Questioning causes of stress.
Metaphasic
NC, USA Explorer
It is one thing to know that suffering has causes, but a lot of people have trouble, even after meditating on it, understanding where the stress comes from, or how to alleviate it. There are three very helpful questions, which I ask myself multiple times daily, that can help.
The first is: Can I do anything about it?
The second is: What are the possible outcomes?
The third is: How will each outcome affect me (and/or others)?
A good example of this occurred about 10 years ago, during a time when my step-father and I had an electrical contracting business together. We were en-route to a client site, when I noticed that he was rather fidgety and pre-occupied. When I asked him what was wrong he told me that he was waiting for a paycheck to arrive in the mail and was worried that it would not arrive in time to pay his power bill. I nodded in understanding, but didn't say anything at first. He then asked me how I could be so calm about it. I then asked him, "is there anything you can do to speed the delivery?". When he said no, I replied, "then do not worry about it. It will either come in time or it won't." He was perplexed and said, "but I need power", to which my reply was "no. You do not. Power is a luxury, not a requirement. Stressing about it is not going to help, so why do it?" He thought about it a while and said, "you know, you're right."
While this example is far from exhaustive or complete, I hope it helps people form a more mindful approach to how they think about the stresses in their lives.
Comments
"If you have a problem, and you have a solution, there's no need in worrying...
If you have a problem, and you have no solution, there's no point in worrying..."
I believe it's a Zen 'Proverb'....
@federica Exactly. Though the thought process reaching that conclusion can be vague. That's what I was demonstrating.
It's not only vague, it's resistant.
I'm constantly telling my mother to not worry.
"Oh, 'Don't worry!' you're always saying that! 'Don't worry'! It's all right for you!"
"Well, why are you worrying?" I reply, "Is it actually doing any good? Is it solving anything?"
She remains silent, and sullen.
"Exactly. The more you worry, the more you cloud your mind. Think clearly. But stop worrying, it does nothing for you OR the situation. It's not a remedy, it's hindrance. It stops you moving forward."
"So, what am I supposed to do then?" she demands, defiantly.
"Don't worry. Things happen whether you worry about them happening, or not. So stop worrying."
Can we perhaps develop a better quality of worry?
For example worry that we are not kind enough? ... come to think about it why should I care ...
@Metaphasic my experience that the cause of stress and suffering in general is created by self cherishing and self grasping minds.
Those naughty Christians pinched this idea and called it The Serenity Prayer:
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference."
@Metaphasic
It is not uncommon for folks to manufacture stress
for the stimulation that it provides,
for the identity that it reinforces or
for how it can divert ones attention away from scarier possibilities.
Until one can find some means of examining why one is stressing in general, trying to address individual causes of stress, often resembles a life long game of whack-a-mole that even long term practitioners can be seen endlessly busying themselves with, to little avail.
@caz Indeed. I -need- this. I -need-that. All when the target is just a mere want. People are so caught up in things these days, they can not seem to tell a need from a want. It is funny to see my teen girl freak out because she has misplaced her iPod.
Of course we stress when our buttons get pushed.
Problem is, we create those buttons and the ones we think are pushing them are doing nothing of the sort. We are pushing then ourselves - voluntarily.
As with fedrica's example, telling someone not to stress or 'stop pushing (punching) your own buttons." just doesn't work. A decision, conscious or otherwise, must be made to take our finger(s) off the button(s). Then, slowly, we eliminate the buttons.
Why slowly? Because we are addicted to those buttons. We made them and we possess them and we don't want to part with them. If we destroyed the buttons too quickly, we would just make new ones.
It is a matter of adjusting to a 'Button Free' life - a matter of eliminating the button dependency.
Good hunting and as always
Peace to all
I think there's a difference between not giving into reactions to stress and not caring/being irresponsible.
If your daughter is freaking out because she knows her iPod is expensive and she/you worked hard to buy it, then I think that's a reasonable sort of reaction. If it's because she's upset she won't be able to Instagram or Snapchat or whatever kids do these days, that's a different story.
