Most of us like to start our Sundays with a coffee and newspapers – don’t we? Today I was flicking though the Sydney Sunday paper that I don’t write for (of course I read both!) and stumbled across Sarah Wilson‘s column on Deepak Chopra.
I enjoy Sarah’s column, and read it most weeks. The premise is that each week, she tries out something – often something New Age-y – to see if it makes life better, sweeter, happier. Eg she could try Reiki one week and NLP or EFT the next.
She seems to go into most of her experiments with an open heart. My take is that Sarah seems to have built up a certain understandable skepticism to anything promising her “the world”, but also seems open to being convinced by what she experiments with. (I happen to know Sarah’s star sign, so perhaps I am biased!)
This week, she wrote about Deepak and seemed to conclude that although she couldn’t quite work him out, that he is the real deal. Having met the man about six times, and having once spent three hours one-on-one interviewing him, I agree. He’s the real deal.
At the very end of the article was a line which gave me pause for thought and made me want to write to Sarah, to discuss! Since I wasn’t sure if doing that would be a bit bombastic, I decided to write this instead!
Sarah wrote “To my mind… living a non-attached life is about reducing stressors”.
Is it? Is that what living a non-attached life is about? And anyway, can we actually control events and others? Can we reduce our stressors? Is trying to reduce our stressors non-attachment or does it lean towards its opposite, aversion?
And is it even possible? We can TRY and reduce our stressors. We can go and live in a cave, for example. We can quit our city jobs and live in the country and be self-sufficient. We can cut out from our lives all the people who stress us.
But even doing all those things would leave us facing different challenges, agreed? (I don’t think I need to spell out the dramas associated with living in a cave etc!) Maybe it’s more that we can CHOOSE our stressors?!
But is reducing stressors even the answer for someone who wants to live a non-attached life? Or is the answer modifying our reaction to stress?
We can’t control external factors, people or events. The cave will drip damp, hungry birds may eat our home-grown organic veggies. We can’t control that but we can be responsible for ourselves and our reactions.
Deepak is one of the biggest exponents of meditation in the world today. As he once told me: One of the main benefits of maintaining a meditation practice is that while we can’t avoid stress in this world, we can improve our reaction to it.
Stress still comes, but because we meditate, we handle it much better.
(For my part, I remember with crystal clear clarity my surprise that when I first started meditating, my tendency to shake my fist at other drivers at rush hour diminished from 100 to almost zero in the first week or two. This is just an example.)
Or as Indian teacher Narayani Amma says: “Problems still come, but the Divine takes care.”
As much as endocrinologist Dr Deepak Chopra will tell you that regular meditation levels out hormones and the blood serum stress indicator cortisol (among other things) I’m pretty sure he’d also agree that meditation is about surrendering to the field of infinite possibilities, or the Divine…
This truly isn’t a criticism of Sarah, I love what she does! It’s just a thought, prompted by her great column. Click here to read her blog.
One of my best ever meditation teachers was Thom Knowles who studied with the same teacher as Deepak Chopra in the 1960s. If you happen to be in the US, he’s teaching there these days and is well worth checking out. This is his Facebook page.
As far as I can tell modifying our reaction to stress is the only way to deal with stress we cannot control or remove from our environment. My personal meditation is giving a massage, I am in the present and focused on the person, releasing my thoughts and feelings and listening to what the ‘voices’ in my head are telling me about the person I am massaging. I find this extremely relaxing and I have found that I can carry this feeling of being in the moment over to everyday life, slowing down my reactions to the environment and allowing me to be ‘detached’ from stress, not averse to what is going on around me. Now that I have started working out regularly my workouts have also become a form of meditation, clearing my mind and using the counts of reps as a meditation. Living a non-attached life is not about reducing stressors, I have not even tried to do this, yet I have found myself much less attached to outcomes and learning to trust the divine, the universe, instead of trying to control everything.