outcomes to learning to respond with wisdom. From hiding from your humanity to celebrating it.

The most stressed people I know aren’t those facing the biggest challenges—they’re those fighting hardest against the reality of challenge itself. The most peaceful aren’t those who’ve eliminated difficulty but those who’ve learned to meet it with presence rather than resistance.

Your stress has something to tell you. Your overwhelm contains intelligence. Your breakdown might be the beginning of your breakthrough. But only if you’re willing to listen, to learn, to let your difficulties transform you rather than just trying to make them disappear.

The hummingbird doesn’t need to slow its heart to find peace. It finds peace in the perfection of its own intense aliveness.

So can you.

Take-with-you summary

• Stress is information, not toxin—your nervous system’s ancient intelligence trying to communicate what matters • Resistance amplifies suffering—most stress comes from fighting reality rather than working skillfully with what’s present
• Perfectionism creates chaos—the attempt to control outcomes generates more problems than it solves • Every breakdown contains breakthrough—stress often signals growth pushing against old containers • Your intensity is your power—the goal isn’t to manage your fire but to find worthy ways to express it • Peace comes through participation, not escape—the most resilient people dance with difficulty rather than hide from it

Ready to Laugh in the Face of Chaos?

If these questions stirred something in you—if you recognize yourself in the patterns we’ve explored—there’s deeper work to be done. The journey from stress-victim to stress-dancer requires more than understanding; it requires transformation at the level of the nervous system itself.

That’s why I wrote Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life. This isn’t another wellness book promising easy answers. It’s a field guide for those ready to stop running from their own intensity and start partnering with it.

Inside, you’ll find the sledgehammer questions that shatter the illusions keeping you stuck, psychedelic field notes from 35 years of soul work across five continents, and rogue rituals for turning anxiety into fuel and chaos into a dance partner. This is permission to torch the rulebook and trust your own wild wisdom.

If you’re tired of trying to meditate your way out of being human, if you suspect your chaos might actually be your doorway to freedom, if you’re ready to trade pretend peace for real aliveness—this book is your invitation.

Your stress isn’t trying to break you. It’s trying to break you open. And that opening? That’s where the real adventure begins.

Available now on Kindle.