It can hurt when stress curls its knotted fingers around our necks.
But boy does it get easier when we see that those hands on our throats are our own.
Instead of it being the things that happen to us that create stress, it is our very resistance to those things that set it in motion.
Unnecessary and prolonged anxiety; frustration; anger, fear and mental anguish. They are here coursing through us because of us.
We permit it to be this way.
We are our very resistance.
Life, in this way, is not hard. It is our resistance that makes it hard.
When I ruminate and stew over an upcoming social gathering I don’t want to go to, I suffer because I think in circles. The event and the people within it have no impact on my suffering at all.
It is the thought I hold in my head about how hard the event will be that makes it hard.
The thought alone sets off a reaction involving nerves and chemicals that makes me feel stress.
My emotional experience is a product of the dancing and provocative pictures in my mind.
That’s not to say we can’t switch off our emotional reaction to stimuli, but it does mean that we can manage it and see irrational fears…
