Not much discussed, and this is the result Credit: blogs.mcgill.ca
Stress is for me a question that needs to be paid attention to, if it’s ever possible to get past the cares of the world, the pressing concerns of life.
If our main activity is lightwork – if we’re so blessed as to be able to work in this specialized way, often foregoing incomes – then, in my experience anyways, stress becomes the big obstacle to progress.
It sounds so trite to say it, but stress is a much-overlooked subject.
I don’t think we understand the stress cycle and its impact on our awareness very well. Maybe I could take a turn at describing it.
Stress begins as a thought of resistance to something. That thought calls up a feeling. After hanging out with the thought and feeling for a while, we reach a conclusion. Then we make a decision around it. Yes, this is what Werner Erhard called a record and what Ramana Maharshi called a vasana.
Our vasanas serve as commands in the database of our conditioning. They organize our behavior ever after, as long as we’re conditioned.
The illnesses and conditions we suffer from mirror our thoughts – a pain in the butt, a pain in the neck, carrying the world on our shoulders, etc.
These vasana-mediated conditions give rise to distinct holding patterns in the body. These locked-in patterns of muscular tension persist through time so that we’re sometimes bent out of shape, have inflammation of a particular part of the body, a weakness in another part, etc.
Muscular holding patterns in the body have a twofold effect on us. Not only do they cause disabling conditions themselves, but they lower awareness. An increase in tension results in a decrease in awareness and vice versa.
It’s stressful to operate as an automaton, a conditioned robot, a stimulus-response machine. Awareness – and with it relief from so many conditions – can really only blossom after we’ve emerged from our holding patterns in the body, our conditioning, vasanas, and stress.
That having been said, we’re about to head into a period as stressful as anything I can imagine – post-Reval.
How are we going to do it?
I don’t have the answer. It may come in tomorrow’s “mail.”