STRESS OR BLISS?

The following is an excerpt from Michael Lee's book "Turn Stress into Bliss"

If you like what you read you can order the book online at www.theyogashop.com

What is Stress? What is Bliss?

Lets deal with the second one first. I have a friend who is a chiropractor and sees a lot of people who have chronic back pain of one kind or another. When he first sees a patient he likes to find out more about them so he can determine the best course of treatment. He asks several questions including the one “How long is it since you had some REAL FUN?”. He tells me there are basically three categories of response he gets to that question. Some people say something like “Oh, just last week I took my kids to an amusement park and we had a blast.” With these folks he knows that they will be easy to treat and the problem is most likely just a temporary physical dysfunction. Others might say something along the lines of “Well doc, its been a while since I had any real fun”. With these folks he knows there could be other things going on in their life as well as what is manifesting physically that could be contributing to their problem. Treatment won’t be as easy and may take longer. His third category is the most interesting. These are the folks that respond abruptly to his question with a statement like this. “Fun? What is that? What do you mean by “fun”? Could you define that for me?” With these people he knows he has real problems on his hands. They most likely have removed themselves psychologically from any genuine experience of their own life. They are probably not very well connected to themselves physically or emotionally and they tend to live their lives from their mind. They prefer to have their lives defined for them by an external authority rather than trust their own unique experience of life.

If you think about it, fun is different for different people. But anyone who ever has fun knows what it is. The same could be said of bliss. I recently experienced one of those magical days that will be unforgettable. When I write, I like to come to my simple lakefront “camp” in the North Woods of Maine. I have a beautiful view of Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, with the lake in the foreground. In the morning, the air was still and the lake was the calmest I had ever seen it. The water shimmered like glass. I was so awestruck by its beauty that instead of doing the next thing, I paused and sat down and simply took in the beauty of what was in front of my eyes for the next 10 minutes. It was so quiet and yet so majestically beautiful. Later in the day the sunset was even more beautiful. A real “Golden Pond” moment when scenery, feelings, and connection to life all seem to come to together in one instant to create an overall magnificent experience of life - a sensual and spiritual orgasm without sex. On both occasions, I was in “bliss” - at least according to my experience of it, and if anyone wanted to define it differently it would not affect my experience of it. It simply was what it was.

Now, I believe that my capacity to experience that bliss has a lot to do with what is happening overall in my life. If my life had been recently stressful for a prolonged period, would I have been able to notice the lake and the view? Or would my mind have been so busy with my “to do’ list that I would have not taken the time to notice, or if I had noticed, would I have ignored it in preference to rushing to do the next ‘important’ thing? Does this mean that if I am stressed, I am unlikely to be able to experience bliss?
Perhaps this is so. It certainly seems the chances of having any fun are much less if I am too stressed out to recognize a blissful moment or to be too busy to enjoy it. So what is stress?

My simplest experience of stress at its worst is to liken it to a “fish out of water”. Whenever we position ourselves in life to the extent that it places us in unknown and uncomfortable situations for long enough we become like a fish out of water. So in response we flap vigorously to try to regain what we have lost but trying to swim on dry land just doesn’t work. Something is missing. The water isn’t there. We think we can get by without it if we can just swim harder and faster but the result is the same. There is no progress and we don’t get back to where we want to be. Whenever we create situations in our lives that defy our deep inner wisdom and continue to do things that are not in our best long term interests, we begin to remove ourselves from the “water”. It can happen in very subtle and unnoticeable ways. It can also happen by doing more than we can handle at any given time. I recall reading a stress check list that listed many significant life changing events that we all experience from time to time and each one had a score so you could calculate your stress level. The way it worked was that if two or more significant life changing events were happening at the same time you had a good chance of being seriously under stress. For example a new relationship accompanied by a change in residence or death of a loved one accompanied by a change in career or arrival of a newborn or any similar combination would most likely be enough to put most of us over the edge with stress in our lives. Why does change produce stress? Because change requires us to adapt – to do things differently from the way we have grown accustomed to doing them – and doing things differently is not always easy. It can put us on edge. Remember the dinosaurs and why they disappeared? The climate changes that they had to face were too stressful so they died. They could not adapt. Are we in danger like those dinosaurs?