Stress is a Choice

Even if you only dabble in meditation and mindfulness, you’ll hear this a lot: you are not your thoughts.

You’ll also hear that thoughts are not the cause of your suffering so much as your relationship to them.

It’s helpful to view thoughts as a form of energy. Everything is energy, right? It’s the constant of the universe. Light is energy at, well, the speed of light. Matter is energy slowed down to a crawl. 

Thoughts? Feelings? I guess perhaps somewhere in between or an interlocking set of both, the interplay between the electrical impulses course if through your body and triggering your mass of muscles and blood and brains into some sort of endeavor around consciousness.

Stress hurts. Physically hurts. When you turn attention to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions, you realize how much they actually physically hurt. And, while additional guidance from meditation teachers is often not to judge them, just be aware of them, it's unavoidable to me in this non-enlightened state that excitement feels better than fear. Love feels better than hate.

I used to think that emotions happened to me. That there was nothing I could really do except perhaps endure them when they felt bad, and savor them when they felt good.

Now, I'm not so sure.

Today was a stressful day. My wife is out of town, so I'm on duty to get the kids up, ready, and take them to school. I had a critical client presentation with a client that's hard to read. I had another new-client meeting where the news of Silicon Valley Bank collapsing has added to the pressure to get some sales traction. The refrigerator secretly sprung a secretive and vicious little leak that over days or perhaps weeks produced a bubble on the ceiling of the bedroom downstairs, and insurance won't cover it. My handyman wife replaced the ignitor on the oven before she left to go out of town, but it won't heat so dinner is still cold. 

Yes, a stressful day. A painful day. And yet, despite the concentration of pressures, I feel better today than similar experiences compared to, say, five years ago before I was meditating regularly. 

A lot comes into play -- quality dad-daughter time while my wife is away for a few days, client didn't actually bank with SVB, refrigerator still works it just doesn't make ice, and the still functional stove top means we'll still enjoy a hot meal tonight. 

How many people in the world would be thrilled to trade places with me? Lots. Millions. Billions?

So, I'm happy in my warm, deteriorating little home. It's quite easy at this moment to see that I can choose happiness over stress.