Have you ever found yourself holding on real tight to things? It can often be very pressuring and frustrating as well as restrictive.
Experiment
I want you to do an experiment with me right now. Take a pen and hold onto it tightly to the point that it can even feel a bit painful as you squeeze it very tightly. Now keep holding for about thirty seconds and feel the tension, feel the pain. After 30 seconds just let it drop out of your hand and notice the release of tension. Now how does it feel once you’ve let go? I’m sure you feel that release of tension and a bit of relief within your hand.
Married to thought
The same thing is with our thoughts. Because they look so real, we get so bogged down and wedded to them that they can feel restrictive, pressuring and even painful.
Objectifying things and people and getting hoodwinked about where our feelings are truly coming from The good news is that when I catch myself in the act of having a strong feeling, I realize I’m in an Outside-In illusion. This means that I’m objectifying something or someone out there as being the creator of my feelings. That is where suffering can occur. It’s where we hoodwink ourselves into believing that our feelings are coming from somewhere other than thought in the moment.
Caught in thought
But when I realize this, I calm down and go back to living an inside-out reality where I realize that we are 100% of the time living in the feeling of our thinking. This is so freeing and powerful because it allows me to free myself from my own mental encumbrances that hold me for ransom and limit me from moving forward with my life.
Spiritual purpose of stress
Understand that stress is meant to come and go within you. This coming and going happens independently of circumstances. In fact, all feelings have a profound or spiritual purpose. In the case of stress, its to remind you that youre not seeing life clearly; to prevent you from behaving in an unproductive, disingenuous, or untruthful manner.
Keep in mind: The ONLY way to hold stress in place, or become debilitated by stress, is to search for circumstantial (or outer) causes and then strategic (or outer) cures. Rather, see stress as an inner thing, or the normal and beneficial feeling that it truly is, and, rest assured, getting stressed about stress becomes pretty much impossible.
One thought away from suffering or freedom It is so powerful knowing that we are always one thought away from suffering and one thought away from freedom. Just having a change of thought can change our experience for the better or the reverse and you’re always only one thought away from that. Now don’t get me wrong and think that I’m telling you to control your thoughts. I’m sorry, but you usually can’t. That’s not what this discussion is about. So many of the people think this at the very beginning when I start working with them. That’s why I always emphasize that this is not a doing but an understanding. And it’s not an intellectual understanding but a feeling, insightful understanding. When you understand something and get impacted, your thoughts automatically change and you’ll have a new experience where new behaviors naturally occur without any effort.
Letting go
Next time you get stressed, what will happen if you see it for what it truly is? It’s a spiritual message telling you that you’re not seeing clearly in this moment which can cause you to be unproductive, disingenuous or untruthful. Once you expose it for what it truly is, you might then not take your thoughts so seriously because who you are is not your thoughts. Then, you might even just let it go and float by like the clouds that are always coming and going.