Tag: choices

How to eliminate stress.

Q: Why do we feel stressed?

A: We feel stressed when we know that we should be doing one thing, while partaking in another, usually out of fear.  So instead of living out of the truth that we are, we are making choices, and therefore living, out of fear.  This is felt as “stress.”

Usually we keep this fear hidden from ourselves and find justifications for our actions rather than looking at how we are reacting out of fear.  If you want to know what you fear, if you are not aware of what you are afraid of, try this exercise.  Imagine yourself living your life completely in a state of no fear.  Picture your day from beginning to end, living in no fear.  What would you do differently?  Why?  Write down what you would do differently if you had no fear, and then write down why you don’t live like this.

This exercise will help you get closer to how you are living in fear and stress.  Be patient, practice this every day, especially when you feel stress.

At first, your ego will run in circles out of fear.  It will justify its fearful actions rather than let you observe them.  This is normal.  Practice watching your ego’s rationalizations.

Eventually you will feel what it is like to live with no fear, so that you can identify how you are living in fear and watch your fear instead of living out of it.  This will bring you peace and eliminate stress.

Making effective decisions

Q: How does one make quick and effective decisions?

A: The best way is to look at a situation, look at what actions may be taken, and weigh the pros and cons of all of the outcomes and actions.  Then be still, request an answer to your question, and it will come.

At first, this process takes time, patience and practice, but it becomes quicker and quicker over time. One also has to realize that questions rarely have yes/no answers, there is also the “it’s unclear right now,” and “now is not the right time to make a decision on this,” and “you really don’t need to make a decision at all,” and so on.

Since the ego deals in dualities, it expects a clear-cut yes or no answer, which is rarely the case.  In most cases, the ego demands a yes or no answer.  This is it acting out of its child persona. That’s also the reason why it seems to get stuck pondering a question; it doesn’t have enough information to make a yes or no decision, which makes it spin in circles.  It is also not typical for an ego to be patient and still, that is a mark of the witness consciousness.

So as you can see, decision making is very hard for the ego. It’s best to observe the question and all of the parameters surrounding it, and then let a decision come. The right decision is usually the most obvious one (even if we don’t want to admit it).

Above all else, when asking a question, one must be patient and wait for an answer, hurrying and impatience is a mark of the ego, which cannot make good decisions.  Good decisions are made for the ego, come to the ego from consciousness.  The ego then tries to take ownership of the decision-making process, inflating itself, which then sets it up for more pain and disappointment in the future, when the next decision has to be made and it can’t make it again.