If you focus on success, you’ll have stress. But if you pursue excellence, success will be guaranteed.
Replace fear-based thinking with love-based thinking. Every time you’re making a choice, ask yourself if it’s going to cultivate the experience of unity and love or the experience of separation and stress.
When your awareness is contracted, the flow of energy and information throughout your bodymind is hampered. You tend to stay stuck in toxic emotions such as regret, resentment, and self-pity. Non-nurturing habits such as overeating and not exercising take hold. The feedback loop between your mind and your body turns negative, and stress can hit you instantaneously or grind away at you day after day.
The fastest growing segment of the population in the world right now is over the age of 90, and in some cases over the age of 100 in some countries. So people are living longer. And even though much of it is attributed to modern medicine, it's not. It's lifestyle. It's nutrition. It's the quality of exercise, the ability to manage stress.
Such a person needs meditation more than anyone else because they are headed for a crisis. If stress and anxiety are so great that you can't even imagine a calm clear mind, that indicates you are reaching your coping limits, and need to begin something like meditation just for the stress reduction benefits.
Meditation is a simple yet powerful tool that takes us to a state of profound relaxation that dissolves fatigue and the accumulated stress that accelerates the aging process.
Most of us have no idea what we can do because we are totally conditioned by the past. Our memories, beliefs, assumptions, prejudices, and stresses conspire to trap us in one boundary after another. We need to escape from this.
During meditation, our breathing slows, our blood pressure and heart rate decrease, and stress hormone levels fall.
When you say, "I have a sad heart," then you literally have a sad heart. If we looked inside your heart, we would find it affected by molecules that cause stress and damage, such as excessive amounts of adrenaline and cortisol.
