5. Excel Without Stress

Worry and stress are closely interrelated. They are like parent and child. One cannot exist without the other. What works for one works for the other as well. However, given that stress is considered the biggest destroyer of health in today's world, it is worth going into more depth on this subject.

Four hundred years ago Rene Descartes* declared, 'I think, therefore I exist.' This has formed the basis of modern thinking. Billions of people in this world have followed Descartes* for generations believing that unless each one outthinks the other they cannot succeed in this world.

Descartes* was right, and he was wrong. He was right in that that the human system does not know how to live without its mind, without thinking. As a result human beings become slaves to their minds. They live in bondage.

Many centuries before Descartes, a vedic* sage declared that man does not begin to exist till he stops thinking. Adi Shankara* , at the age of eight, faced his future master across the waters of the holy Tungabhadra river. The master asked him, 'Who are you?'

The confusion between our true nature and what we pretend is stress or tension.

In response Adi Shankara*

said, 'I am not the mind, I am not the intellect, I am not the ego and I am not the senses. I am beyond all that. I am pure consciousness.'

We are merely a bio-machine as long as we think we are mind and body. We are just a shade better than the animals we ascended from as long as we allow our senses to guide us. But the true potential of human beings is not merely to think and prove that we are superior to animals. The purpose of human life is to transcend the mind and ascend to a higher state of consciousness. In that state we are truly in the divinity that we descended from.

Till we reach that state of unity with what we truly are, we are in turmoil. This turmoil, this confusion between our true nature and what we pretend and strive to be is what we call stress or tension.

Rene Descartes - French philosopher scientist famous for his saying 'I think, therefore I am'.

Vedic - Referring to Veda or ancient scriptures.

Adi Shankara - Enlightened master from Bharat. Greatest exponent of the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta or nondualism, whose movement restored glory to the declining vedic tradition and Hinduism during his period.

According to vedic* psychology, we are not disturbed. We are indeed the source of that disturbance. Understand this well, you are not tensed but you are tension. You are not stressed but you are the source of stress. There is a big difference between the two. Let us look deeply into it. Then you will understand. You are not in tension. You are the tension. There is a very big difference between 'you are disturbed' and 'you are the disturbance'.

A group of reputed and experienced scientists, after doing research for many years, have now come up to say this. They say, we cannot make man responsible for his actions unless we teach him how to manage his emotions by managing what is happening inside him.

Whatever the vedic scriptures said five thousand years ago is the same thing that the modern scientists are saying now. These scriptures also provide the solution and answer for this age-old problem. They can bridge the gap between the Western psychology and the vedic psychology.

Western psychology continuously gives us the hope that we can be brought back to normalcy, retaining I as I. For example, if we are feeling hot in this room, we can fix the air conditioning and make it cool to be comfortable. But we forget an important factor. The moment we bring air conditioning into this room, we need to maintain it. That brings additional tension. That brings additional problems. Now we need electricity, we need to pay the bills and for all these facilities we need money. When you go out to work, you no longer enjoy this room. The room and its air conditioning exist, but you are elsewhere working to pay the bills for the air conditioner!

We forget an important factor. You as you are, is a disease. The concept of mind, according to Western psychology, is a machine. According to vedic psychology, it is a process. Mind is not a machine but a process. It is constantly happening. The word 'manas', which is the Sanskrit word for mind, means a constant happening, something that is not passive and dead but something that is dynamic and alive.

Western psychology insists on this one idea that the mind is a biomechanical machine. We all believe unconsciously that mind is matter, a thing or a machine. That is why constantly we connect all the past happenings of the mind as a chain, and start believing our mind is a solid thing.

Vedic - Referring to Veda or ancient scriptures.

Let me give you an example. The low mood that you experienced ten years ago, the low mood that you experienced nine years ago, the low mood that you experienced eight years ago, the low mood that you experienced seven years ago and the low mood that you experienced yesterday are completely unconnected and independent incidents. All these happened for different purposes, different reasons, at different times and situations. You connect all these unconnected incidents and say, 'My life itself is a depression.'

