How your mind causes stress and what you can do to stop it. Part 4 of 6.

Whether you like it or not, things will always change. If you fight the flow of change by clinging to an idea of how things should be, you will get hurt because you can’t stop life and make it fit your vision.

You can learn to go with the flow of change by becoming more open, flexible, and accepting through meditation. Meditation is a great way to study evolution because it gives you a chance to sit still and watch your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations come and go. Or, you can stiffen up and fight, which will hurt the process more. Did you ever notice that as some people get older, they get crankier and more depressed, while others age gracefully and with a smile on their faces? The difference is in how well they can deal with the complex changes that life throws at them.

Pain is a given, just like change. So, too, is happiness. You can’t have one without the other, even though most people would rather have it some other way. When you tighten your stomach and hold your breath to avoid pain, whether it’s physical or emotional, you make the pain worse. And when you attach a story to the pain, like “I don’t believe this is happening to me” or “This is Karma, I deserve this,” you stick an extra layer of suffering on top of the pain. This makes your body tighten and resist even more, which makes the pain worse instead of better.

You can learn to take deep breaths, relax your belly, cut through your story, and let go of your pain through meditation. Most of the time, the pain goes away on its own, and even when it doesn’t, it usually gets much easier to deal with.

Your mind tends to compare you to other people and judge everything you do as wrong or not good enough. This makes you anxious, frustrated, and upset. This tendency often comes from your stories or life script, which is a group of deeply held, often negative beliefs. At the end of the day, if you think you’re perfect and loveable the way you are, your mind has nothing to compare you to. When you meditate, you can learn to watch your mind’s judgments and comparisons without getting caught up in them or mistaking them for the truth.

Several psychological studies show that your ability to handle stressful situations depends significantly on whether you think you have the tools you need to do so. If you think you can, you’re right. If you think you can’t, you are also right. You might be your best asset if you feel you have what it takes. If your story keeps telling you that you’re not good enough, it just adds to the stress of a situation.

Meditation can teach you ways to deal with challenging situations and people, like how to focus and calm your mind, come back to the present moment, and develop positive emotions and states of mind. These skills can help you avoid negative, distracting thoughts and give you the power to deal with challenging situations and people. In the end, you can learn how to look past your story and get in touch with the natural source of hope and joy, the wellspring of pure being inside you.

Even if you can’t tell your story, you may be painfully aware of how strong emotions like anger, fear, longing, grief, jealousy, and desire make it hard to think, hurt your heart, and do things you later regret.

Meditation doesn’t get rid of these feelings right away, but it does teach you how to focus and calm your mind so that the feelings don’t get in the way. Then, if you want, you can use meditation to watch these feelings as they come up instead of trying to avoid or stop them. Over time, you can get a deep understanding of these feelings and how they are connected to the stories that keep bringing them up. Ultimately, you can look into these stories and break them down completely.

Pain, stress, and trouble? Who wants to think about things that aren’t interesting? But the more you understand suffering, pain, and anxiety, the easier it will be to lessen their effect on your life. Think about the following differences:

Pain is made up of direct, physical experiences with few mental overlays. Your heart tightens and hurts when your best friend says something mean to you. When you hit your thumb with a hammer, it hurts and hurts a lot. When you have the flu, your head feels like it’s being crushed in a vice.

Pain hurts. It’s that simple.

You are in pain when your mind makes money from your pain. For example, you decide that because she hurt your feelings, your best friend must secretly hate you, which means there must be something very wrong with you. The next thing you know, you’re not only hurt but also sad. Or you say your headache is a sure sign that you have a severe illness, which adds a lot of fear and hopelessness to an already challenging situation. In other words, suffering happens when you look at things through the skewed lens of the story your mind tells you.

The stress response is a way for your body to deal with difficult situations, whether they are physical or mental. Physical stressors like extreme heat or cold, a loud noise, or a violent attack are stressful no matter what your mind tells you about them. But most things that make you feel stressed out depend on your thoughts. For example, driving to work in heavy traffic, sitting at your desk for eight hours doing paperwork, taking phone calls, and then going home may not be very physically stressful. But if you’re worried about being late, have a terrible relationship with your boss, are angry at several of your clients or co-workers, and are still thinking about the fight you had with your spouse or best friend yesterday, it’s no wonder you crawl home at the end of the day completely exhausted. Just as your mind can turn pain into suffering, it can also turn familiar sources of stress into very stressful ones.

The body tightens when the mind gets stuck on particular thoughts and feelings. This is because the mind tends to fixate on things. Have you ever noticed how tense and worried you could feel when you think about the same situation over and over, even if it seems like a good one? Mindfulness meditation can help you develop an alert, open, and fluid mind. This kind of mind lets you move from one experience to the next without getting stuck or stuck on one thing. A mind that is open and wide, like the sky welcomes whatever comes up.

Come back tomorrow for part 5.Be well.

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