Understanding Stress

Almost all of us are familiar with the word stress but most of us do not really know what stress actually is? We also know that stress can create both mental and physical disorders, but do we know how and why?

Modern advancement in science and technology has no doubt many advantages, but its drawbacks are far more dangerous than its advantages. The pace of our life has triggered a sense of fierce competition among people which is accompanied by strong feelings of envy, lust, uselessness, loss and a feeling of being financially broke. It has also given us a sense of being overtaken by the fast pace of events happening around us. All this combines to germinate a lethal situation conducive to accrual of stress. These strong negative emotions, as mentioned above, build up a severe strain in the human mind creating nervous tension, anxiety and depression. Such a state as this continued over a long period of time damages the mind and we fall into the abyss of stress.

Seeking pleasures is the chief cause of stress. In our pursuit of seeking pleasures we become greedy and our desires, needs and demands start shooting up with every single second. The more the demands, desires and needs, the more the stress.

How does stress express itself in people? This needs to be understood. Stressed people resort to using drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. They may have eating disorders and restless sleep. In short, they start abusing those substances around them which are supposed to be beneficial for them. They fly into a state of rage and ruin their performance at work; ruin their relationships at home; and fail to achieve their ambitions in their lives. This stressful situation comes over the brain and the body with full might and we start feeling the pain. The important thing to remember is that everyone experiences stress, but dealing with it varies from person to person. Some can handle stress diligently while others cannot, therefore, in nine out of ten cases, people either blame others or external circumstances for their stressful circumstances.

Our senses are controlled by our brains. We can only control our senses if we control the brain—the king of senses. When a person is in a meditative state, he is calm because his brain is calm; and his senses are under control, not tensed. At this point the stress level is zero and external events cease to have any adverse effects on the brain. We need to learn how to prolong this state of mental and nervous calmness; and ultimately learn how to live it to avoid the onslaught of stress. The key is to keep the king—the brain—in a peaceful and meditative state.

Getting rid of stress may be difficult but surely not impossible. Everyone can choose whatever works best for them:

• In order to relieve stress, practising religious rituals like worshipping, praying and singing hymns are extremely beneficial.
• Yoga is a very effective way of minimizing stress. Yogic exercises and breathing practices are wonderful ways to relax, rejuvenate and calm the body and the mind simultaneously.
• Meditation can be extremely powerful tool to get rid of stress.
• Contentment is a precious blessing if someone has that. Compete, but allow others to perform as well. Also, allow the pace of life to go on on its own pace; don’t try to control it.

We need to remember a simple fact: a relaxed person in a meditative state of the brain is teeming with cosmic energy and the body remains free from diseases and disorders. 

Why Yoga is a Must?

It is the age of materialism which has created a spiritual void in the lives of many. Today the majority of us feel that our lives are useless, barren and devoid of meaning. The turmoil of our daily life brings stress to the body and the mind resulting in serious psychological disorders like depression, tension, stress, anxiety, restlessness, and rage. These problems need to be addressed before it is too late. There are many ways to nip all these psychological disorders off; and yoga is one of them.

Yoga restores the mind to simplicity and peace; and eliminates all specks of confusion and distress from the mind. This state can be achieved from the practice of yogic asana (postures) and pranayama (breathing). Yoga is a cleansing tool and both physical and breathing exercises can cure physical, physiological and psychological disorders. But that is not the ultimate end of yoga: it aims at achieving self-realization by bringing perfect harmony between the body and the mind, in the absences of which we suffer from different physical and mental ailments.

Yoga—a set of mild exercises—does not put excessive strain on human muscles and bones like other physical exercises do. It tones the body and strengthens our bones and muscles. Yoga improves our circulatory, respiratory, digestive and hormonal systems quite easily and effectively. When this physical milestone is achieved, the mind becomes calm to perform at its best. Yogic breathing exercises are incredibly useful to make the flow of fresh and oxygenated blood in our body. This process results in increased energy and the body is thoroughly rejuvenated. On the emotional side, yoga calms our feelings and clarifies the mind.

A yogic mind does not know negative emotions and negative attitudes. If yoga is practised with full honesty, dedication and concentration it will bring positive effects in all walks of human life. It improves physical and mental health and makes life meaningful. The best thing is that yoga can be practised at any age.

We all must remember that the mind can be our secret enemy or our devoted friend. Yoga controls the mind to control our emotions and turn them in our favour, not against us.

Living in the Now

"Past has gone, forget it; future is far away, don’t worry; present is here, use it."

If only we could decode the wisdom in this quote, we may be able to make our lives a lot easier, but easier said than done. The only force that can either facilitate us or keep us away from using the present is our mind. It is the most powerful thing, in a very awesome and mysterious way, that human beings possess in their bodies and without any doubt it rules over human lives by shaping them according to its functioning.