The low mood that you experienced years ago, months ago, weeks ago or days ago are all unconnected and independent incidents. Fifteen years ago, you would have felt the low mood and felt depressed because your toys were lost. Nine years ago, you would have felt depressed because your girlfriend was lost. Few years ago you would have felt depressed or disturbed because your son was not listening to you. The reasons were different, situations were different, and the causes were totally different. However, when you connect all these low moods and decide, 'My life is full of depression,' you have created hell for yourself!

The moment you start believing that your life is depressed, your life indeed becomes depression. Please understand that it is You are not in tension. You are the tension.

only what you believe to be your past that you will reproduce in the future. We all know that we can't fly from our past experience. How can we believe that we can start flying from tomorrow onwards? No, we can't. Whatever we believe to be our past, only that we will believe can be our future. So once we start believing that our past was filled with depression, we have created the unconscious faith that our future will also be depression.

When we believe that the mind is just a thing, a bio-machine, we have created hell for ourselves. Fortunately for us, the mind is not a thing. There is hope. The truth is that mind is not a thing as we all have been taught, it is a process. It is not a noun but a verb.

When we believe the mind is a thing, we create problems that do not exist.

A small story:

A man goes to a psychiatric doctor and says, 'Doctor, my life is full of problems'. The doctor says, 'Everybody's life is a problem. Don't worry. Every week we will have three sessions and you will be charged 100 dollars.'

*The man says, 'Doctor, three sessions per week each at hundred dollars will

solve your problem. What about my problem!'

Understand, the moment we start believing that the mind is only a machine, we become helpless. No psychiatrist can help. No psychoanalyst can help. No other method can help, because the basic belief is wrong. The moment we bring a wrong belief, whatever is built on that has to go wrong. It cannot be the truth. We need to understand the basic truth that the mind is a process; we are not in tension but we are tension.

Identity gap

The identity that you project to the outer world is called ahankar. The identity that you believe as you internally is called mamakar. Again and again vedic psychology says that you are beyond these two. You are not just these two. According to Western psychology you are just these two. That is why so much of work is done to protect your identity. So much of attention and energy is given to hold on to your identity.

The reality, the real you, is much more than these two identities. You are beyond these two identities.

Above all, you need to understand that your mind is not a machine. It is not connected as you think. Because you do not experience the gap between two thoughts, you start believing it is connected. You go on repeating that you are disturbed and tensed. No. You are not disturbed. You are a disturbance. You need to understand the basic root where the problem starts, where the problem is created. The first basic root is you believing yourself to be a shaft or a thing. You are not a thing. Your idea about pleasure, your idea about pain, your idea about life, everything is built on that one lie, that you are a thing.

You need to understand this one truth: you

*Ahankar - The false identification of the pure inner self with the outer world. A form of ego that makes you project a false identity of you to the outer world.

*Mamakar - Inner ego that constantly says that you are smaller than what you think you are.

are a process, and that by your very nature, your thoughts are unconnected, independent and unclutched.

Understand, by very nature, what you think as your identity is not required for you to run your life. You may say, 'No, if I am unclutched, unconnected, how will I plan for my future, how will I think of tomorrow? I have deadlines, project plans, so many things. How will I work? How will I submit my projects? How will I run my day-to-day life?' These are big questions that haunt you.

Understand this one example: when you are driving, do you plan every step? Do you plan how much you need to press the accelerator, when you need to press the brake, when you need to turn right, turn left? No. In the initial level when you are getting trained, you may plan but once you learn driving, you just sit. Many times you don't even remember what happened while driving. Am I right? You don't even remember you drove down to your office all the way. Only when you park your car in front of your office, suddenly you realize that you have been driving all this time and even reached your destination!

