When I was a teenager my mother worked, so she frequently put me in charge of fixing supper. One night she had me use the pressure cooker to cook the meat. While I had frequently seen her use the pressure cooker, I never had. So I didn’t know that you had to release the pressure by running cold water over the top before opening the lid. That was a very important piece of information that I was missing.

When I twisted the lid off, the pressure that had built inside the cooker threw the lid, with me holding on to it, back against the opposite wall. The ingredients from the cooker splashed all the way to the ceiling. What a mess! But thankfully I was not scalded, since I had held on tightly to the lid. The moral to this story is to stay connected to why pressure is building up inside you. Otherwise the buildup might cause you to suffer some unpleasant effects.

It is not difficult to miss the big stressors like death, divorce, or serious illness. But the daily, persistent pressures brought on by daily tasks and interactions can sneak up on you. You know they are there, but your emotional responses to them just become common place. So you tuck each feeling away until you have a pressure cooker full of emotions. And if you are not careful, when the lid comes off, you may find your mental, emotional, or physical health damaged.

When we either ignore a feeling or just push it away, because we are too busy to acknowledge our response, then it stays inside and cooks. And when this happens, you must hold tight to the lid that covers what has been cooking inside you. The lid to me is symbolic of whatever has been covering the pressure. For instance, if you are a bit stressed about something as simple as taking a trip, that will be the lid that will hold in every little stress in the days preceding the trip. But if you decompress around the trip, the lid will come off of all that came after the original.

In other words, it helps to catch the stress-inducing culprit quickly. A build up can be dangerous to you and those around you.  Of course, you have to be willing to release the original feeling and replace it with the assurance that your Heart has exactly what is needed to deal with the situation. Each time you do this, confidence in your creative self will increase, and the pressure will decrease.