The key to meditation and resilience lies in this understanding:
- Nothing and no one can get into your brain and fire off angry resentful thoughts or anxious miserable thoughts
- Nothing and no one can get into your muscle fibres and make them tight and tense
- Nothing and no one can change the action of your vocal chords to make you speak in an angry or anxious tone of voice
- Nothing and no one can get inside your endocrine system and set off the cascade of stress hormones
- Those reactions happen because it is the way you currently process your perceptions that sets them off.
Still-mind meditation
Regular still-mind meditation can change to the way you react to situations and give you a break from the cycle of stress and anxiety. You would feel a change fairly quickly, and in some situations you would look back and say, “Hey, I would have been more upset about that a few months ago!”
Really profound life-change takes a bit longer. You would have to sit with a still mind regularly over years, until your mind is seen as objectively as you can see your hand. Then it is a matter of seeing that the mind is simply a part of human functioning, and not a special someone at all.
Resilience training
Learning how to examine your mental processing leads to resilience in the first place because you become aware of the unrealistic mental processing that leads to stress.
Practising realistic thinking, you become more reasonable and resilient in daily life, and the mind-self moves more easily through life. We become more reasonable and more emotionally steady.
What does not budge with only training to sort out stress by better thinking, however, is the intrinsic mistake that every mind makes – the notion that self and reality is as the mind supposes it to be.
Only no-thinking (still-mind meditation) sees the illusions that thinking maintains.
Still-mind Meditation plus resilient thinking processes is really the ultimate route to no stress !!