This is what we call prarabdha, biomemory. You have an automatic intelligence to run, to maintain, to live and to expand your life. What I am saying is a very basic truth. Only if you What you think as your identity is not required for you to run your life.

have suffered enough in your life with your mind, you will understand what I am saying. Only if you come to the verge of suspecting your own identity, you can understand.

The doors of entry to our mind are our sense organs. Without the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin we will not be able to give any input to our mind. The sensory inputs are the foods that the mind thrives on.

We assume that all that we see and hear are authentic. We believe that the sights we see and the dialogues we hear are the way that things happened. A little reflection will show how untrue it is. How many times have you interpreted a scene to be very different from what it really was based on your own conditioning? For instance, the moment you see a man and woman in close proximity interacting emotionally with one another, perhaps hugging, you immediately jump to the conclusion that they are lovers! They could be friends, brother and sister, father and

*Prarabdha - Mindset and desires that we bring into this world when we are born.

daughter or mother and son.

It is the conditioning that we carry in us that drives us to interpretations of what we perceive through our senses. That is why I say that we first decide on the judgment and then collect the evidence to support the judgment we have already made. We have made the judgment already. All we need is a few bits of data to support that conviction, that's all.

It is as if our mind is a projector. We have a number of slides we have gathered along the path of our life, some even from our past births. These slides are the projections with which we live our lives. Each time the slide is repeated it gets more powerful. The first few times it may have to be shown for several minutes for it to impact us. As the samskara gets engraved deeper into our mind, all that is needed over time is having a quick glimpse and our mood changes and we decide based on that samskara.

Molecular biology experiments have revealed a startling truth that each time we experience a powerful emotion, like anger for instance, new cellular transmitters and receptors for anger get activated in our body-mind system, not merely in the brain but everywhere in the body. The first few times the emotion happens in the system, it may be a brief drizzle. Once more and more cellular structures get built for this emotion, the drizzle turns into a shower, then into a storm and finally into a tsunami!

A man was stopped by a policeman on the highway for speeding. When the policeman questioned the man, he angrily replied that he was not speeding.

The policeman said he noted his speed at seventy miles per hour when the speed limit was fifty miles per hour. The man screamed that the policeman was lying. Now the policeman reached out for his pistol.

Just then, the man's wife leaned over and rolled down the window, 'Officer, don't argue with my husband when he has been drinking, he can become dangerous!'

All these incidents of road rage and other acts of passion and violence do not happen at one particular instant. The conditioning gets deeper and stronger at the cellular level. It is like cancer. Just like the malignant cells grow and kill, scientists have now discovered that emotional receptors multiply allowing emotions to flood us with no control from our part. In simple terms these emotions take over our behavior. To think that we control our mind

*Samskara - Engrams or deeply engraved memories.

and we decide what we do is the biggest illusion we carry in our lives! This is the maya that drives us.

Only about ten percent of what we perceive through our senses gets recorded in our conscious mind. Everything else goes directly into our unconscious mind. This is why many times we do not even remember a place that we pass every day. So long as this sensory perception does not interest us in some way, it does not get recorded.

Let us now see what happens to those sensory perceptions that do get recorded in our conscious mind. These impressions are sorted out by parts of our mind and identified. Your conscious mind records whether the person you see in front of you is known to you or whether he is an unknown stranger. How you would like to interact with him is no longer a decision made at the conscious level. In case you know him, your attitude towards him and your action would be based on the engraved memories that are grooved in your mind. In case he is unknown to you also, the appearance of that person would

trigger unconscious responses. Either way the file moves into your unconscious for lives!

To think that we control our mind and we decide what we do is the biggest illusion we carry in our

a decision about what you should do.

For most of us, less than ten percent of the mind is conscious. Less than ten percent of what you perceive through your senses gets recorded consciously. It is possible that less than one percent of what you decide is a rational decision!

What do we do then? Do we continue to allow our unconscious mind to control us or can we do something to regain conscious control?

