I am starting this stress management series, i will be posting a chapter daily. This stress management series has helped many corporate heads and individuals in recent years. i hope that u read and practice it at your own pace. I know you will benefit from this, happy stress free life living to all.
Stress Management-Part-1
I went to my first yoga and meditation class along with my friend. I thought yoga and all this meditation were some fermented dairy products for health freaks and old people. But the meditation class quickly captured my attention. There I came with the totally different perspective of life and personal psychology, one that I had never thought about. As I struggled to understand the meaning of what the mythologies meant, I began to see underneath the images and stories of our mythologies lies a powerful, systematic and scientific approach to understanding the entire person. The details of how mind, body and spirit all successfully come together in human form. As I discovered more, that this was nothing less than the science of inner life, a prescription for personal power and excellence. The colorful and dramatic symbolism of heroes and villains in our mythologies is necessary where knowledge had to be passed from teacher to students verbally without the aid of books or modern electronic devices. The stories and myths, heroes and villains, are remembered far more easily than fact and figures.
Like most people, we grow up learning to look outside ourselves to find answers to our problems. Doctors and medicines would cure our disease, friends and lovers would end my loneliness, attaining status, position, and power would bring me self-esteem and fulfillment, and money and all the things it could buy would bring me happiness.
We all know here that this doesn’t work. But we don’t know what else to do. We are so externally oriented that we know little about what happens within our inner world. It is an unknown region, a scary place filled with the terrible things the psychiatrists talk about, all the things we struggle to forget, all the powerful desires and fears that we work desperately to suppress.
The way that most of us deal with the problems of life is more than a little misdirected. We basically ignore our inner resources. We are so caught up in the world around us that we don’t see that both the cause and the cure of our suffering lie within ourselves. Because we look in the wrong direction, we have a distorted view of ourselves, and very little ability to use our powerful resources. As a consequence, our human skills have not kept pace with our technological skills. We have become so enamored of the power and speed of our technology that we increasingly ignore the nearly infinite power of minds. In doing so, we become dependent on external means to solve internal problems. We overuse drugs, blame others for our own choices, and become victims of circumstance. The more things we have, the more disturbed we seem to become. With all our technical and scientific knowledge we still feel powerless, alienated from each other and fearful of the world around us. Instead of understanding and mastering the source, our own self, we keep dancing round and round with the endless things outside of ourselves.
Fortunately, we have yogic tradition that doesn’t demand that you believe in a certain way or in certain individual. It is not that people were more intelligent 4,000 years back, it’s only that they had less external disturbances and aid from technology. So they dedicated more of their time for studying human psychosomatic (the body and mind relation). The whole thrust of these traditions of yoga, Sufi, Zen, Reiki and several different styles of meditation is to become free – of self-doubt, of neuroses, of self-imposed suffering of all sorts. But this freedom is not something that can be given by anyone or any master. Anyone who has gone through these research and practice can help you navigate through the labyrinth of your mind. Through examples and methods, bringing you face to face with your greatest resource, yourself. But no one can make it work for you; only you can become masters of yourself.
It does not matter what culture we live in, which religion we practice or which part of the globe we live in, nor does it matter what calling in life – doctor, lawyer or executive. We all want to live without worrying and being fearful, we all want to share joy and life with others. In other words, we all want to be successful human beings.
We can accomplish this if we understand the fundamental truth that lies at the heart of our humanity: self-knowledge and self-discipline (skill) lead to self-mastery alone leads to freedom, to happiness, to success in life. Self-mastery has two essential elements: self-knowledge and skill. Like two sides of a coin, we can’t have one without the other. When we have self-knowledge but no skill we become paper tigers – we know all answers but we can’t live any of them. Many of us think that making more money, hearing enlightened sage, or wearing the right crystal will somehow magically eliminate the misery of our lives. Bur nothing can save us from ourselves. There is an old saying that “ you must light your own lamp”. We are provided with unlimited resources, but unless we become skilled in there use, they are of little benefit. The more skilled I am at using my inner resources, the greater ability to respond successfully to any situation without creating stress, disease, and unhappiness.
Today stress has become a household word many of us think that we know all about stress and how to cope with it, unfortunately this is far from the truth. Life has become more complicated, with greater pressure and higher levels of stress. Our ability to reduce these pressures has diminished, not increased.
