How to Transform Stress into Serenity

I am well-acquainted with stress, as indeed are many of my fellow humans. You are too, in all likelihood. That state of mind that emerges from the void between what you have and what you want. It’s a toxic cocktail of feeling both a victim of, and responsible (to some degree) for whatever lack, limitation or adversity you’re experiencing.

The emotions that stress evokes can range from mild irritation to abject dread and ultimately hopelessness.

No surprise then that chronic stress can eventually seep beyond our psyches into our bodies, causing physical symptoms of what previously seemed to be ‘all in the mind’.?Studies suggest?that stress hormones may even wake up dormant cancer cells that remain in the body after treatment.

With the luxury of hindsight I can look back on my life and clearly identify numerous episodes of physical phenomena, that I can now attribute to stress — not one of which doctors could understand, let alone cure.

In my 20s, panic attacks, insomnia and cardiac arrhythmias.

In my 30s, acute back problems and digestive issues.

In my 40s, muscular pain and allergies.

Nothing particularly noteworthy but all quite debilitating at the time. Today, I am free from them all and consider myself as fit as a butcher’s dog.

The catalyst has been a growing awareness of the part that I play in the experience of stress and thus the ability to develop mastery over it.

Here are my findings in a nutshell:

1. Know the boundaries of your responsibility: Whatever situation you are in, do not indulge in recriminations and self-blame. The situation will be the natural result of everything that has gone before it. Once it has manifest, your only responsibility is how you respond to it and this starts with the thoughts you entertain.
2. Respond, don’t react: Reactions come from established, learnt patterns of behaviour — habits — which are essentially unconscious. Ensure you?respond?in a conscious, intelligent way to whatever seems to be creating the stress. This might involve working hard not to externalise emotions.
3. Do not undermine your worth: You are a sovereign being with free-will and the ability to impact the world around you in profound ways you may not even be aware of. Never belittle yourself (or anyone else) and always maintain a sense of value, power and responsibility.
4. Don’t drag the past or future into the present: Our memories are artefacts of the past — they are not the past itself. The past is no more and has no existence in the present. So when we recirculate the past, we try to give life to what is dead, creating mental zombies instead. The same goes with fantasising over the future.
5. Choose your thoughts: Thoughts are the mind’s food. You wouldn’t put any old rubbish in your mouth — be even more selective with what you allow into your mind. Thoughts create feelings and our human experience is a?feeling?one. Think better to feel better.
6. Do not suppress emotion: Emotions are there to be felt. The quality and intensity of emotion gives you the best feedback available on your thinking. So feel them, and then let them go. Feeling emotion and externalising them are not the same. Experiencing them is always good, externalising them is often not.
7. Choose your feelings: Taking back your power from habitual reactive behaviours and zombie thinking will allow you to choose how you want to feel. We all want to feel good, so do just that, in the knowledge that your feelings are quite independent of circumstance.

If you practice these disciplines diligently, you will start to master the way you feel,?independently?of the circumstances you find yourself in. In turn, this will lead to better decisions, creating more auspicious circumstances for you to enjoy. You will spend more time in a feeling of serenity, which is the emotional backdrop to our human lives, just as silence is the backdrop to music.

I have found meditation to be a great help in transmuting stress into serenity. Yet as powerful as it is, it cannot replace the moment to moment alertness needed for emotional mastery. Do not rely on meditation alone. I recommend non-guided, solitary meditation, using breath focus or mantra.

Practice feeling good. Whatever you want to feel, all you need do is imagine it and?real-ise?it — amplify and intensify it. Imagination is our most powerful faculty — use it to create your emotional climate. Feelings held in imagination are no different from any other feeling and just as (if not more) real.

We all crave serenity and — even if we can’t remember experiencing it — we know exactly how it feels. Serenity is available to you at every moment. All you need do is determine that it is a birthright that you claim now. Have no truck with any thoughts that suggest otherwise.

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