If you are just apathetic, that's not the same as having ceased stress. The former can be harmful and there is no real intent/view/direction to the apathy. The latter is directed to Rightly - right action, right speech, right view, etc.
From what I have read, people who have experienced awakening still feel emotions, but they end up experiencing them like pebbles thrown into a body of water - ripples form and disappear, the emotions never really affect anything in the big picture. It's not that they have no interests or desire or anger, but it's just that these things dont' affect them as they normally would.
@Invincible_summer Of course, in her eyes though it was merely that she was cutoff until it was found. Either way, I approached this topic more as a way to determine the best way to talk to non-Buddhists (or otherwise not privy to where stress comes from). I do not assumptions, but one would think that -we- know. But what about those who do not? It's a lot harder to impress upon somebody else the concept of not worrying. They worry because of false ideals, values, and logic. The approach I take is to explain why they are flawed. Naturally, it only works on occasion, as mentioned above.
I would agree, all except for the "voluntarily" part!
Indeed.
We have to play this game to get our stress level down to a manageable degree. That is the early stage eight fold path, meditation and being kind to ourselves and others Hinayana style.
As we grow up a little, we find that dukkha/suffering is endless (ay curumba!) What to do? Can we accept the First Noble Truth?
Now what does it mean to practice meditation and the eightfold path? First there is a mountain, then no mountain, then a molehill as the zenniths say.
Just as everything is flat we find new molehills to climb ...
Perfect caption for the picture: 'But you said you wanted a room with a view.'
Stress is how we shape reality.
LOL
Isn't that how dukkha is formed not reality?
When you raise your hand, you do it through stress, is this illusory? No, of course not. Mind works in precisely the same way. You can either allow something, or block it with stress. That is all we can do intentionally, and yes, it causes suffering.
Sometimes it's hard to know how to stop worrying. Even if you logically know there is no point and you cannot control something. Sometimes it's just hard to trust that things will work out ok (even if you know somehow they do) when you are in the thick of dealing with difficult things. Sometimes, telling someone "STOP WORRYING!" just contributes to their anxiety because they already know they shouldn't worry but they don't know how not to. And then someone points it out consistently that they need to stop, it just adds more pressure. Most people who are worriers by nature already put a lot of pressure on themselves and getting it from others doesn't help.
The one thing I truly hate is when I have a lot going on and someone says "God never gives you more than you can handle!" Oh give me a break. I don't know how those kinds of phrases ever help anyone feel better. My mom tells me that kind of stuff all the time, knowing I don't believe it or share her beliefs. She says them to me, to comfort herself, and it drives me bananas.
I'm very type A and can be very high strung. Thankfully meditation, yoga and running helps me a lot with that. But sometimes when things I can't control pile up, or a difficult situation drags on for a long time, it gets hard to deal with and let go even if I logically know I need to. Believe me, being reminded constantly to "stop worrying!" doesn't help. What would help? Maybe something that actually does something other than tell me what to do. Offer to come help my teenager with algebra or writing. Offer to actually learn how to help manage my son's diabetes so perhaps my husband and I can get away for more than a couple hours.
We have never once been alone together for a weekend or even a single night in the past 5 years because his diabetes scares people and they don't want to accept responsibility for his care. You get burnt out when your entire life revolves around something like that. You learn to live with it, of course, and it just becomes part of your day. But there is no pretending it's not stressful or worrisome when your kid has a chronic, life-threatening health condition. Go ahead, tell me not to worry. It helps SO much.
Anyhow, offer to help rather than to criticize. (these are things I tell my mother, who always tells me to stop stressing, but it gets me no where). She just likes to use her own anxiety to tell me not to worry rather than to offer practical help with the things I stress about.
Really struggling/stressing to find some understanding of what you are getting at. Do you mean all volition takes effort and is not spontaneous? Can you clarify please.