There are two ways in which we can regain control. The first is to reduce the conditioning that binds us. In our meditation programs, we work on the removal and dissolution of these samskaras that bind us. The second way is to be in the present moment, in total awareness and control.

In our Life Bliss Programs we teach techniques for both these methods. In the superconscious meditative state it is

*Maya - Literally 'That which is not'. It is the concept that life is but a dream, however real it may seem while being experienced.

*Samskara - Engrams or deeply engraved memories.

possible to relive embedded memories so that they are relieved. This allows the inner space to be cleansed. One gains the skills to reach and stay in the present moment awareness.

If you observe your thoughts carefully, you will understand two things. One is what we talked about earlier about thoughts being unconnected. All you need to do is to sit down and write down the thoughts that arise in your mind for ten minutes. You will realize that there is very little connection between your thoughts. They seem to jump from one to another.

The second point you will notice is your thoughts are always about your past or your future. You can only think about what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. Your thoughts of the past are usually regrets about what you did not do or guilt about what you did. Thoughts of the future are about what you wish to do.

Please understand, neither the past nor the future is real. The past is dead and gone. Most often we do not even learn from the past. All we try to do is use our past to steer the future. It is like driving a car looking only at the rear view mirror! You know for sure where you will end up!

The future is even more unreal. It has not happened. You have very little control over your future the way you are, because all your actions are steered by the unconscious mind. You are driven by the embedded memories of your past. Your thoughts are nothing but the movement of your mind between past and future. Your mind never wants to rest. If it rested you would know you could do without it!

If only you allowed the mind to rest or even persuaded your mind to rest, you will find that you reach a blissful state. That state is the present moment. All your future has to happen in this present moment. It is what you decide now in this present moment that makes your future. Once you take care of the present moment, once you live this present moment consciously, you no longer will have cause to regret your past or feel guilty about it.

You are oscillating at a high frequency most of the time. You are always excited, even when you think you are resting. This is why Buddha calls it the 'monkey mind'. As the thought frequency or thoughts per second or TPS comes down, you naturally rest into the present moment.

In the diagram, the shaft in the center represents 'time'. At any given time, the greater your TPS or Thoughts Per Second, the more far-flung you are from

consciousness of the present moment. You are simply worrying about the future thus allowing it to slip into the past, without ever getting a glimpse of the present.

When your TPS comes down, you enter more and more into the present and when this happens, you have a clearer vision of the past and the future. You may wonder what is there to be clear about the past. One can understand that the future may not be clear, but why the past? I have lived it, so why should it be unclear! You need to understand that what you now remember of the past is your When you are in the intuitive state, you are more in the present.

judgment of the past, not the way it happened. How many times do we talk about the golden past? How much has been written about the 'golden past'! There is nothing golden about the past. We just choose to remember the good parts, so it looks golden.

When you are in the intuitive state, for those few moments, your TPS has dropped and you are more in the present. When your TPS is zero, you can clearly see the entire past and future.

The point where the future meets the past is the present. This is where your thought frequency is zero and you are in a no-mind state. You have not merely controlled or suppressed the mind, which is impossible. You have transcended the mind, which is possible.

Not only can the mind not play its games on you anymore, but you also reach a state where you can play with the mind and make it do what you wish. We can choose to be in this state. This is the state of meditation. Meditation brings the mind to rest. Meditation disengages the mind so that the mind cannot play games.

We can also reach this state in the master's

Ninety percent of your worries never materialize.

presence. The master is always in a nomind state,

which is the zero TPS state. When you are in his awareness, whether physically or otherwise, your own TPS also drops. You can reach zero TPS just by being in the master's presence. The presence of the master is meditation. Awareness of the master is meditation.

In our normal state we are constantly in chatter. Even if we do not talk out loud to another person, as many stressed people in fact do, we talk silently within. Not only is our mind not at rest, but the thoughts it generates also take shape as a monologue or dialogue within us.

