Health Practice · Personal Growth · Life Success · Embodied Peace
Phone: (808) 880-1395
Stress is the "dynamic psychophysical energy" our bodymind experiences as we are impacted by a constantly changing set of conditions and experiences in our daily environment. When I say that stress is "dynamic psychophysical energy" I mean that it can create either positive or negative feelings, sensations, and mental states in our moment by moment bodymind functioning.
A certain amount of stress and tension during daily work, play, and relationships is healthy and necessary — and can feel good to your bodymind's sense of vitality, aliveness, and passionate engagement with life. This kind of "positive stress" can add excitement, enthusiasm, meaning, fulfillment, and dynamic energy into our lives. Athletic competitions, work deadlines, artistic endeavors, openly sharing difficult feelings with others — and even our experiences of sorrow, loss, and grief — can add compassionate depth and meaningful wisdom to our lives and relationships.
However, there is a negative side to stress that can have a serious and detrimental impact on our bodily health, our emotional well-being, and the quality of our human relationships. When the psychophysical experience of stress and tension exceeds positive levels, we begin to feel driven, anxious, depressed, angry, resentful, powerless.
We now know that the negative influences of chronic stress can create health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, recurring headaches, insomnia, rashes, lowering of immunity, and stomach ulcers. In addition, high levels of chronic stress can lead to over-indulgence in unhealthy habits — overeating, smoking, drinking, and drug abuse.
As we experience our dynamic and ever-changing life circumstances, the healthy or unhealthy impact of our bodymind stress is dependent on the degree to which we relate to stressors with conscious awareness, compassion, wisdom, and creative response-ability — or with unconscious prejudices, beliefs, habits, perceptions, and behaviors, respectively.
Given that stress is inherent in the dynamic nature of life and our relationship to it, it is not meaningful to approach the problem of stress by seeking to eliminate it from our lives. If we were to practice the elimination of stress from our lives, we would have to negate the more healthy and positive aspects of stress as well. Insufficient stress can leave us feeling bored, depressed, dejected, and disheartened.
Therefore, the goal of Applied Meditation Therapy® is not to eliminate stress from your life, but to help you learn how to manage the degree, quality, and intensity of stress in order to sustain a healthy, passionate, creative, wondrous, and enthusiastic engagement with your daily life and relationships.
What we need to do is realize, understand, and creatively change the ways in which we unconsciously perpetuate excessive and unhealthy stress on our bodymind — and practice maintaining the optimal levels of healthy stress that continue to enhance our vitality, motivation, and passionate life engagement. This balanced and dynamic relationship to stress is the goal of Applied Meditation Therapy®.
Dr. Bonnici has developed a four-part sequential visual teaching that explains how stress impacts the nervous system and how AMT® transforms stress reactivity into health-promoting response-ability.
The human nervous system as a pyramid — the autonomic nervous system at its base governs all vital biological processes. The sympathetic (fight-or-flight) vs. parasympathetic (rest-restore) balance.
Read Full Teaching →How residual autonomic imbalance builds over time — exercise and relaxation alone cannot address the fundamental source of stress reactivity in personality, perceptions, and core beliefs.
Read Full Teaching →AMT® works on daily refinement of personality, attitudes, core beliefs, and conditioned perceptions — transforming stress reactivity into creative stress response-ability.
Read Full Teaching →At each point of the 11-step autonomic neural firing cycle, AMT® can change the dysfunctional direction of reactive psychodynamics and liberate the bodymind to respond with true wisdoming.
Read Full Teaching →Confidential and convenient — fill out the intake form, choose your day and time, and simply be ready from the privacy of your home or office. There are no video or phone charges from anywhere in the world. The hourly fee is charged to your credit card after your session.
All video, telephone, and email communications are kept strictly confidential. Only two exceptions exist: (1) when Dr. Bonnici has knowledge that a client is a serious danger to self or others, and (2) when there is any indication that a child, elder, or disabled person is at risk because of abuse or neglect.
Please note: All counseling, education, and training provided by Dr. Bonnici is designed to support — and not replace — medical care or any relationships that currently exist between clients and their physicians, psychiatrists, or therapists.
Video sessions available worldwide — no phone charges from any country. Dr. Bonnici will respond to your inquiry within 24 hours.