Post #26 05032020
To re-cap, I had finally reached a state of mind that results in a reduced stress level as measured by my blood pressure, now routinely 120/80 or less, without relying on cigarettes or any other drug.
How did I do that?
An insight comes to mind from the Est Training (now Landmark Forum) I attended so long ago (1980). The punch line to that four day training was simple, startling: Life is empty and meaningless! The point being that it is up to each one of us to create meaning…… every day, in every moment.
And, a companion insight offered by Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts, taken from The Nature of Personal Reality.
You are given the gifts of the gods,
you create your reality
according to your beliefs.
Yours is the creative energy
that makes your world.
There are no limitations to the self
except those you believe in.
Finally, there is the excerpt from my own book (11 Life Practices, practice #3, Life is Recreation):
The reality we experience is always personal and subjective.
About this we have no choice. It is the way our sensory system/brain is designed.
We could call this one of the rules governing this reality.
Rather than resist this feature of our reality, we do well to embrace it and use it to our advantage. Because we are creative beings, every moment is an opportunity to re-create new stories about ourselves, our lives and imagine new futures for ourselves.
In other words, we can’t help being story tellers. The very act of sensing reality and processing that data in our brain creates a story. It is the way we experience “reality.” However because we have created it, we also have the capacity to recreate it, i.e., to create a different story about ourselves, our current life experience.
So, returning to my high blood pressure episode, my story at the time was: the moment I completed my book, my purpose for “getting up in the morning” was gone. Suddenly I was experiencing my life as being empty and meaningless.
But (my story continues) I am a goal driven being. What do I do when I no longer have a goal?
After suffering in this anxiety driven state of mind, “wringing my hands” for several weeks, I suddenly (and accidentally) discovered I had super high blood pressure. This turned out to be a gift, a startling wake up call. Once I realized I had HBP after a lifetime of normal blood pressure, I dove into the research. How could this happen, I wanted to know.
What I discovered is stress is a leading cause of high blood pressure.
- Now I got it. The anxiety and emotional distress of losing my sense of purpose left me feeling life was, indeed, empty and meaningless. This story created stress, which generated my high blood pressure.
What is my way forward? What can I do about it?
Once again, Spiritdog was/is my savior, my teacher.
When I look into his eyes, touch his fur, in the blink of an eye I lurch out of the past/future, into being now-here, where joy lives. He wakes me up! He does for me what meditation can do, or sometimes the sun breaking over the trees on the eastern horizon, or sunlight shimmering across the surface of the lake, can do. But Spiritdog is highly reliable and always available. He, himself, is always in this space of being in every moment, and he is always at my side.
Being now-here, being, itself, is enough reason for appreciation, gratitude and joy he says without speaking.
The way forward is being now –here, he says without speaking.
When we are being now-here, the need for stories disappears. So do the stories themselves.
So the safe place in any storm is being now – here, returning us to joy.
And I love being goal oriented, having a sense of purpose. I don’t need to give this up; I can simply put my doing where it belongs, in the context of being. I can recognize I am whole and complete, with or without goals, that life is whole and complete as it is without me adding any of my stuff to it. And I can also pay attention, notice opportunities that offer me the possibility of making a difference, of contributing to the whole, that excite my passion ….. and show up by pouring my energy into actualizing them (practice #6 in 11 Life Practices).
Earlier in life I did this by practicing engineering, solving technical problems, and toward being an activist, doing what I could to solve this problem or that one, and later it was toward supporting groups of people in becoming high performance teams. In this later phase of my life, my passion has been devoted to writing. I wrote books, Dianna’s Way, then 11 Life Practices and now it is to write this, right now, right here. More fundamentally, writing has been a thread throughout my life, a way for me to explore my own personal reality.
But, none of this replaces being now-here, drenched in appreciation, gratitude, and joy. It is simply the content of my life that is fun to do.
So, as I see it, the way to handle stress on a day to day basis without using drugs, whether cigarettes, weed, or Prozac, is twofold:
- Practice being now-here.
- Be patient, paying attention to opportunities for contributing to the whole. Then show up!
Summarizing, life is bound to be up and down, exciting and boring, challenging and sleep inducing, projects start and end, careers begin and end. But no matter how things are going in the plan b) category, our back up is always the capacity to avail ourselves of plan a). No matter what we are up to in life, if we always nurture the capacity to be now-here, and practice it (why it is practice #1 in Life Practices), we are going to be OK.
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