This inner chatter is what we call worry. Worry is nothing but the constantly repetitive inner negative chatter. Again and again we refer to the past and project it to the future by connecting all the negative things that have happened to us in the past. We then visualize the same thing happening in the future.

Left to themselves ninety percent of your

worries will never materialize. I have shown this to people who have attended our courses. I tell them to write down their worries and review them six months later. All of them tell me that almost all of their worries never really happened. The ten percent that did happen was good for them!

Your strong visualization actually invites these worries to become true! If a worry constantly nags you, bring in the understanding that the worry itself is a creation of your mind. The mind itself is unreal. The connection that it makes with your thoughts is unreal. Therefore, the worry is also unreal! You can replace negative words with positive words and negative thoughts with positive thoughts. It is that easy. These words have power.

We do not realize how powerful our thoughts and words are. As we discussed earlier, various experiments like those on water, show clearly that even water responds clearly to our words, thoughts and feelings. Over seventy percent of our body is made up of water and seventy percent

of planet earth is covered with water. So you can imagine the power of words!

These experiments established beyond doubt what the Eastern mystics said centuries ago: As are your thoughts, so is your will. As is your will, so is your action. As is your action, so you become.

Don't think that negative thoughts and words will only affect those against whom you express them. Understand clearly that these same thoughts and words will have an equal effect on you, the person who created them. Negativity does not merely affect others, it affects you first.

We have looked at what the scriptures say and what I think about why stress is created. Let us now look at what science says.

We all have a part of our brain that controls our actions such as breathing, digestion and such activities that the body does automatically, involuntarily. Nature has designed a fail-safe system in a part of our brain called hypothalamus. This part of the brain also includes what biologists refer to as the reptilian brain.

Behavioral scientists often talk about the fight or flight response. When the bodymind system perceives a danger to our survival the hypothalamus is alerted by The life saving adrenalin can become a killer when it is produced without reason.

our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind functions at speeds a million times faster than the conscious mind. So even before we consciously become aware of danger, we instinctively become alert. The hypothalamus activates the pituitary gland, the master gland, which then activates the adrenalin glands that secrete the adrenalin hormone, which is pumped into our extremities, the hands and legs. We then get ready for the 'fight or flight' reaction – either the energy prepares us to fight the threat or to run away from the threat.

The unconscious reptilian brain takes the decision to release chemicals into our body to protect us. This worked very well in the days of the caveman when he faced lions and tigers. He had to be ready even without thinking to fight or run away.

To study the effect of adrenalin on human beings today, experiments were carried out on athletes. Sprinters were lined up at the starting block and moments before the pistol was raised to signal to them to start running, the umpire lowered his arm. So, the sprinters had to fall back and reposition themselves. This was repeated six times. Without even running a meter the

Stress is a killer, but it is in the mind.

sprinters collapsed at the starting

block! The adrenalin level in their bodies had become dangerously high. The life saving adrenalin can become a killer when it is produced without reason.

The chances of our meeting a tiger or a lion are quite slim these days. Nevertheless our unconscious mind keeps sending signals of such danger. I call them 'fear strokes'. Psychologists estimate that we face at least half a dozen such fear strokes every day. These fear strokes produce large quantities of adrenalin in us. It has been established that depression is a direct result of such adrenalin production. Depression in turn is considered to be the main cause of many chronic and fatal illnesses.

Medical research has found that many young people in rich countries, even teenagers, have arteries so badly blocked that their arteries are similar to sixty-yearold people! Doctors have established that the physical condition is only one part of the problem. A much larger part is the emotional condition. It is now fairly well established that an emotional trigger causes the immediate onset of a heart attack or stroke, even though the physical condition may have been present for a long time.

Nowadays, cardiac physicians routinely request people to fill in a questionnaire on stress factors in addition to conventional tests to determine how prone they are to cardiac problems.

