Step Four: Freedom | Four Steps Back From Stress
It’s a no-no to step off a train in mid-motion, just as it’s touch and go on the old ferry boat when the river floods and overflows. Likewise, stress can seem too powerful a thing to oppose.
Before jumping off moving trains and crossing waters that froth and foam, we might have to jam on the brakes, and go to where the current’s a little more slow. To break free from stress, by contrast, here’s what works best: to take the bull by the horns while keeping the heart close - so to handle stress’s slings and arrows, and all its commotions.
We all know what stress connotes: discontent, distraction and exile from our true home. When stress biology takes over, we no longer hold any focus truly of our own. At the same time, stress submerges us into a part of our unconscious that it keeps under its control, so the gap between our perception and the truth only grows.
Thanks to stress, our conscious awareness becomes swamped by an unconscious steeped in fairy tales doped, faked and cloaked, and impounded by those blokes at the Dept of Mind Control, fear & Co.. Again, stress pushes us from pillar to post till it seems we’re wholly without a hope. To win back our life, joy and love, we dwell on what the heart is and does when given half a chance.
We think of the “C’s” of the heart, and imagine them coming alive inside us, something we can do anywhere and at any time. Just to summarise, these are consciousness
for letting in reality’s light; contentment
to cut compulsive desire, gloom
and pride down to size; calm
to disarm anger
and shame; courage
to confront fear; compassion
for others (and even for our own self); connectedness
and integrity, as a self unique yet part of the wider community; and commitment
to the truth more generally.
The more we build these “C’s” of the heart into our everyday ease, relationships and activities - and practice being more mindful of these - the stronger will be our heart-head connection and peace.
As to our actually escaping stress, so we “approach the cell door with jailbreak in mind”, this assuredly qualifies as an act of will. Yet it can’t involve aggression, for that only hands the initiative back to anger
- and so to stress. No, we must go armed with patience and resolve.
Eschewing violent force, we approach the cell door with inner strength and confidence. By these alone (and whichever “stress force” has had us floored in the first place, and whatever the scenario), we’ll lay stress low with a knockout blow. For stress can’t and won’t hold when we find our way back to our heart and true home.