Stress? An external factor or we created it?

[pgdharma]

Stress is unavoidable and the point of stress reduction and stress management programs is not to eliminate stress from our lives entirely as life is always full of challenges. One of the most common reasons for people wanting to learn meditation is to reduce stress. A considerable amount of research has shown that meditation has benefits on mental health, including a reduction in proneness to depression, an increase in emotional positivity, and an increased ability to deal with life’s inevitable stresses.

Meditation, however, not only involves relaxation but also promotes mindfulness, which helps the stress-sufferer to recognize unhelpful patterns of thought that give rise to the stress response, and also involves the active cultivation of positive mental states such as loving-kindness, compassion, patience, and energy.

The most effective coping strategies are therefore cultivating loving-kindness, or being nonjudgmental, compassionate, kind to oneself and others; right understanding, or trying to see the world as it truly is; and reflecting on impermanence, or the notion that all things (including our problems) pass. When we reflect on all these and detached the things that worry us, we will understand that stress is created by us.

f there is a remedy, then what is the use of frustration?
If there is no remedy, then what benefit is frustration?

[hope rainbow]

I found this internet link on beliefnet.com, written by a "buddhist therapist": http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Buddhism/Articles/Destress-the-Buddhist-Way.aspx

"Once you become accustomed to inner and outer space you will become more comfortable with it. And then you can drop some of your daily activities and allow the possibility of empty time in your daily schedule. As you do this your feeling of being stressed and hurried will disappear."

Stress seems to always come back to the fact that we feel there is not enough time to act upon reality.
No time to fix things, nor communicate, etc... with a feeling of experiencing a worsening as time goes resulting in more... stress!

How can we get experiences of life in which we feel that we have no time for nothing?
If not as a result of not having made time for others in the past!

[Tammy]

Thank you for sharing, I love the way the speaker say about turning an 'obstacle' into something positive.
I life we always meet people whom we cannot or unwilling to work with or be with. I can definitely relate to the situation where the mere SIGHT of some imposing individuals can cause me hyper ventilating and take an immediate beeline to avoid direct contact!!

I have family member who are not very nice n extremely bad tempered. I used to think it is my bad karma that I have to stay under the same roof with this individual, but after learning dharma, I know how to turn the situation around. I no longer view that family member as someone who is extremely not friendly, instead I am glad she is giving the golden opportunities to practise being patience and compassionate. In fact she had become the "object" for me to learn how to be patience and put down my ego to talkmtpmher etc etc... Infact, She has become my teacher!

[icy]

We can see that there are many ways in which we actively contribute to our own experience of mental unrest and suffering. Although, in general, mental and emotional afflictions themselves can come naturally, often it is our own reinforcement of those negative emotions that makes them so much worse. For instance when we have anger or hatred towards a person, there is less likelihood of its developing to a very intense degree if we leave it unattended. However, if we think about the projected injustices done to us, the ways in which we have been unfairly treated, and we keep on thinking about them over and over, then that feeds the hatred. It makes the hatred very powerful and intense. Of course, the same can apply to when we have an attachment towards a particular person; we can feed that by thinking about how beautiful he or she is, and as we keep thinking about the projected qualities that we see in the person, the attachment becomes more and more intense. But this shows how through constant familiarity and thinking, we ourselves can make our emotions more intense and powerful.

We also often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, overreacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally. We tend to take small things too seriously and blow them up out of proportion, while at the same time we often remain indifferent to the really important things, those things which have profound effects on our lives and long-term consequences and implications.
So I think that to a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation.