admin_website Article published on the 8th August 2018 in The Asian Leader Newspaper.
We are stressed out, feeling stretched, overwhelmed with life and unable to cope with the pressures of a high impact lifestyle. We are struggling to find balance in the chaos. We are living in a world which we have engineered to bring us every comfort and convenience to make our lives easier yet why are we still struggling on a basic level to find the wellbeing, peace and happiness that we so desire? What we are failing to understand is that all these states should not be a goal that we strive or work towards but rather the fundamental requirement from which we function and govern all of our affairs from. To do it any other way is detrimental and counter-productive to ourselves and to those around us. Stress is a factor in five out of six leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory diseases and accidents with an estimated 75-90% of all doctor visits as a result of stress-related issues. Are these statistics likely to go down and is our current approach to how to we deal with these conditions truly effective or are we simply treating the symptoms rather than the root cause of stress?
To be able to address these issues, a better understanding of the health of a human being needs to be adopted. We must understand the concept of health and wellness from a greater perspective other than the physical health of a human being.
The word health comes from the Anglican word which means whole or holy. We cannot speak about health without invoking the sense of a human spirit. If you were to ask the sages, shamans, the wisdom keepers of all times and of all cultures, languages and religions, and ask them what makes up a human being, they would all say – mind, body, spirit and emotions. You cannot separate one from the other. It is one beautiful package. In our culture, we give more emphasis to the ‘body’ as it is the most easily measurable. We can measure height, weight, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, right down to even being able to measure DNA. We have a really sound understanding of the way in which the body functions, however, unless we honour the integration, balance and harmony of the mind, body, spirit and emotion connection then we will end up with a dysfunctional society as we are seeing today. An ailing or dysfunctional society can never be great and healthy – it can only be ailing and dysfunctional. Only a healthy society can truly be great and prosperous. In order for us to effectively address the health challenges we are facing as a society we must introduce human spirituality back into health education and healthcare.
We think that stress comes from external factors such as the manipulating boss at work, the bickering children, the washing machine that didn’t work, the insensitive comment by our spouse, the traffic jam, the pressures of life. The stress is actually coming from one place and one place only which is our inner reaction or our thoughts in the moment. It is the inner meaning, judgments and the monkey chatter that is taking place within about what we are perceiving on the external level which is causing us the stress – not the actual situation. To illustrate this further – your son or daughter is behaving in a particular way. What is really upsetting you is not the external actions they are taking but rather the meaning that you are giving their actions. Your inner dialogue is telling you that you have failed as a parent, you are fearful about what people will think of you, you are feeling angry for having invested so much time and energy in bringing them up yet they clearly fail to act in accordance to your expectations. Anger and fear (fight & flight emotions) are known as the survival emotions and they are useful and needed if they are used within the boundaries of physical survival. However, this inbuilt adaptive response is having a maladaptive effect on our human spirit because we are continuously putting our bodies in a state of unnecessary stress by harbouring unresolved anger and fear within our bodies. We need to understand the basis of everything that is happening within us. If we are generating illnesses from within, then correcting from within is more important.
Humanity is experiencing a spiritual crisis and to deal with this we need to turn to spiritual cures, inner resources or coping techniques such as faith, optimism, patience, forgiveness humour and compassion to name a few. These resources are the muscles of the soul.
Like our physical muscles, if we do not exercise the muscles of the soul, they will lack the strength to cope as we go through the journey of life and experience the constant challenges and tests it throws in our path. Life is like seasons, constantly changing so we must have the inner resources to be able to withstand these changes and be able to rise above each experience as a stronger, more resilient human being.
If we can change our perspective of who we are at the core, then everything changes. If we live from the perspective that we are human beings on a spiritual journey, then we remain stuck in a victim’s mentality whereby we feel we are being punished or abandoned. Life becomes increasingly difficult and we become hopeless. If we can shift our perspective to one of, ‘We are spirits on a human journey’, then we move from living life like a victim to living life like a victor. Now, everything, good, bad and the ugly are open to experience. If we can learn from all of these experiences then they prove to be valuable lessons for us. Stress is a perceived disconnection from our Divine Source when in fact we are never disconnected from our Divine Source, God or whatever else you conceive this to be. If we have unresolved issues of anger and fear within us then this will cloud our judgement and we will feel like we are disconnected and cut off from this. We want to learn how to handle stress not only with our mind but also with our human spirit.
The human being is the most highly sophisticated machine on the entire planet and if we do not operate it properly it will cause us many problems. When we have such a sophisticated and sensitive machine, we cannot and should not be operating it like a blacksmith. Doing so makes attaining peace impossible. We need to adopt a culture of health. Not more hospitals, operations and medications but rather a culture of health in which we take back the control of this magnificent machine and start to pay enough attention to it so we can move towards health and wellness. To establish a culture of health there needs to be a synergy taking place between health professionals and people from various other health care fields all working together.
The implications of understanding the nature of stress and then addressing this from a place of greater clarity invite us to experience the magnificence of who we truly are. We begin to have a deeper, fuller, richer and more connected experience of life. By having this understanding, we won’t simply wake up tomorrow and start living an effortless, more peaceful and happier life but we will spend less of our time in the state of stress and we won’t see it as our reality anymore.
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