Is Stress Messing Up Your Self Improvement?

We all want something more out of life. There are those who want to change their experience of living totally – some of us have things about ourselves that we wish we could change. But, unfortunately, for the normal average person, life keeps getting in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, tens of millions of people are suffering from stress and health services worldwide are spending a fortune trying to dela with the resultant health problems – stops us in our tracks.

But, if you believe that stress has invaded your life, you’re making a big mistake! Stress does not get in your way – you’re getting in your own way. You are the problem – but, happy days, that means that you are the solution. How are you the problem? You see, in reality, there’s no such thing as stress. Sure, it appears to be real, the effects are thee for all to see, the related illness, damaged relationships and sleepless nights are real enough. But they are all simply symptoms of an illusionary disease. Because, stress is simply a figment of the imagination, a creation of the normal adult mind that is paying no attention to reality and, instead, is doing a second-rate job of trying to make sense of what’s happening – using completely irrelevant data.

Let me explain. Let’s say that something happens that annoys you or stresses you out. It’s not what’s just happened that’s the problem. It’s what you make of it, how you think it makes you feel and, as a result, how you react. You decide all these things using ‘knowledge’ that you internalized during your formative years. This is the outdated data that your subconscious mind employs to evaluate everything that’s going on and every single person you encounter – including those difficult people that you think are the cause of your stress!

And your subconscious will always – yes, I said, always – consult this out-dated data automatically. This horrible mechanism 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 pay attention to what is actually happening right now – not what it has concluded is going on! You must appreciate that your subconscious mind’s conclusions about what’s happening now can never – I repeat, never ever – be even close to the mark. It’s using the wrong data!

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

This is done through meditation – because meditation disciplines your normal undisciplined mind. When you meditate you train yourself to pay attention to the reality of the present moment, what you’re hearing, what your breathing feels like, what your body is telling you. You break down the process you’ve been using the second guess what’s actually happening. Until you do that, your life will always be just as it is.

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