Without stress, there is no you. Everything you do, you do it through stress. When you know that, content becomes irrelevant. Stress shapes who you are, because you control things through stress, and this activity is transformed into habit, which is nothing but a stress pattern below the threshold of consciousness. Anatta, Dukkha and karma.
This is why the four noble truths are talking about stress, its arising and passing.
Stress is unpleasant, because it costs energy, damages the body and blurs reality by resisting incoming information (ignoring things). But it give control.
I find in my own life there's a fine line between worry and logical concern. Of course, when TSHTF, we need to be able to react, and nature has given us mechanisms to cope with things that would harm us, e.g. adrenaline. I think that I've learned to just go with that, and deal with stuff as it comes, because for all of my best intentions to foresee eventualities, and to be prepared, I never really am prepared for what's coming down the pipe, life throws so many challenges my way that I never could have foreseen them.
@karasti I know what you're saying. I've had my share of the 'Thoughtful Don't Worry' advice from family members too, when really, what I needed was practical help, and not platitudes. I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that practical help (or even just the offer of practical help) seems so much more comforting then empty words.
Don't know if any of this makes any sense, I'm having kind of a strange morning today, just been thinking so much about the past, kinda in a bit of a strange mood...
Not that this is necessarily going to be new info for folks here but...
When stress comes up for me, it is usually accompanied with thoughts being generated of a defensive/offensive nature about the situation that instigated the stress.
I have found that whenever these thoughts start to repetitively revisit me, by automatically redirecting that thought focus over to the simple observation of the physical sensations of my current breathing,
the very thought processes which formally had the potential to become a construct of grasping can actually be transformed into a practicing aid of ones awareness in a moving meditation.
Stress, contraction, clinching, tightening, resistance. Things that are removed through relaxation.
I am not talking about anything unknown, or mysterious.
That is a higher form of stress, covered by meaning.
In a sense, stress happens when one takes the illusion too seriously ...
No, actually, it's a figure of speech.
Maybe not, but I think you're overstating it and making it too emphatic.
"stress" really isn't that highly-strung.
Could you explain this statement? Do you mean we are continually seeking relaxation, which you describe as the opposite of stress?
And by "stress" do you actually mean dukkha?
It cannot be generalized. Some people look for achievements, and here stress is the way. Some are running from suffering, and here relaxation is the way.
At the end, we all are looking for relaxation.
there is no difference between those two. Even in suttas, they are interchangeable.
), but subtle form of stress, which does not undergo constant change, is invisible for awareness. There is a fog of ignorance, known as habituation, which removes everything from our sight, which does not change. There is huge mass of stress that we are carrying around, without knowing. This is suffering.
Problem arises, when we need to remove stress which is not visible normally. It's easy to relax you hand (unless it's a phantom hand
So with your approach the Second Noble Truth would presumably read something like: "The cause of stress ( dukkha ) is the craving for relaxation"?
How does this relate to the way the Second Noble Truth is described in the suttas?
"And what, friends, is the noble truth of the origination of stress? The craving that makes for further becoming — accompanied by passion & delight, relishing now here & now there — i.e., craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming."
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.141.than.html
It seems to be much deeper than "relaxation" or "comfort".
So then it's quite good the be without stress! Because it means you realize the below:
And also this.
AKA, no more stress!
Referring to a recent topic about onions.... self is an onion made out of layers of stress.
That shows that the only "way out" is relaxation. It can be direct, or caused by insight and understanding. I like to combine those two, relaxing into all-encompassing presence. Of course, we need some degree of stress to keep our body functioning, but if if the understanding is good, only the intentional stress is gone (karma), without impairing our functioning in the world.
What did I start?
In regards to the noble truths, I interpret them as something more akin to the way to "obtain stillness of mind". The difference is in how you approach it. If it is something you try too hard to achieve, the attempt violates it's own basic principle. Instead, it is something you should calmly seek, rather than boldly require. Water, that is disturbed, does not rush to settle, but does so at it's own pace.
Well put.