The mind’s favourite pastime is preoccupation. It loves to live either in the past or in the future and this needs no training at all. Despite the fact that the outcomes of the past events in one’s life cannot be changed, the brain enjoys going over all those events, tragic or fantastic, petty or vital, charming or horrific and gets a strange kind of satisfaction or dejection depending upon the experiences of the past.

Likewise, the other favourite preoccupation for the mind is to live in the future. The mind remains in a state of worrying about what might go wrong in the future or what might be an exceptional experience. Regarding tragedies and sad incidents, if the future flight of thoughts were limited to thoughts only, that would have been fine but the problem is that the mind, being an exceptionally powerful magnet, starts attracting those tragic events, which are focused upon owing to worries, into one’s life in whose skull it resides. This is how some people die many times before the actual death; fail many times before the actual failure in the future and face a variety of tragedies before the often-thought-of tragedies actually happen in their lives. The interesting thing is that sometimes those tragedies never happen depending upon the intensity level of one’s focus. The mind’s flight into the future also needs no training. When our minds think about the past or the future, they are on autopilot mode and we lose all control on them. But to bring our minds to the very moment we live in, to the present moment, to the now is a real challenge that needs rigorous training.

Living in the moment is what we all need because it is the real life. Living in the moment means coming to the now because we only live in the now moment. Whatever we did in the past is gone and has lost its reality and whatever we will do in the future are mere plans, far-fetched dreams and ambitions. They are not yet the actual physical reality. That proves that we live bit by bit, second by second or more accurately now by now. When we come out of the autopilot mode of our mind, which is also known as preoccupation, we come back to life and start living the very moment. If we don’t cherish that moment, we do not live the true and literal meaning of life. In short, coming out of the autopilot mode is coming to the now and this situation is called mindfulness, the opposite phenomenon to preoccupation.

But it should not be forgotten that living in the future for the fulfilment of our dreams is a wonderful idea provided that we think about positive outcomes: success, wealth, health, love and fame, because that is what the mind is going to attract and that is what most people live for. Attracting positive outcomes can only be possible when we know how the mind works and how it hijacks our lives if it is allowed to go on autopilot. It has been researched that in autopilot mode, the mind is mostly engaged in negative pursuits and creates negativity effortlessly. That is why it is very important to know about the working mechanism of the brain; how to stop it from going in autopilot mode; and how to train it to think positively to manifest future dreams.

Multi-tasking is another aspect of preoccupation which means doing several things simultaneously. Multi-tasking results in the lack of quality in everything that we do and every action that we perform. For example, when we are over the phone, we mostly find ourselves engaged in working on a computer, taking down notes, giving instructions to others using the body language or driving a car. All tasks done in this fashion seriously lack quality due to the absence of attention on the part of the doer and need re-doing in majority of the cases. There is one extreme disadvantage of such sort of multi-tasking i.e. stress. It is because the process of re-doing and bringing in the required quality to a task takes double time. Therefore, we always run out of time and remain in a continuous state of chasing things around. Such a situation, continued over a long period of time, creates stress which is the mother of majority of ills that we have in our society today.

Paying attention on purpose to the present or the now and then discerning anything with clarity is called mindfulness. This is a very powerful state of the mind where the healing process takes place. God has bestowed upon our minds great healing powers. These healing powers are only activated when we are mindful and consciously know what we are doing. When we live in the now, the mind is extremely relaxed and in this state of ecstasy, it starts fixing our maladies, whether big or small. As discussed, the mind loves to live like a vagabond and goes wherever it likes in imagination, whereas on the other hand the body lives its own life. It is one of the most difficult tasks, more difficult than moving mountains, to bring the vagabond mind and the non-nomadic body into a state of perfect harmony. If we can achieve this harmony between the mind and the body, we must expect unparalleled things to happen.

Mindfulness or paying attention is a skill that can be learnt but unfortunately it is taken for granted. Teachers in schools, colleges and universities keep telling their students to pay attention and sometimes get cross with them for not being mindful, especially in schools; parents also get angry with their children for not paying attention and so on. But the problem is that no one, neither teachers nor parents, teach us how to pay attention, how to be mindful, how to live in the present and how to come out of autopilot mode of the mind to live a true life in order to achieve our dreams. Preoccupation is a dangerous commodity for all, especially for students who are in the process of laying foundations of successful and enviable lives ahead.

By learning how to focus, how to meditate and how to pay attention, monstrous maladies like stress, tension, depression and anxiety, which are the top killers of modern times, can be avoided. Now that we understand how the mind works, we are left with only one option if at all we are serious in improving the quality of our lives and manifesting our long-cherished dreams:

Either to get control of the mind and live in the now and the future at our own will or be mere helpless spectators and allow the mind to drag our lives into the kingdom of sheer negativity!

"Whatever you focus on the longest becomes the strongest."

