Chapter 1

"EXCERPTS FROM MEDITATION , LIFE AND FLY FISHING".

STRESS LESS

CHAPTER ONE

MEDITATION & STRESS DEFINED

WHAT IS MEDITATION?

Meditation is a powerful technique that you can use to reduce stress and anxiety, thereby dramatically improving your minds ability to function. With this increased rationality, all areas of your life are greatly enhanced. Your health improves. Your decisions are more effective. You find more fulfillment. You’re better able to appreciate life. You’re happier.

Meditation is nothing new. It has been practiced in various forms for centuries by an enlightened minority. Only today are many of us just now learning to embrace its amazing abilities to improve our lives.

Its increased popularity stems from the urgent need to vent the stresses of modern day living, as well as a growing desire to expand our potential and to make our lives more fulfilling in many different ways.

Progress leading up to the 21^st century has brought about many changes to our lives. Airplanes, automobiles, television, computers, medical cures, and general improvements in technology have all effected life for all of us. Many of the changes have positively impacted our well-being. At the same time, certain aspects of these improvements have brought with them conditions that have the potential for heightening our levels of harmful stress. This stress must be eliminated if we are to be happy and to realize unencumbered lives.

Technology has given us so many more options. We are continually enticed to push and pull ourselves in several different directions. Our needs and careers have expanded to encompass a broader spectrum of possibilities.

This intensity, coupled with a comparatively sedentary lifestyle, devoid of physical avenues to expel stress, leaves many of us unhappier than our less sophisticated ancestors. Despite our progress, anxiety seems to be more prevalent and happiness more elusive for many of us. Ironically, much of our ‘progress’, if left unbridled, diminishes our lives rather than enhancing them.

In meditation, you are provided with a means to release this accumulated stress and anxiety. You are given a chance to ‘have the best of both worlds’. You are able to utilize the progress of technology to enhance your life, yet be in a frame of mind where you are able to enjoy it and prosper by it.

Various techniques are utilized to temporarily suspend your conscious thoughts to varying degrees. You focus exclusively in the moment of your meditation, forgoing thoughts of the past or future. This allows you to release excess stress and to break down the barrier between your conscious and subconscious minds, thereby bringing you calm and increased mental acuity.

There are many different forms of meditation that slow down the conscious thought process. You can focus your attention on a candle flame, a fixed object, a moving cloud or a simple walk. You can practice yoga. You can even chant Sanskrit sayings.

All achieve a certain beneficial effect by displacing the conscious thought process with something else. This ‘something else’ consumes your attention to such an extent that your conscious thought process is interrupted temporarily. You are living in the moment of your routine, excluding your normal thought process.

The form of meditation employed in this book is called Ascension Meditation. It involves the use of a mantra to divert the attention of the thought process from the conscious mind in a self-perpetuating manner, making the process free flowing. This creates a reduction and even a momentary elimination of your mental activity through ‘voids’ of thought to varying degrees.

The use of a mantra provides you the means to slow down and periodically halt your conscious thoughts. This reduction of activity offers an avenue for the release of stress and enables you to come in closer contact with your brilliant and powerful subconscious. Other methods of meditation that only slightly divert your attention are also beneficial, but less intense and therefore less productive for the time expended.

Ascension Meditation seems to accomplish more than other forms of stress reduction and other forms of meditation. By rapidly placing you in a slow, subdued state of mind, conducive for meditating, and holding you there for much of the duration of your meditation, you are able to achieve the full benefits of meditation within a relatively short period of time invested in each session.

Ascension Meditation fits in neatly with our 21^st century fast track lifestyle, providing maximum results for minimal time and effort.

WHAT IS STRESS?

Stress is the tension created by YOUR REACTION to events in your life. It’s your body’s response to a ‘perceived’ threat. Often, it is based upon an irrational interpretation of everyday events.

This is very important for you to understand. ANYTHING, if perceived improperly has the potential to cause you stress. Stress results primarily from YOUR INTERPRETATION of situations, rather than solely from the events that have transpired. STRESS is not simply a foregone conclusion for a given set of circumstances. It can be minimized or eliminated with the proper mindset.

When we are not in a calm rational state of mind, we experience stress. Our senses become heightened, our nervous system is thrown into high gear, and adrenaline and hormones are released. We are ready for ‘fight-or-flight’.

In the early days of our evolution this ‘fight-or-flight’ response meant the difference between life and death. It served a very worthwhile purpose. It helped us deal with an impending life-threatening situation, whether it was a carnivorous animal threatening to devour us or a neighboring tribesman preparing to skewer us for hunting on his grounds, that stress propelled us into life saving actions.

Today however, the stress response, a remnant of our ancestral days, often causes us problems. As our body reacts to a perceived threat, our pulse races, muscles tense up and our immune system shuts down. Most of the time the perceived threat is not physical, but our bodies still react in the same manner as if we were going to do battle. We often experience a knee-jerk over reaction to what we unconsciously recognize as a threat to our existence.

