Spiritual De - stressing - Chant every morning: "I am a fool"
 

While travelling by train recently I saw a man standing with his bag and baggage on his head. I asked him, "What are you doing?"
He said: "The train is overloaded and I am trying to relieve it of some of the weight."
You may laugh at him. But we are unconsciously doing the same thing. We are carrying unnecessary things on our head and getting stressed out. That is why we are in pain. To get rid of the pain we have to get rid of the unnecessary load on our heads.
Our intellect is an inhibition to bliss. Our approach to handling stress is confused. To define health we can't say it is a lack of disease. We can't explain a positive phenomenon with a negative answer. To explain stress you have to understand joy. When a person is in pain he will be obviously unhappy. But what about someone who is unhappy even when he is happy?

The problem is that we question joy itself. If you question how you are going to sleep then you will not be able to sleep throughout your life. You are questioning the laws of nature. When you see people playing cards and ask them why, they usually say: "We are passing time." You don't pass time. Time passes you. When you try to become bigger than nature, you become tense.

Point One: Don't push against the laws of nature. Because if we question it then we are just talking about higher levels of our ego. We are not in harmony with nature. The day you flow with nature there will be no stress.

Point Two: We are trapped with the past. That is why we are in trouble. If we want to enter into meditation we have to kill the past. The source of joy cannot be reached before removing the word "past" from our systems totally. There was a master who once told his student to go and observe a waiter at a restaurant to understand himself. The student was upset to find that the waiter was an idiot who from morning to evening only obediently served people.

After six months the student came back and told his master angrily: "I have learnt nothing except how to be a good waiter. How can I go higher levels of consciousness just doing this?"

The master told him: "You did not see the spiritual aspect of the job. Whenever the waiter served a person he treated him like God. But the moment the guest left he forgot about him and attended to the next. He always lives in the present. That's what I wanted you to learn. But your level of intelligence is so high you can't see the simple aspects of life."

There is no point reading the Vedas and the Upanishads or narrating the five Granths when you can't understand such a simple concept. Spirituality is about learning the laws of simplicity.

Point Three: To get rid of stress is to know the difference between the known and the unknown. What is known is that I believe nothing will happen to me. The unknown is that an earthquake can swallow me up even as I write this. We always don't account for the unknown in our lives. But if we constantly factor in the unknown into every minute of our lives, we will be in a state of constant awareness. Stress can be handled if you accept that you may die tomorrow. If you are a little more aware, accept that you could die within an hour. Then you won't be under any stress.

From a distance, everything will look either good or bad. Look at any object, it is just a mirror or an image of your own thought. Learn to accept the mirror. If you are opaque you remain depressed.
If you want to reduce stress, be open to everything. Possibly chant every morning: I am a fool. I am a fool. I am a fool. It is a way of learning how to laugh at yourself. The day you can laugh at yourself, you begin growing.

Bharat Thakur
From The Faith Line Column