We can use our full human thinking — our hearts and our minds — to reduce and even eliminate stress. This episode explores several aspects of stress and details a path to easing its tension. It’s available to anyone, as it doesn’t require a particular belief system or practice.
Exercise: Letting in Light and Love
• Close your eyes and think of a moment when you experienced love.
Any feeling of love works here. It can be a time when you felt another’s love, or it can be the feeling of love you have for another. It can also be the feeling of love you felt when with a favorite animal, or from another time in nature. The feeling of love experienced during prayer or meditation also works.
• Close your eyes and repeat the exercise. This time let go of the circumstances that brought the feeling of love.
Simply hold onto the feeling of love.
Let it fill you and let it radiate through you.
• Call up the feeling of love without any associated memories.
You don’t need to close your eyes to call up this feeling.
Call it up multiple times during the day and in various settings.
Quotations
I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.
— William Ernest Henley, Invictus
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
— Seneca
In the wonderland of Mind, I am as free as another with sight and hearing.
— Helen Keller