We all want more out of your life. There are those who want to transform their lives totally – some of us have misgivings about ourselves that we’d like to change. However, unfortunately, for most of us, life keeps getting in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, tens of millions of ordinary mere mortals are weighed down by stress and health services worldwide are wasting a lot of money trying to cope with the knock-on illness – stops us dead – almost literally!
However, here’s something that you need to know. If you feel that you’re suffering from stress, you’re way off the mark! Stress does not get in your way – you’re actually destroying your own life yourself. You are the problem – but, happy days, that means that you can also be the solution. How are you the problem? Well, in actual fact, there’s no such thing as stress. OK, it appears to be real, the side effects are thee for all to see, the related health issues, messed-up relationships and sleepless nights are all real enough. But they are all just symptoms of an illusionary disease. Because, stress is a figment of your imagination, a construct of the normal adult mind that is paying no attention to reality and, instead, is trying to make sense of what’s happening – and it’s using completely out of date data.
A little explanation will go a long way! Let’s say that something happens that annoys you or stresses you out. Now, it’s not the something that happens that’s the problem. It’s what you think about it, how your subconscious make you think that you feel and, as a result, how you react. You make up your mind on all these things using ‘knowledge’ that you learned during your formative years. This is the data that your subconscious mind uses to evaluate everything that happens and everyone you meet – including the difficult people that you believe are stressing you out.
Unfortunately, your subconscious will always – I repeat, always – consult this out-dated data – and it does it automatically. This self-defeating mechanism is your default state of mind. And, as I’ve said, it always will be until you do something concrete to change it. And that something different involves you re-training your mind to give its undivided attention to what is really going on – not what your subconscious has concluded is going on! You must realize that your normal conclusions about what’s happening now can never – I repeat, never ever – be right. It’s using the wrong data!
So what do you have to do? I’ve suggested that you must re-train yourself. I use the word re-train because, when we were young and impressionable, we didn’t pay attention to what we thought was going on, we paid attention to reality. And you’ve got to get back to that way of looking at the world. To put an end to the process through which your out-dated data is taken as the basis for making your mind up, you’ve got to learn to focus on what your five senses are telling you – and not allow your conditioning leap to different conclusions.
You can achieve these through meditation – because meditation disciplines your normal undisciplined mind. When you meditate you re-learn to pay attention to the reality of the moment, what you’re hearing, what your breathing feels like, what you can feel in your arms and legs. You interrupt the process you’ve been using the second guess what’s really going on. Until you do that, nothing in your life will change.