When we are continually subjected to this stress response day in and day out, we begin to have problems. We internalize the stress unless we find a method to dissipate it. It’s effects build and build until we find an avenue to release it. Nervousness, anxiety, disease and irrational thinking ensue as our bodies become inundated.

Debilitating stress is not caused by the exhilarating thrill of competition enroute to visible accomplishments. That stress can serve a useful purpose. Coping successfully with roadblocks to our goals can create self-confidence and build immunity to future problems. A certain amount is beneficial, but it must be managed effectively.

Stress can help prepare you for a challenge that lies ahead. It can sharpen your senses and make you more competitive IF it is internalized in the right way and in the right proportions. If not, it can be devastating.

The bad stress (subsequently referred to as merely ‘stress’), that we refer to, is that uncomfortable nervousness that results from our negative interpretation of events in our lives that persists long after the need has been served. Often it occurs when we are unable to see a way out of the circumstances creating our dilemma, when we feel powerless. When this type of stress accumulates, it adversely impacts virtually every aspect of your life, from the functioning of your thought processes to your physical health.

WAR GAMES

Stress is a part of each of our lives. We are all destined to be neurotic to some degree. Society and our parents lovingly drilled into our psyche all the thousands of things that could go wrong in our lives if we didn’t follow the rules or if we veered too far off the proper path. As a result of that benevolent conditioning, we replay and replay again and again numerous perceived threat scenarios in our conscious and subconscious minds, causing stress to build.

“War games” constantly play themselves out in our psyche. In childhood our conditioning begins. We are going to lose an eye if we play with sharp objects, get hit by a car if we don’t look both ways, sully our reputation if we play with the wrong friends, get pregnant or cause someone else to become pregnant if we’re not careful, have a drink and wreck our car, be unable to get into college with inferior grades, choose the wrong career and ruin our lives, spend too much money and go bankrupt………. etc, etc, etc.

Life was portrayed as too unforgiving. Mistakes were not an option. Taking risks was forbidden. Our parent’s intentions, of course, were honorable. They only wanted the best for us and they wanted to prevent the truly horrible things from happening to us, no matter how unlikely.

Add to that all the knowledge of the possible pitfalls that we assimilate on our own, including numerous totally irrational fears, and we’re burdened with a subconscious that projects minefields in nearly every direction we turn. We’re inundated with potential disasters. We’re insecure. We’re afraid to move forward for fear of moving backward or falling down altogether. We’re frustrated. We’re stress-bound, unable to fulfill our dreams. Our rationality is incapacitated by stress. We’re ill.

Yes, stress is an impending sickness. It is an accumulation of disturbing perceptions that is a precursor to disabling mental and physical illnesses. It represents a pre-flu, pre-cold, pre-cancerous, pre-accident, pre-nervous breakdown and pre-disease condition in your life. Its elimination should be your number one priority.

The most important thing in life is your happiness. Happiness results from a rational interpretation of life and from being at peace with yourself, feeling calm and contented with your lot in life. This cannot happen until your stress level is brought under control. When our cup becomes dangerously low, we diminish the content of our lives and the lives of those we share.

When we are happy our lives are full spiritually and often materially. We can enjoy life and willingly spread that joy to other people. Our cup is overflowing with the joys of life and we have the capacity to give to others.

When we’re ill at ease and unhappy, we’re in a constant battle, scratching and clawing our way through a life devoid of pleasure. We’re less able to share of ourselves with others. There is less to share. We are too busy taking care of our basic needs to help anyone else. Our growth has been stunted. Stress has won the battle for our lives. We have lost control. We our subservient to its’ effects.

When stress rules, we’re unable to contribute to society. We may even be a burden to our fellow men and women. Stress has the ability to render us dysfunctional, to sap our strength.

Stress prevents us from moving beyond a minimal existence. It causes us to cower in the perceived relative safety of mediocrity. When we are stress bound we avoid or run away from our problems, instead of confronting them, surmounting them and ultimately profiting from them. Stress can inundate us with so much parasitic clutter that we lose the capacity to progress in our lives.

Stress creates anxiety and worry. Stress ruins relationships. Stress creates illness. Stress stifles your abilities. Stress causes unhappiness. The manifestations of stress can annihilate your ambitions and literally destroy your life.

Stress is not your friend.

HOW DOES MEDITATION WORK?

From the moment you are born, your mind functions every second, minute, hour, and day of your life. It's active day and night, extensively while awake, less so while you sleep, but continually working. It’s your constant servant, regenerating only as you sleep or rest, when activity is reduced, but not eliminated.

Sleep in itself is a wonderful health tonic, dissipating stress, reorganizing data, and helping clear the mind. Sleep at night and naps during the day offer some of the benefits of meditation.

Diversions also provide some of the benefits of meditation. Hobbies, games, sports, projects, reading and day dreaming all divert our thoughts from their usual course, thereby providing some relief to our over taxed mind. They enable us to focus on the moment, to let go of our past and future thoughts long enough to experience some relief from our never ending thought struggle. These diversions represent a watered down version of meditation and require lengthy periods of our scarce time.

