A short presentation by the always entertaining Robert Sapolsky, showing how prolonged exposure to the stress response causes more problems than stress itself:
Category: How Stress affects us
An anxiety about being
Not holding on is tough to do because we are not honest a lot of the time which is because of fear – the fear of losing our self-image. The social pressure to get ahead and win is so ingrained that we are anxious about failure.
This anxiety about doing becomes an anxiety about being, because in a driven life, doing is being: you’re supposed to be doing and you are assessed by it.
Ajahn Sucitto
Living in a distracted age
Philosopher Alain de Botton on the effects of the relentless barrage of information which our minds are subject to in today’s world and how we need to re-learn and practice the ability to switch off:
One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible…..The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
You are not alone
There are no quick fixes to some of the problems which people can face. Sometimes they can seem even greater by the sense of isolation which they produce. Fear can close us in on ourselves. However, through remaining open to others and sharing, we realize that there is no law that states that we have to go through problems all alone.
The human story is both personal and universal. Our personal experiences of pain and joy, grief and despair, may be unique to each of us in the forms they take, yet our capacity to feel grief, fear, loneliness, and rage, as well as delight, intimacy, joy, and ease, are our common bonds as human beings. They are the language of the heart that crosses the borders of “I” and “you”. In the midst of despair or pain you may be convinced that no one has ever felt this way before. Yet there is no pain you can experience that has not been experienced before by another in a different time or place. Our emotional world is universal.
Christina Feldman. Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World
Things to do this weekend
Modern culture keeps sending all these messages that the people who know how to live properly are always doing something.
The great question “What are you doing this weekend?” keeps coming up, as if that defines us. We hear talk about lives where everything is “so busy that I do not have time to think”, or “I am so busy I never have time for myself”, or “I am so busy I am exhausted”, and this word, busy, busy, busy comes up time and again, and it starts to sound like an epidemic – an epidemic of busyness.
Abbot Christopher Jameson, The Big Silence, BBC2
May nothing disturb you: Nada Te Turbe
Today is the feastday of Teresa of Avila, another formidable nun, this time from the 16th Century. She lived in an age of great social change, somewhat like today, and was a strong leader, founding monasteries at a time when most preferred women to be relegated to the kitchen and the home. She was intensely practical and deeply human. However she combined her achievements with a very profound interior life. She reminds us not to neglect the dimension of the soul in this age with our focus on progress and speed.
Despite suffering ill health she had a great trust that a Higher Power was guiding her life and her work. Even if she could not see where things were leading she trusted. These handwritten words were found after her death. May they support all who struggle this evening. The musical version comes from the monastery at Taize, not too far away from here in Bourgogne.
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
Everything passes.
God does not go away.
Patience
can attain anything.
He who has God within,
does not lack anything.
Nada te turbe, nada te espante; quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.
Mindfulbalance 