Why is it so easy to get stressed out when facing a tough business challenge?

After all, solving problems is what we signed up for, right? Whether we’re an entrepreneur, an agency owner, a marketer, or leader of any kind, problem solving is a huge part of our job description.

If there were no high-stakes challenges to solve, there wouldn’t really be much value we could bring to the table.

And yet…

You may still feel stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious when facing the obstacles in your path. Times when there may be something deeper that’s blocking you from seeing things from the right point of view.

In yoga, that blockage is called a Samskara, “an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.” (Michael A. Singer)

While Samskaras can also be linked to things we find pleasurable, most are related to chronic or trapped stress within our body and mind, usually from some kind of traumatic experience that we’ve yet to fully process. Rather than allow ourselves to experience a painful event and let it pass through us, we instead resist that pain by distracting our attention and pushing down our emotions.

But those emotions don’t just go away. Like a magnet, they start attracting similar emotional energy, forming stronger neural pathways that eventually become blockages—getting stronger over time as we continue to feed them with even more energy.

Those blockages then cluster together, forming our most deeply held beliefs about our own capabilities and worthiness, other people, and the world in general.

And when our thoughts about a challenge hit one of those blockages, they trigger all the emotional and thought energy trapped within it. All that unprocessed stress, overwhelm, and anxiety.

We’re not actually reacting to the reality of the challenge in front of us. We’re reacting to the stored emotional energy and mental stories that the challenge dredges up.

The only way out of that mess is to go through it. To remove the conditioned blockage by bringing awareness to the inner sensations, emotions, feelings, and stories that we’ve avoided until now…

And letting go of them.

But what does it mean exactly to “let go”? We’ll explore that in the next post.

For today, what will you do to start removing some of your own Samskaras?

Will you start facing some of the unprocessed emotions that you may have been avoiding until now?