If sleep and diversions provide such benefits by merely slowing down, diverting and manipulating the thought process, just think of what greater benefits can be derived by a further reduction of the thought process through meditation.

Meditation does something that sleep and diversions will not. It stills the conscious mind, even if only momentarily, at various points during the meditation. This, your mind eagerly grasps, like a trekker through the desert quenching his thirst at an oasis.

Even seemingly minute Voids of consciousness provide relief to your starving subconscious. You may not even realize that a lapse of consciousness has occurred, but its' effects will be realized.

These momentary Voids of the conscious thought process provide an avenue whereby your mind is able to vent the stress that has accumulated allowing it to function at a much higher level of awareness and intellect.

This absence of excess stress enables you to feel more blissful. You are able to put your problems and anxieties in perspective. You are able to live more happily in the present, with less anxiety from thoughts of past and future events.

WHO SHOULD MEDITATE?

A better question might be, “Who shouldn’t meditate?” Stress and anxiety to one extent or other are indigenous to the human race. We all need an outlet for the accumulated stress from everyday life.

Absolutely every thinking reasoning human being of sufficient mental capacity to understand the basic techniques should meditate. All people young or old, healthy or infirm will benefit immensely from meditating.

Youngsters will gain by preventing the accumulation of stress from taking hold and manifesting itself in various anxieties now and later in life. Their minds will able to grow uninhibited by the limitations caused by fear and anxiety. Creativity will grow rather than be stifled by the skepticism of ‘so-called’ maturity.

Calm and rationality will replace hyperactivity, a very common problem with children today. They will be able to pursue their dreams without inhibitions. Their ability to think and reason will expand to meet any challenge.

Middle and older aged people will find tremendous relief of the stress and anxiety that accumulate with age, enabling them to use their wisdom to further the evolvement of society and gain personal fulfillment.

As we age, year-by-year, like the ‘tell tale’ rings of a tree trunk, we accumulate an ever-increasing number of fears and anxieties. We acquire these phobias from our growing store of knowledge and experiences, both from our own and those experiences of others the world over.

Our comprehensive media coverage and communication networks give us the ability to educate and terrorize ourselves twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with the latest accidents, crimes, wars, diseases, and other impending dangers to strike this planet.

If some potential harm hasn’t happened to us, we surely know someone personally or incidentally that it has happened to. And if we don’t know someone directly, the media ensures that we can live the terror of someone else’s life vicariously through their explicit coverage.

It would seem that the accumulated knowledge of our older generations would give them a distinct advantage over the youth of our society. They should be the exclusive ‘movers and shakers’ of this world. They should have the ‘world by the tail’. They surely should have ‘it’ all figured out.

Do they? A minority does, to some degree, but what holds back the vast majority? What handicap imprisons our most knowledgeable element? Why are the ‘golden years’ less than golden for many?

FEAR…..Fear of failure, fear of making mistakes, and fear of being hurt physically, mentally or financially. Why is this, when our older generation has all the answers that elude our youth? Well…. all that experience and knowledge, not only breeds wisdom and resolute action, but if not managed wisely also causes fear and anxiety.

In our youth, we hear all the warnings from our elders of the calamities that various actions can result in, but we ignore them. We haven’t experienced them and we haven’t been exposed to them. We are invincible. Nothing can happen to US. Bad things happen to OTHER people. We’re smarter, quicker, and just pain luckier than everyone else. Our ignorance truly is blissful.

But, after we have a few years under our belt and have experienced or seen those same negative consequences, we realize that, yes, the world can be a dangerous place and that opportunity is fraught with risk. In addition, now we have something to risk. We have a reputation to maintain, more money and perhaps less vibrant health. We are no longer invincible. We are vulnerable to the perils of the world. Our armor has lost its luster. It can be penetrated. We have become more emotionally feeble.

So, much of our older generation, with all its’ accumulated wisdom, is frozen by the rational and irrational sum total of their real and vicarious experiences. They our prevented from enjoying a complete and fulfilling life.

This is where meditation can benefit us as we age, as well as anytime. As we introduce rationality and a balance between wisdom and realistic risk into our lives, we are able to accomplish more of our dreams and bring more happiness into our lives. We are able to reduce our irrational fears, while providing a low stress environment to cope with the physical and mental effects of aging.

Our wisdom becomes a source of inner strength, as the accumulated fears and anxieties dissipate. We are able to contribute more fully to our evolution and to that of society.

Meditation allows all of us, regardless of age, gender, race, nationality or beliefs to bring peace into our lives by dissipating our fears, enabling us to live happily ‘in the moment’, unencumbered by past or future events burdening our conscious and subconscious thoughts. It enables us to rationally retain our youthful exuberance. We’re able to mature immaturely, to laugh at and enjoy all that life has to offer.

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