Soul Sustenance

Stress Management

There are some false beliefs about stress that we have acquired:

"Stress is natural and has a positive part to play in our present day lives"

Truth: There is no such thing as 'positive stress'. By definition, stress is unnatural and unhealthy, and is therefore always a negative state.

Stress can be defined as a form of pain that comes to tell you there is something you need to change. Pain - any pain - is a messenger saying there is something you need to learn.

While some people rightly differentiate pain from suffering, where pain is physical and suffering is mental or emotional, but the term pain can be used for both.

If you put your hand in the fire, what do you experience? Pain. What do you learn? Not to do it again. You listened to the messenger, you learned and you changed. We can experience stress or pain at four levels - spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. When the messenger comes at the mental or emotional levels, with painful thoughts and negative feelings created by no one but ourselves, do we listen to the messenger? No we don't, we shoot the messenger down. Why? Because we have been taught to believe that some stress is necessary and good. 'They' told us it is normal, and we believed 'them'. And so we allow stress to develop within ourselves, not realizing we are creating our own slow death. One reason why the developed world's medical services are having such a tough time is because more and more of us are taking less and less responsibility for our own mental and emotional well-being. No one told us that a single negative thought could have a devastating effect on our immune system.

(To be continued tomorrow ….)

In Spiritual Service,
Brahma Kumaris