One youngster comes to me very
depressed and asks this question "Why is God creating so many
difficulties for us? How to handle stress?" I tell this youngster to
reflect on this beautiful story:
A man goes
to a shop, picks up a beautiful cup and says "my god this cup is so
beautiful" and suddenly the cup starts talking to the man. The cup
starts saying "O man, I am beautiful right now, but what was the state
of my being before the pot-maker made me a beautiful pot?
  
When god
gives us lot of trouble, it appears god is very cruel but we need
patience and we have to wait. When bad things happen to good people,
they become better and not bitter.
With this understanding, let us not be against difficulty. Understand difficulty is a part of a purifying process. A purifying process at present which we cannot understand and hence we need faith and we need trust.
Let us
understand how to handle stress with this background. You can be
affected by stress from two angles. There is an internal stress and
there is an external stress. Nobody can avoid stress; one has to only handle it with smile.
The
internal stress is: your thoughts can create stress, your values can
create stress, and your beliefs can create stress, meaning thereby your
stress is coming from your mind more from the outer world. Many people
suffer not from heart attack – they suffer from thought-attack.
For
example, when somebody says you are an idiot, we get so hurt, we get so
victimized. My boss has called me an idiot and I am feeling tremendous
pain. Now where does this stress come from? If my boss has called me an
idiot, I have to ask myself "am I an idiot"?
If I am an
idiot nothing to be upset about; and if I am not an idiot, then also
nothing to be upset about..! It is the perception of the boss. But why do
we suffer from that stress? I suffer not because my boss has called me
an idiot but because of the thought-attack.
I may say
the boss has called me an idiot; therefore I am suffering? It is true
that the words are unpleasant. But what hurts is the interpretation of
the unpleasant word. The thought in me interprets. That is pain and
therefore it becomes pain. Much of our stress is our mind interpreting
it as pain. So we suffer from thought-attack more than heart attack
~Swami Sukhabodhananda
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 Convesation between Shekhar Kapoor and Sadhguru
Shekhar Kapoor : How to
get rid of stress?” Is there a definition that we can assign to the idea of
stress?
Sadhguru: When I
first went to the United States a few years ago, wherever I went, everybody was
talking about “stress management.” I really didn’t get this because in my
understanding, we manage things which are precious to us – our business, our
family, our money, our wealth, our children. Why would anyone manage stress? It
took me a while to understand that people have concluded that stress is a part
of their lives.
Manage yourself, not
your stress
Stress is not a part of your
life. Stress is just your inability to manage your own system. Stress happens
not because of the nature of your work. The Prime Minister is complaining of
stress, the peon is also complaining of stress. In between, every other person
is saying his job is stressful. And those who are unemployed also find their
situation stressful. So you are suffering your job – if I get you fired, will
you be joyful?
Shekhar
Kapur: No.
Sadhguru: No. So
stress is obviously not about your job, isn’t it? It is just that you do not
know how to manage your body, your mind, your emotions, your energy, your
chemistry – you do not know how to manage anything. You are functioning by
accident, so everything is stressful. If you get into a car where if you turn
the steering wheel one way, the car goes in the opposite direction, you’ll be
stressed, isn’t it?
Shekhar
Kapur: Yeah.
Sadhguru: Right
now, that’s the kind of mechanism you are driving. Without understanding
anything about it, just by chance, you are blundering through life – so you will be
stressful. Stress is not because of the nature of the activity that you are
performing or because of life situations. Stress is simply because you do not
know how to manage your own system. What is stressful for one person, someone
else breezes through – isn’t it so?
Shekhar
Kapur: Correct.
Changing the context of your life
Sadhguru: So
stress is just an inability to manage the inner situation, not the outer
situation. Essentially, the quality of our lives changes and transforms not because
we change the content of our lives, but only because we change the context of
our lives. If someone is
living a beautiful life, it does not mean he is doing something
different. When he wakes up in the morning, he also goes to the toilet. He also
brushes his teeth. He also does the same things. But somehow, his life is
magical and beautiful because of the context.
This could have happened to people when
they fall in love with
someone. When they fell in love, and everything becomes different because the
context of their life has changed. But then, once they fall out of love, again,
the context of their life changes and they become miserable. Changing the
content of your life as you wish may not be possible because you need
permission from the situations in which you exist, but changing the context is
something that you can do willfully. You don’t need anyone’s permission. It is
not at all situational.
On a certain day, three men were working in one place. Another
man came by and asked the first man, “What are you doing here?” The man looked
up and said, “Are you blind? Can’t you see I’m cutting stone?” This person
moved on to the next man and asked, “What are youdoing here?” That man
looked up and said, “Something to fill my belly. So I come here and do whatever
they ask me to do. I just have to fill my belly, that’s all.” He went to the
third man and asked, “What are you doing here?” That
man stood up in great joy and said, “I’m building a beautiful temple here!” All
of them were doing the same thing, but their experience of what they were doing
was worlds apart.
Every
human being, every moment of his life could be doing whatever he is doing in
any one of these three contexts – and that will determine the quality of his
life, not what he is actually doing. How simple or complex an activity is
doesn’t change the quality of your life. With what context you do it changes
the quality of your life.
If you
look at your ability to handle various situations in your life, is it better
when you are feeling very happy or unhappy? When you are joyful, you are
willing to take up any number of things and do it. When you are stressed, you
don’t want to do even the simplest things – it sets up a different kind of
momentum within you.
So the
first and foremost thing we need to work at is to make a human being peaceful
and joyful.
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