How do you cope with stress and pressure?

Are you ready for a deep dive? I have dived deep for many years, so my answer about my approach will also reflect my experiences over the years. Here comes the answer:

I take full responsibility for everything I experience. This does not mean I am personally in control of other people. But I know I can potentially fully take charge of how I conduct this human being.

But what to do when I take charge? How would I even know what to do?

The first step when taking charge is being brutally honest. When you don’t know something, you must admit it. This will open up so many doors, because these doors remain closed when we pretend we know things. We live with the illusion of knowledge, remaining unaware of the truths of life.

Therefore, brutal honesty will lead to us recognizing that we don’t know, and then we will need to look for the truth.

I followed this path long enough to recognize that, personally, I have a very limited amount of knowledge. Somehow I am surviving, but I don’t know why.

For example, I don’t know why I can stand on this ground. Why don’t I fall off under the surface for example? I don’t exactly know. I have an idea. Yes, there are objects, yes, there is gravity. But I don’t know exactly why I find a solidity in the ground when I plant my feet on it. Somehow my heart beats, somehow my eyes see, somehow thoughts arise in my mind, somehow I can move my hand and fingers and I can type. Yet currently, the ultimate why avoids my personal understanding.

See.. my mind has many ideas, and when I focus on my brain, I can hear them as thoughts. But these thoughts do not give me the exact knowledge of why things happen. They give interpretations, they give me a limited understanding.

But I have discovered something else!

More than a decade ago, when I was trying to find answers due to getting frustrated with the limited understanding of my mind, I created myself a type of meditation. I possibly had heard something similar to it earlier from somewhere. But that night, frustrated with why I didn’t have enough self control to keep working overtime in my company, I tried to test the full extent of my self control by doing my absolute very best in controlling myself. The meditation would be staring at a certain point in the wall for 18 hours. I was already tired when I started, but I wanted to find out the truth. I think about 4 hours or so had passed, and I was doing my absolute best to keep concentrated. I had decided, to be able to test this, I would look at this as if I was going to die if I stopped. It became past midnight, and I was sitting. The body started to lean sideways going asleep. But I was aware of this, yet I was realizing who I thought I was, who I thought was in control was not in control. The body leaned sideways and fell asleep. That moment was a realization for me. I knew that the ego (who I thought I was) might believe that it was in control, but in fact it was not. I experienced a kind of distance happening with the ego and who I was.

Around those times, I also was getting interested in Astral Projection. A simple technique was to lie down with eyes closed, relax the mind and imagine you were pulling yourself up with a rope. I was interested in Astral Projection for a specific reason. I thought, we must be able to realize God if we truly, sincerely wanted to. I was believing that I could reach God if I could Astral Project and go to the dimension where I thought God was. Interestingly, when I closed my eyes and truly concentrated with this intention, my whole field of view was engulfed with a 360 degree darkness. There was a nothingness and I was like in the center of it, center of this 360 field of view. In the back of my mind, I was still trying to pull myself upwards and leave my body and my head started to rise out of the pillow. There was a shaking in the body but I didn’t mind. Yet, I sensed I was doing something wrong and stopped. After this, I was still calm and yet my body shook for a few minutes when I lay sideways on the bed. My intention to reach God had taken me to an inward experience; an experience of awakening.

I highlighted two experiences that I think were important. With these experiences, and others culminating on my natural growth path, I was awakening to something about our true nature. I was realizing, at the depth of ourselves, we were the Awareness that was deeper than who we thought we were. We were more than our thoughts. Thoughts were just a part of our mind, yet we could reach a deeper perspective, deeper state where thoughts were no longer there or they were very calm or almost in a far away background that was in a different dimension. In fact, everything was disappearing in this dimension of experiencing this darkness/nothingness. Nevertheless, I wasn’t able to create an experience this deep for a long time afterwards, yet I had obviously made a jump in understanding, probably owing to my sincere and concentrated effort.

At those days, I was also looking at the topic of beliefs. I was aware that our behavior seemed to be heavily influenced by our beliefs. So, to become a person more closer to how I desired, I was working on determining and changing my beliefs. At a certain point, this triggered an existential confusion in me. If our beliefs could change or were so subjective, then all this time, I was reinforcing an illusion. I was in front of the computer, listing my beliefs on a personal development software and with these realizations, I was like.. Whaat? WTF??

See.. I am sharing these because partly, I want you to understand that there is more to our reality than just thinking about questions and hearing answers. We experience stress and pressure, and seek answers from the thinking level, but there is more to who we truly are.