Doctors have found that major traumas in life such as death of a loved one, loss of job, loss of money and even transfers in job and moving houses can be serious stress factors that can lead to heart attacks.

What is true of heart attacks is true of many non-life threatening but highly debilitating ailments such as backaches, migraines and ulcers. The underlying emotional or psychological factor is far more relevant than the superficial physiological causes.

Stress is a killer, but it is in the mind.

We create fear strokes through worry. We create them through conditioning. You can correct the situation temporarily through medicines. Unless the underlying cause is removed, no medicine can be effective in permanently curing the ailment.

In an IT company the Chief Executive received an enquiry for a project. He sent it down for a proposal. The team that worked on such projects did a full review and said that they could do the job in six months at a cost of a million dollars.The manager in charge of the team reviewed this and said the team can do this in 4 months at a cost of three quarter million dollars.

The proposal went up to a General Manager. The General Manager called everyone, gave them a pep talk and said, 'We should be able to do this for half a million dollars in three months.' Then he sent this as his proposal to the Chief Executive.

The Chief Executive called the client and told him that his company will deliver the product in two months at a cost of half a million dollars.

People who work in corporations can relate with this incident. People who make decisions and commitments are often out of touch with ground reality. Once such decisions are made their egos are in play. Anything can be sacrificed but not the ego! A simple study of corporate history can show how many companies have failed because of the egos of the people who led them.

I am told by some of my disciples in the corporate field about something called Level 5 Leadership. This is about those corporate leaders who put themselves behind the needs of the company and the people who work for them rather than placing their own ego needs first. Research has shown that the Chief Executives of companies that have been commercially successful consistently are hardly known to the outside world! These leaders are so humble, and focused inwards.

In life, there are two categories of people: those who are stressed and those who are not. Those who are stressed are those who wish to control life. They like to mould life in the way they wish it to be. They are focused only on themselves. Those who have no stress are those who flow with life. They accept without complaint what life offers them. Their focus is about what they can do for others. You feel the stress when you flow against the current, not when you flow with it. You lose yourself when you flow with the current.

You can choose to get stressed just by staying at home. It is not necessary to go out and work. Research shows that the highest frequency of divorces happens between the ages of forty and fifty. People tend to divorce more when children grow up and leave home. Till then children have been the buffers between their parents. When children leave home, husband and wife do not know what to say to each other. Silence creates stress!

Stress at the workplace starts with our education system. We start ranking children from a very young age. When in a group three people are graded as heroes, the rest of the group feels useless. We are taught to compete from a very early age. This comparison continues into the workplace and converts it into a battlefield.

A small story:

A crow was sitting in a tree doing nothing all day. A rabbit passed by, watched the crow and became envious. The rabbit asked, 'Can I also sit like this doing nothing?'

The crow said, 'Of course, please do if you wish to.' So the rabbit sat under the tree and did nothing. Some time later, a fox came by and ate the rabbit.

The moral is: to be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

The so-called Human Resource programs specify that people must be categorized. I am told that in many corporations it is necessary to show that ten or fifteen percent of the people are bad performers. People are reduced to statistics! In order to survive people are forced to make others victims. This is probably why they call these offices 'concrete jungles'!

As long as people are driven by fear and greed, they cannot be inspired. They can be controlled and made to perform routine tasks, but they cannot be inspired to do the impossible. This is the dilemma today's corporations face. They need people to perform, but their kit of motivational techniques is not enough. It contains the whip and the carrot, nothing more.

Human beings are not satisfied merely with material things. Psychologists in the field of management recognize this and say that salaries and perquisites are dissatisfiers and not satisfiers. What they mean is that if people are poorly paid they are unhappy, but they do not become happy by being paid well. They look for something more. They look for recognition.

A well-known psychologist built a model of how human beings move up in their desires. This is now named after him. At the base of this pyramid are one's survival needs of food, shelter and other material essentials. People then look for fulfillment in the society they live in, such as building a network and so on. They then seek love and attention. Then they look for respect, name and fame. After all this they are still dissatisfied. They feel that there is something still missing in their lives.

