Ours is a world of explosive change, the breeding ground for uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. While some believe that stress is necessary to reach peak performance, there are many more for whom stress is the cause of debilitating illness.
If we look back just over a hundred years, a heart attack (one of the more serious stress-related diseases) was a medical curiosity. Might this be because it was much easier to relax a century ago? This was a time when the quality of being was more important than the quantity of doing – when people were more like human beings rather than human ‘doings’.
Although we can’t go backward in time, we can learn to reconstruct a much healthier and more relaxed lifestyle for ourselves, and to find again some of that lost peace. The only condition is that we have to want to. In the early 1980s, I found myself suffering from enormous amounts of stress. At the time I didn’t call it stress, I simply called it pain. I was working long hours, seven days a week, driven by deadline after deadline. My relationships were far from harmonious, I was not enjoying my job, life often seemed meaningless and there appeared to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Taking some months to research my pain, both internally and externally, I tried to find solutions. I realized that the one thing no one teaches us is self-understanding, and if I don’t understand myself, then how can I manage myself – I can’t manage my thoughts, feelings and attitudes. I knew that I had to change my lifestyle, and that I had to go back to school. Not for academic purposes, but to the real school in life, which is our own consciousness. It is within our own consciousness that we do all our learning and unlearning, create our vision and make our decisions. My research was thorough and intense, and it resulted in the discovery of the root causes of human distress at various intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels.
Thankfully, I also discovered that the greatest gift that we can give our self is the ability to reconnect with the state of inner peace that was present all along at the heart of our own being. I realized that it was possible to transform the quality of our relationships with others, but only when we draw from our deepest inner resource which we all know to be love. I quickly discovered that the process of decision-making, which is somewhat stressful for many, is enhanced when we draw on our own innate wisdom. It is a resource that everyone has but few learn to access.
I found that no book, seminar or guru could do this inner work for me – although they have often served to remind me of the next step in my journey during the darker times of stress, as well as of the illusory notion that stress is both necessary and inevitable. As light dawned, change became possible through the practices of meditation and contemplation, combined with the power of personal action and the restoration of a more spiritual awareness.
This book serves as an anthology of some of my learning in those early years. Its aim is to pass on to you a selection of the most useful insights, as well as some practical exercises that you can experiment with, as you make your own way to a more relaxed and enlightened state. I hope that it will encourage and guide you, so that you too may understand and be reminded of the deep wisdom of relaxation. This wisdom does not lie out of reach, in a far away place, but is buried within each of us, simply waiting to be rediscovered.