When I began to realize in experience that we were the Awareness and all our beliefs were subjective, this created a huge desire for seeking the truth of our existence in me. Because the current paradigm of who I thought I was simply was collapsing.. leaving me with a kind of void. After a lot of contemplation, I reached the conclusion that all of life was going towards an experience of oneness. I was writing my contemplations and also journaling those days. It was also very hard to keep up with my normal tasks of life because my ego was collapsing. I was being supported by my family and friends. I believe life is always sending us help, or the experiences we need. When help doesn’t come in the form we expect, it is still coming! Life is training us to be stronger/wiser!

Again around those days, I found an enlightened teacher. He was writing and sharing videos about the Higher Self, also providing channeling sessions. My contemplations and the teachings were matching. So, I started studying his teachings and had a personal session with him. The session was totally mind blowing. He was channeling the Higher Self like reading a book. It was very very clear that he was speaking from a beyond genius level of intelligence. How did I know that he was enlightened? A decade ago I knew, by heart. And I still know. How did I know he was channeling the Higher Self? During the session, again by heart I knew, and also only those things that I knew about myself were clearly being discussed. Like my working with my belief structure and its collapsing etc. These all were known by the channel and my heart knew that I was being guided, without being invaded or violated in any way. I was being guided with the exact amount of information that I needed at that moment. I listened to the longer than an hour session recording many times over the following years. A huge amount of information was condensed that I could integrate in due time, yet be able to benefit listening to even the first time.

So, in 2010 I got initiated to the Higher Self path, by becoming aware of these teachings and the teacher’s embodiment of the Higher Self through direct experience. From that point, I worked on this path, watching videos, reading articles, working with the teacher personally around a handful of times, exchanging some e-mails, and practicing meditation and meditativeness starting from 2014. Until 2014, I was also working hard to understand and move forward with the teachings.

At times, I was being frustrated with myself and thinking if I was thick headed and wondering why I couldn’t understand these teachings faster. They contained deep, profound insights, like several levels ahead of me. Yet, my heart knew the truth of them, and I continued studying. Of course I had also an active ego, which was doing its own thing, putting up its own resistance meanwhile.

Practicing meditation opened the gate of insights and started to ramp up the growth curve for me. (This article can give concise/accurate information for you to understand what meditation is)

What I learned is, when we can remain as the awareness and stay focused on the energy of love in our hearts, we access the intelligence of this same Higher Self. Practicing meditation teaches us to recognize the state of awareness, and to be able to focus on the energy of love in our hearts. With these actions we start creating in the present moment a quickly evolving understanding towards becoming a Higher Self realized person. Living as awareness give us insights about all parts of our human self. Focusing on the energy of Love and living as Awareness brings this Love to all parts of the human system progressively under the guidance of the Higher Self. This awakening teaches us that we are the creators of our own reality, and we start to gain mastery over the entire human system.

Stress and pressure are also created by us. They are subconscious expressions in reaction to the external and internal events/stimuli we are experiencing. The more we bring awareness to the subconscious processes, the more our knowledge of ourselves develop and with this knowledge we can opt out of creating stress/experiencing pressure. We can instead focus on the completeness of our true self, and be fulfilled from within in the present moment. We can engage with the world from a deeper intelligence than our thinking mind, the intelligence of Higher Selves, which we by and by, gradually start to embody. This approach solves the stress and pressure problem from the root.

It takes a lot of work to master this. But this is the ultimate level of mastery. This is the complete transcendence of all suffering. It has been a decade for me, and I got a huge wealth of insights and progressed on this path of mastery. My practice and learning continues, but today I can say that I am levels ahead/orders of magnitude ahead from where I started. This doesn’t mean that lessons of humility aren’t always around the corner. This is not becoming victorious over life. This is awakening to our oneness with life. So, wherever any resistance remains within me, I will still have to face it. I will have to go consciously/as awareness through the process of howsoever I am creating the remaining stress/suffering I am still creating in my life, so that I can understand, grow and move on. In this path, our experience genuinely improves, but this is a learning journey, not a one time conquest.

You can check out a comprehensive introductory article for these teachings if you are interested. Or you can make a search about stress on the search box in that same site. You can also examine my own journey of evolution in this path in the form of writings (including articles&blog posts) here in this site.

My core advice however is to start taking full responsibility of your life, to look at it moment to moment with awareness, to intend to discover who you truly are at the core level and direct your attention towards this, always honoring the guidance of your inner self, your heart. You don’t have to create step by step the experiences I have created. There is a higher intelligence within us that can guide us through a path where we would benefit the most. It knows our highest good, because it is one with the universe, the highest intelligence in the universe, and it is one with us! It is us!

Have a great journey, and Much Love.