Are you feeling anxious or tense? Are you a worrier? Ever feel nervous? Do you get easily annoyed? Do you get stressed out? If you perceive yourself to be suffering from any of these problems, then you’ve let your mind play tricks on you. The inner you cannot be anxious, nervous, stressed or uncertain. The real you is simply not capable of being stressed or anxious. All these afflications are symptoms of an over-active personality – when you feel any of these symptoms, it’s only your personality tripping you up.
What you must realize is that your personality – from the Latin persona, which means mask – is just a mask that not only conceals the real you from everybody else, it has you completely fooled into thinking that it is, in fact, who you are. But, psychology tells us that your personality is a series of photographs of events and people that impressed you during your childhood – what we normally call our formative years. You snapped photos of these things because they were important enough to make you feel good or bad about yourself at the time. Unfortunately, psychology also confirms that the normal person is much more disposed to dwell on the negative rather than the positive snapshots.
Your subconscious mind is even still obsessed with those snapshots and it is this obsession that gives life to your personality. Basically, your personality isn’t real – it may well have got you to where you are and you may really like it – but be careful you don’t fall in love with an illusion.
To rid your life of the problems from which only your illusory personality can suffer – worry, stress, anxiety, self-doubt, fear, loneliness – you’re going to have to move beyond that personality, your perceived weaknesses and strengths. You’ve to go in search of the inner you because not only does the real you not comprehend worry, stress, doubt, not only is the inner you fearless, the real you is capable of achieving effortless happiness and success. The great thing is that you won’t have to look to hard to find the inner you – it’s crying out to be uncovered. You will discover the real you in the peace of a reflective moment, in the experience of one of those wonderful “natural high” moments that we experience at some point in our lives – where peace and happiness reign.
However, you don’t want or need to wait for the next peak moment to get over the illusions of stress and worry. You can do that right now by indulging in a little meditation. When you meditate you begin to appreciate that stress, tension and fear are simply self-destructive thoughts and that a clear and focused mind (the real you) simply has not time for that kind of nonsense – it has far more pressing work to do.
