Everyone wants more out of your life. There are those who want to change their experience of living radically – some of us have blind-spots about ourselves that we wish we could do something about. However, unfortunately, for the normal average person, life keeps getting in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, millions of people are weighed down by stress and health services worldwide are bleeding trying to cope with the resultant health problems – stops us in our tracks.

However, here’s something that you need to know. If you think that you’re suffering from stress, you’re making a big mistake! Stress does not get in your way – you’re actually destroying your own life yourself. It is you who is the problem – but, happy days, that means that you are the solution. How could you be the problem? Well, in actual fact, stress does not exist. Sure, it appears to be real, its side effects are thee for all to see, the related illness, messed-up lives and sleepless nights are all real enough. But they are all just symptoms of an imaginary disease. Because, stress is simply a figment of your imagination, a creation of the ordinary adult mind that is paying no attention to the real world and, instead, is doing a second-rate job of trying to make sense of what’s going on – using completely irrelevant data.

Let me explain. Let’s say that something happens that gets up your nose or stresses you out. It’s not the something that happens that’s the problem. It’s what you think about it, how you think it makes you feel and, as a result, your reaction. 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 calls upon to evaluate everything that’s going on and everyone that you encounter – and that includes the difficult people that you believe are stressing you out.

And your subconscious mind will always – yes, I said, always – refer to this now irrelevant data – and it does it automatically. This destructive process is your default state of mind. And, as I’ve already, it always will be until you take positive action to do something different. And that something different involves you re-training your mind to give its undivided attention to what is actually happening right now – not what it has concluded is going on! You’ve got to appreciate that your normal conclusions about current events can never – I repeat, never – be correct. It’s not using the right data!

So what do you have to do? I’ve said that you need to re-train your mind. I use the word re-train because, when we were little kiddies, we didn’t pay attention to what we thought was going on, we paid attention to reality. And that’s what you’ve got to learn to do all over again. To cut out the process by which that old out-of-date data is taken as the basis for making your mind up, you must teach yourself to pay attention to what your five senses are telling you – and not allow your conditioning leap to the wrong conclusion.

This is done through meditation – because meditation will discipline your normal undisciplined mind. When you meditate you learn to focus on the reality of the present moment, what you’re hearing, what your breathing feels like, what your body is telling you. You will break down the process of second guessing what’s actually going on. Until you do that, nothing in your life will change.