Love and Dreams in Education

If education cannot teach and train students how to fall in love, it does not serve the true purpose. Without falling in love it is nearly impossible for students to see dreams with their eyes open, which is absolutely imperative to bring their long cherished aspirations from the heavens of ideas down to the world of physical reality. Therefore, if love and dreams are missing from education, as unfortunately are in most cases, there is no point in rubbing the brain against books throughout an academic year, listening to routine lectures, going through the pressure games i.e. examinations, and at the end of all this process getting a piece of paper with a student’s name inscribed onto it which proves that he could not become a lover or a dreamer even at the cost of his own money and time. 

We know that lovers are incredible people. They achieve what non-lovers only aspire to achieve because love, the second highest form of mind energy and frequency (gratitude being the highest of all), is the driving force to succeed in life. To a forceful young person in love, all sorts of target hitting is possible because love creates determination, will power, intense focus, persistence, perseverance and tenacity. If love is missing from education, all these splendid qualities are mere corpses; and it is simply impossible to win the battle of life with an army of corpses. Also, in matters of love, we must not practise economy; we need it in abundance to influence our futures in a positive way.

Great accomplishments of history have been made by great lovers, not by great students who scored the highest mark in all sorts of examinations with love missing from their academic life. Thomas Edison did not invent more than 1000 inventions just because he wanted to cross the 1000 figure, like a student who has to write a 1000-words-essay on a given topic. He loved to invent that was why he did. Bill Gates is the richest man on earth not because he wanted to prove to the world that riches can be achieved, but because he fell in love with computers from an early age and loved what he did. Pablo Picasso did not try to prove to the world that he had the sublime touch of brushes, wet with paints, but he loved what he did and his sketches came straight from his heart. Similarly, Norgay and Hillary did not become the first people to climb Mount Everest just because they wanted to measure the height; they loved to surmount the eternal challenge that Mount Everest had been posing to climbers; and they loved to stand at the top of the highest peak on earth. There are numerous examples regarding the wonders of love and an unlimited list of the same can be created. Anyone doubting this reality can make a probe into historical facts simply to find out that all successful individuals, whether be they scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, authors, or poets, succeeded because they loved what they did. Their strong love created powerful dreams which made them achieve what they wanted to achieve and made them known in the world. Once a dream is created, the destination becomes extremely vivid right in front of the eyes of a lover so that he can step onto the ‘road of love’, especially a love that flares up like gunpowder. That is it. Teaching students how to love and dream is the true purpose of education. 

If education does not create lovers and dreamers, it would be the worst kind of atrocity education can inflict on the youth by murdering their potential talents—talents that could have, otherwise, added value to the lives of human beings in the fields of science, medicine, art, literature, politics and so on. If our lives today are comfortable, we owe it to the lovers of the past who loved their work to create marvels for us. 

Those who design an education system, along with teachers, are responsible to create lovers and dreamers out of the youth who have milk instead of blood in their veins. Teachers who are in direct contact with students do not have to do teaching only; they have to work like architects to give the world great scientists, artists, doctors and philanthropists by feeding the spirit of love in their students. This is a huge responsibility. Unfortunately, in our education systems, we do not teach children how to love and dream, with a few exceptions at individual levels. We must know that any work without love means unsatisfied spiritual desire in the worker and this is the surest road to failure and the greatest waste of all. The only possible way to fulfil this huge responsibility is to teach the youth how always to be in love and furthermore what to be in love with.

A Probe into the Brain

Scientists have been researching on the brain for centuries but it looks that this three-pound entity is still challenging the brain scientists with its utterly complex and supremely mysterious character. There are some unanswered brain mechanisms that need some serious probe. Though the modern scientific research has not yet been able to measure the depths of the brain, I invite readers’ opinions and ideas regarding some of those unanswered brain mechanisms, which are established facts though without any explanations in most cases or rather varied explanations for the same fact. Your responses to the following questions would be much appreciated:

1.     What is the reality of thoughts and how and why are thoughts created?

2.     Why do the two hemispheres of a single brain have tremendously different characters?

3.     Why do the opposite hemispheres of the brain control the opposite sides of the body i.e. the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and vice versa?

4.     Why does the brain live in pre-occupation i.e. lives in thinking about the past events or the future dreams and ambitions? Why does it not like to live in the present?

5.     If thoughts are mere virtual, spiritual and mental reality and not physical then: Why do they consume a huge amount of the brain's energy? How do they create realities when they are themselves mere thoughts and ideas?

6.     It is a scientific fact that the image of anything that we see is created upside down on our mental screen. The questions are: Why do not we see all things in the world upside down? How does the brain make us see things upright and why does it do so? OR Do we really see things upright?

7.     When we look at different things like water, stone, oil etc. we know that these things are wet, hard or sticky, even though the brain or we have not touched anything physically? How does the brain know that something is hard, soft, wet, smooth, rough, hot or cold?