How Do I Calm Down and Deal With Stress
What we do here at the Center For Common Sense Counseling is help people work through relationship and stress issues by teaching them how to become centered and flow from intuition.
Most of us are suppressed and inhibited because we are reactive, and thus outer directed. We react to situations and people, and then say or do the wrong thing. We become afraid of expressing our pent-up hostility, and we dread another round of error and failure.
So we hide ourselves from others so as not to be embarrassed or make mistakes. We put on a phony facade to keep people at a distance. Our secret hostility and resentment make us feel empty and needy.
But instead of finding an inner rapport and wholeness, we reach out to the world.
(article continues below)
____________________
announcement
Roland's new book Becoming a Friend of God - finding peace of mind and courage in an age of anxiety is available.
____________________
Feeling unworthy and yet needy, we clumsily claw for love, often settling for the most lowly and loathsome love offerings. When we can't bear the pain of reaching for love anymore, we settle for the comfort and false love of drugs, alcohol, and pills, or we stuff ourselves with food. All because in our distant past someone upset us or pulled on our heart strings, tempting us to step away from our center of dignity and love.
Some of us continue to yearn for the good we have never known. But reaching out to worldly spiritual or religious organizations has brought us betrayal or led to cynicism. We love truth and goodness, but we haven't found the real thing. Those we trusted either betrayed us, used us, or revealed their own lack of understanding.
What we need is to refind the inner intuitive way of living and moving and having our being. We need the original perspective, the one we had before we were upset and sidetracked by authorities who themselves had been tempted away from reason and inner love.
Fortunately we can find the love and understanding we have always been searching for by learning to become still.
We can refind the original perspective, and then moving unemotionally from this clear perspective, we will see our way back to a sensible, calm, inner directed way of life. A special simple meditation or centering exercise teaches us how to stand back from thought and emotion. It is not difficult or complicated. Perhaps the most difficult part of it is setting aside the intellectual analysis and second guessing, and just practicing the meditation in its sheer simplicity.
Calming down and beginning to see clearly, we begin to see things and people, including ourselves, as we really are. Going out into the world, we learn to be less reactive. We learn to be patient with people. We learn not to look to them for love, because once having found the inner light in which to see, wordless guidance by which to act, and inner warmth and rapport to seal us off from outer entanglements, we are free to express truth and be patient with others.
Family, relationship, work, and health issues begin to resolve themselves. When we have love instead of seeking love, and when we have patience instead of impatience, we develop a healthy disinterest concern for others, instead of needing something from them.
Spiritual and physical health is the natural state of the body and soul. By learning to give up the resentment, emotionality, and a misguided lifestyle that interferes with health, we recover in the Light.
However, the question remains. Most of us know that we should stop over-reacting. We know we should be patient. In fact, most of us would admit (if someone really pressed the issue) that we are more aware of intuition than we would admit. We have done and said foolish, dumb, and risky things even though we knew in our heart not to. We have also ignored hunches that would have benefited us.
So why don't we just calm down and live intuitively? The answer has to do with our nature, which by inherently responds to lies, tease, and challenge. We believe lies when they promise us ego greatness or a cure for what ails us. And we react resentfully to cruel tease and then compensate to prove ourselves right.
The other part of the answer as to why we don't just calm down and live intuitively has to do with the curse of hypnosis. We respond compulsively, obediently, mindlessly to external authorities. We believe them more than we do our intuition. This is the curse of original sin. We are subject to wrong authorities (instead of the Creator) and we are subject to the flesh by which external people, places and objects affect and influence us.
In order for the spell to be broken, it is necessary that we believe into the one who overcame the world. By believing into the proper authority, we are saved from responding to the wrong authority.
We are individually and collectively under a spell. Two things are needed. We need a truth speaker on the outside who tells us the truth guilelessly, so that we tend to wake up. In other words, someone who is not catering to our ego, and whose message is so clear that we can't duck it.
And it is even better if this leader is completely credible and full of love. Such a person awakens us with truth and then seeing his love, we are shriven, chastened, and beleive in where he is coming from. We love the reality he represents, and we want to live in that Reality, not in the private hell of our imagination or the hellish society that our lying politicians and other seducers have created for us. As we wake up, we become aware of intuition or conscience, our closest link to God.
All that remains to know is if we love truth. If we do not, we will have no interest in truth and reality. Secondly, it remains to be seen if we will repent: if we are willing to admit we are wrong in the Light of Truth we are now aware of.
For the blessed soul which is ready and willing to wake up the proper meditation is very helpful.
