JDPatten said:
"This IS the right place to discuss the life histories of those we know who managed to incorporate their challenging life stressors into a long healthy, happy and productive life.Some are able to do that. Some are not, even having had much less in the way of life-stress.How do they manage it?I, for one, would like to understand it."
The term 'stress' is being used in a very fuzzy way - that can mean almost anything and therefore nothing. The word strain was used to indicate persistent stress that debilitates over time, but a shock can have acute effects, with the unhealed or unresolved issue persisting in the mind's strategic recoil, replay or fear of reliving.
So my appreciation of the mind - as generally presumed to be operating - IS - the recoil from shock of separation trauma. IS the strategy of seeking to evade, avoid, overcome, overlay or divert from the 'inevitable' - which is ultimately accorded the complete loss of capacity to control or maintain this sense of a life, but operates all the time as a sense of being defined and motivated by what we fear true, what we DON'T want - as a risk aversion and risk management laid upon the impulse to live, that is more or less associated with danger, to which we may feel more or less able to see and feel our way with - and fully appreciate the living!
Fear is inherent to our experience of physical existence and has a vital role - for it brings attention present to attend to what is truly needed NOW. But fear OF fear operates a mind capture (or indeed an amygdala capture) where the intensity, persistence and interpretation of shock, sets the past as a power over the present - and robs us of our future. (Our future in unfolding awareness of true presence).
The achievement of the learning of the mind is a kind of dissociation that works enough to make life in such terms bearable. To redefine our sense of self and world so as to operate out of a (collective) amnesia - that is guarded heavily against disclosure. This is no less true of the individual than of Big Pharma. The individual can remain more of less 'unconscious' of its own bias while such self and world 'works' in terms of defining its challenging life stressors under a narrative identity.
But when our separation scripts break through such a conditioned sense of self and world, we are either compelled to 'regain' the world that we lost, or recognize it is not 'there' or here to get back to - and let an honesty of being in that could not reach us when we seemed sufficient unto our own thinking.
The segregative movement of our being is of a conflicted and coercive sense of self-assertion and struggle. The reintegrative movement of our being is the healing and rewakening to a wholeness of being - in which the woven deceits of a prior self-necessity, are teased and loosened and undone - in every step of willingness.
If you can understand that life naturally responds to heal a wound of fracture and division and communication loss, you can understand that this is not limited to external physical conditions.
There is no advice that fits anyone in all situations excepting to truly attend what is here in willingness to see or know what is called for, needed or called forth. But the fear of fear makes this impossible, while the mind is locked into such self-evasion and giving power to whatever seems to offer power and protection in such terms.
And so an awakening self-responsibility is growing the honesty and acknowledgement of thoughts and feelings that were habitually discarded or given a 'blind eye'. But NOT to feed or fuel the fear and guilt complex of self judgement and self-manipulation. The desire for true - which must reintegrate and align by nature - is an innate curiosity. This I invite you to consider as a 'Christ Child' - because it is not born of a manufactured narrative control, and will prompt and guide you to keep you mind open until you feel the resonance of true in a coherence of being and not just in the sales brochure or official edict.
Stress and disease -
Ease is not a medical condition - unless of course psycho-pharmacologically mandated!
I don't have any doubt that distress contributes to, accompanies or causes physical consequences - including those arising from poor choices in mitigating or relating to unresolved stress. Running away from our problems is 'storing up our treasures in hell' - until of course we simply address what truly needs to be addressed. But in general, we are afraid, and our minds are ingeniously protective against seeing what we are not willing to see. But do they witness to truth?
Another form of pervasive ongoing stress is the result of assigning or using the body for what it is not its function to serve - AND dumping the responsibility for our own distress in lack of life upon it.
Joy and peace are qualities that can be felt pervading our cells in gratitude for our existence - that is... from the inside out. If we do not cultivate the qualities of wholeness of being, in the moments of which we are aware and have choice, it is because we are set upon cultivating something else. However, our good cannot be forced upon us, (without rejection or overpowering of the will). So we have to accept where we are at currently as a basis to grow.
So yes, distress is the elephant in the society that society operates a sort of negative version of pass the parcel with.
But stress is inherent to the functional expression of life in action and the body is designed to hold and support us in act, while rest and regeneration comes in as needed. A managed consciousness in a managed society is not so flexible!