The problem is that we approach stress like any other disease-find out what is going wrong and fix it but stress is uniquely different. It is a dis-ease an inner imbalance that we constantly create and maintain within the body and mind. Stress is psychosomatic in the true sense of the word involving both mind and body. We create stress when we mismanage our own inner resources. Its source is in the patterns and habits of our lives, a consequence of how we regulate or rather, how we do not regulate, the mind and body. The chaos of inner world, emotional turmoil, thoughts and attitudes and lack of exercise creates physical consequences like ulcers and high blood pressure
We have created myths about stress and we need to understand them before we get to the path of self-mastery.
Like most people, we grow up learning to look outside ourselves to find answers to our problems. Doctors and medicines would cure our disease, friends and lovers would end my loneliness, attaining status, position, and power would bring me self-esteem and fulfillment, and money and all the things it could buy would bring me happiness.
We all know here that this doesn’t work. But we don’t know what else to do. We are so externally oriented that we know little about what happens within our inner world. It is an unknown region, a scary place filled with the terrible things the psychiatrists talk about, all the things we struggle to forget, all the powerful desires and fears that we work desperately to suppress.
The way that most of us deal with the problems of life is more than a little misdirected. We basically ignore our inner resources. We are so caught up in the world around us that we don’t see that both the cause and the cure of our suffering lie within ourselves. Because we look in the wrong direction, we have a distorted view of ourselves, and very little ability to use our powerful resources. As a consequence, our human skills have not kept pace with our technological skills. We have become so enamored of the power and speed of our technology that we increasingly ignore the nearly infinite power of minds. In doing so, we become dependent on external means to solve internal problems. We overuse drugs, blame others for our own choices, and become victims of circumstance. The more things we have, the more disturbed we seem to become. With all our technical and scientific knowledge we still feel powerless, alienated from each other and fearful of the world around us. Instead of understanding and mastering the source, our own self, we keep dancing round and round with the endless things outside of ourselves.
Fortunately, we have yogic tradition that doesn’t demand that you believe in a certain way or in certain individual. It is not that people were more intelligent 4,000 years back, it’s only that they had less external disturbances and aid from technology. So they dedicated more of their time for studying human psychosomatic (the body and mind relation). The whole thrust of these traditions of yoga, Sufi, Zen, Reiki and several different styles of meditation is to become free – of self-doubt, of neuroses, of self-imposed suffering of all sorts. But this freedom is not something that can be given by anyone or any master. Anyone who has gone through these research and practice can help you navigate through the labyrinth of your mind. Through examples and methods, bringing you face to face with your greatest resource, yourself. But no one can make it work for you; only you can become masters of yourself.
It does not matter what culture we live in, which religion we practice or which part of the globe we live in, nor does it matter what calling in life – doctor, lawyer or executive. We all want to live without worrying and being fearful, we all want to share joy and life with others. In other words, we all want to be successful human beings.
We can accomplish this if we understand the fundamental truth that lies at the heart of our humanity: self-knowledge and self-discipline (skill) lead to self-mastery alone leads to freedom, to happiness, to success in life. Self-mastery has two essential elements: self-knowledge and skill. Like two sides of a coin, we can’t have one without the other. When we have self-knowledge but no skill we become paper tigers – we know all answers but we can’t live any of them. Many of us think that making more money, hearing enlightened sage, or wearing the right crystal will somehow magically eliminate the misery of our lives. Bur nothing can save us from ourselves. There is an old saying that “ you must light your own lamp”. We are provided with unlimited resources, but unless we become skilled in there use, they are of little benefit. The more skilled I am at using my inner resources, the greater ability to respond successfully to any situation without creating stress, disease, and unhappiness.
Today stress has become a household word many of us think that we know all about stress and how to cope with it, unfortunately this is far from the truth. Life has become more complicated, with greater pressure and higher levels of stress. Our ability to reduce these pressures has diminished, not increased.
The problem is that we approach stress like any other disease-find out what is going wrong and fix it but stress is uniquely different. It is a dis-ease an inner imbalance that we constantly create and maintain within the body and mind. Stress is psychosomatic in the true sense of the word involving both mind and body. We create stress when we mismanage our own inner resources. Its source is in the patterns and habits of our lives, a consequence of how we regulate or rather, how we do not regulate, the mind and body. The chaos of inner world, emotional turmoil, thoughts and attitudes and lack of exercise creates physical consequences like ulcers and high blood pressure
We have created myths about stress and we need to understand them before we get to the path of self-mastery.
2 comments:
i find this article very interesting and yet im thinking if i can have a happy stress free life at all..knowledge combined with skills and attitude could probably make it works or should i say"practice makes perfect"...have a nice day!
This is really a good article, that can be practiced. The only problem I feel is that it should be posted full in one go so that we can actually use it now. Its tough to come for a blog daily.
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