That something is within. This is the zone where we flow free of stress. This is the zone of

inner realization. This is the zone where you know that you are one with the universal energy. Whether you work at home, in an office or factory, or you do not work at all, you still look forward to this state where you are centered.

This is what we teach in our basic Life Bliss Program courses. The five levels of the pyramid correspond to the seven levels of energy that we carry within us. These seven centers of energy are called chakras* in the vedic system. Each chakra* represents an emotional state as well as a state of desire. As we fulfill the needs of each chakra* we move up in energy till we reach a state of fulfillment. It is a process many thousands of people have gone through with remarkable effect. We have taught these programs in many corporations worldwide. I call this a 'Guaranteed Solution'.

I referred to the Level 5 Leadership concept earlier. If this concept is about developing people who are more concerned about what they can do to help others and the world and through that process themselves, then our Life Bliss Programs are a simple route to developing such Level 5 Leaders. Such leaders not only do not suffer from stress themselves, but they also do not induce stress in others.

To sum up, stress is an inevitable part of life. There can be no life without what we term 'stress'. It is just the mind-body response to what happens outside of us. It is not the disturbance outside that creates the trouble, the stress. It is the disturbance inside that does it. That is why we said earlier that we are the disturbance.

This is why, what causes stress in one person does not necessarily cause stress in another person. Someone said that the reverse of 'stressed' reads as 'desserts'! What is poison for one is nectar for another!

Stress is such an important issue in the corporate world. They estimate that trillions of dollars are wasted because of stress. As long as stress affects only people no one cares. The moment it affects what they call the bottom line, of course something must be done about it. Talking about stress and offering solutions that work temporarily at best is a huge business.

Maslow - American psychologist famous for his concept of the five layered hierarchy of needs.

Chakras - Energy centers in the body. Literally means 'wheel' based on the experience of mystics who perceived these energy centers as whirlpools of energy. There are seven major chakras along the spine: muladhara, swadhishthana, manipuraka, anahata, vishuddhi, ajna and sahasrara.

There is nothing that you can do about stress by playing with things outside, rather than fixing what is wrong within. How long can you run? From what will you run away?

What you can do is to change yourself. You can make yourself stress-proof. It is so simple. Choose not to be affected by what happens outside you. This is not impractical. This is a simple truth. It is your conditioning that makes you get affected by what happens to you through events that are beyond your control. Nothing is inherently good or bad except what we judge them to be.

Drop your judgment about yourself, people around you and situations. You will be free of stress. That is all it takes to be liberated from stress. Meditation can help you with this liberation. It helps you reach the restful mind state from which you can witness events around you without being touched by them.

You really have nothing to lose by trying, except your stress!

This is a simple and yet a powerful technique to clear stress. We teach this technique in our Life Bliss Programs for unblocking the manipuraka chakra* or navel energy center, which is the seat of stress. This technique should always be practised before a meal, when the stomach is empty and a few hours before sleep.

While standing, shout, scream, rave and rant in a language that you do not know. If anyone is listening, it should also not make any sense to them. Be aggressive in letting out all your emotions and feelings that will start pouring out of you once you start. Cry if you so wish. Roll on the floor if your emotions drive you.

This technique is a powerful meditation. It unblocks your unconscious and allows all the negativities stored inside to dissolve. Typical psychoanalytical sessions when patients talk to their analysts or even throw things around for catharsis, are still conscious processes. Only ten percent of your stored memories will be released. Processes such as hypnosis are through the unconscious and you have no control. This technique is a superconscious process in which you retain awareness while cleansing yourself.

Practise this technique for twenty minutes. Then sit down and allow the energy to spread within you in silence for ten minutes. During this silence just be a witness to your thoughts. Do not suppress them or chase them.

Manipuraka chakra - Subtle energy center located near the navel region and associated with worry.