Thanks to my friend Steve, I bought the National Geographic special Stress: Portrait of a Killer from iTunes tonight. It is an awesome look at the long and short term health effects of living with stress. It is based on the work of Robert Sapolsky who also wrote Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers. This is one of the required reading texts for the Yoga Therapists training from my teacher (which Steve is part of).

Long story short, stress is bad - duh. It shows some interesting details about why it’s bad and how it affects your mind and body. Dr. Sapolsky studies baboons, and so a lot of the documentary focuses on some of the results he has learned from his work with them in the past 30 years. Matthias and I are still laughing at how we are basically just baboons who drink coffee. Some of the other researchers in the film have worked with humans, and so the results are a bit more subtle but just as interesting. I think we all know that living with stress is not good for but, I like to be reminded about how important it is to take care to manage stress everyday. This film did a good job of that without trying to tell you how to live your life.

Seeing that does give me some confidence in the idea of shifting from a science-based career path to more of sharing Yoga with people. I know it has helped me, personally, manage stress better though I am always trying to do better with that. I have inherited my dad’s nervous mind, so it will always be an up hill battle for me, I suspect. It would be cool to know that something I can share with someone else could help them deal more effectively with stress too.

Adrian & Maria VisitI have to say that the video of the baboon families also made me laugh at myself because the little baby baboons clingy to their mommies looked a lot like Clair holding on to me in her carrier! I have been calling her my little monkey lately, but maybe she is a bit more like a baboon than I realized! If she looks like a baby baboon, then what does that make me?