on to a time when life seemed simple and happy, regardless of the lack of material possessions or wealth. It was a time that had unending opportunities, true friendships and no limit to dreams. In today’s world, it seems the pressures of everyday life have a way of blurring happiness, even in the most ideal situations. When you admit to feeling stress, there is no longer a stigma to the admission. Stress has come out of the closet and is now openly and publicly discussed without embarrassment or isolation. Stress has fallen on the shoulders of the population like a fashionable new coat, draped as a badge of honor on the bodies of adult and child warriors in battle, fighting for their right to peace and tranquility.
Before Satori
You are not alone as you struggle to maintain your composure while navigating the maze of your stress-filled environment. The twenty-first century has bombarded the human psyche with so many demands that we are racing from overload to burnout at an accelerated rate of speed. The days of spending a lazy afternoon talking to a neighbor over a backyard fence are nearly non-existent. Instead, we exist in households of one or two-income workers who cannot keep up with their financial demands. Some families have homes they cannot afford, as others dare not ever dream of being a homeowner.
Those who are fortunate enough to live in beautiful residences are not home long enough to enjoy them as they become secondary to the amount of time spent within the four walls of the office. It seems that there is no end to the amount of money needed to afford the homes that cannot be enjoyed! Even the miracle of birth has given way to overly taxed parents feeling burdened by the responsibility of the children they love. Rather than being able to enjoy and share in their growth and development, many parents are scrambling to hand off their kids to complete strangers as they go to work, make money and begin the vicious cycle all over again. In fact, many couples are deciding not to have children because they presume, often correctly, that raising a family will only add to existing stress.
Adult stress is difficult enough, but to be a child, helpless to accurately express their feelings and emotions, stress robs them of their childhood and sculpts out their upcoming adulthood in a very unpromising manner. Stress spreads. In families, children quickly adapt their own lives to mimic the turmoil they have experienced. Their parent’s stress trickles, imprinting an emotional roadmap that incorporates stress passed down from generation to generation.
The Life-long Effects of Labeling
By the age of five years, children are adopting the labels placed upon them by their families. They begin as blank slates, but they don’t remain pure for very long before they are covered in societal graffiti, each mark formulating self-worth. Some of the more fortunate children may be applauded for their intelligence, their beauty, or their winning personalities, while others wait for their turn to be special. Yet as each day passes, their self-esteem falls away until they come to the realization that their turn may never come. Their stress is marked by isolation, sadness, complacency. If we fast-forward ten or twenty years, these children become adults with difficulties in social, personal, occupational and legal situations. Stress has defined their future.
Satori and the Human Spirit
What can be done? Fortunately, the human spirit perseveres. It begs for another chance. It begs for Satori. Satori is actually the “ah-ha” moment when you finally “get it”. It is the moment when you come to the realization that whether you have done your best or not, every situation is a life-lesson from which to learn before moving on. It is the process that retrains your brain to listen to the intelligence that resides in your heart, rather than the programming that resides in your mind.
Satori is the moment when you can forgive yourself for being human, and replace unrealistic expectations with those that are more reasonable. Satori is not unlike a loving mother nurturing her child, hugging him, protecting him, righting him when he stumbles, and setting him carefully back on his feet. It is the moment when all is once again right with the world. It is never too late to change the manner in which you raise your children, connect with your spouse, or mesh with your co-workers. It is never too late to like the person you are. If today is the day you have dedicated to being the first day of making a change, tomorrow will find you better off because of it.
Living up to the façade of the perfect life had been easy. I appeared to be happy because the loss of my happiness was so gradual, so insidious, that for the longest time I didn’t realize that the joy I felt in my heart at one point in my life had dissipated to the point that I almost couldn’t remember it. Furthermore, I couldn’t even pinpoint the exact decade that I stopped experiencing those feelings of inner happiness. I simply woke up one day and realized I was living a lie.
Like our storyteller, most individuals set aside their awareness of their feelings to master life’s tasks. Then one day, they wake up and realize that the person they once knew, themselves, is missing. This loss causes anxiety and profound sadness. There are many public smiles masking private sorrow. Take off your mask. You are about to reconnect with yourself, and reclaim your life. You just have to believe.
Satori awaits you!
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CHAPTER ONE PRACTICAL EXERCISE
The goal of this exercise is to take an inventory of your current life, and pinpoint how much of that life actually belongs to you, to do with as you please. If you are like most of us, you may be quite surprised at the results.
To make a blueprint of your current life, take a pair of scissors and cut out several two or three- inch squares from a plain piece of paper. Now think about all the aspects that make up your life, and write each of them down, one at a time, on each paper. For example, if you are married, jot that down; if you have children add that as well. Continue adding squares to depict your employment, your hobbies, and your responsibilities. If you care for aged parents, put it down. If you volunteer, list that as well.
Think of every moment that you spend time at the grocery store, filling the car up with gas, helping the kids with homework, cutting the lawn and taking the dog for a walk. If you don’t have at least ten to twenty squares of paper filled out, think harder. Don’t forget holiday obligations, church or religious duties, Friday night dinner parties, babysitting for the neighborhood children while their parents are out of town, dog-sitting, house-sitting, work-related trips. You may find you have one hundred or more squares before you have finished. Now spread them all out on a table top. There! You are well on your way to mapping out your life.
Now, one by one, remove all the pieces of paper that have to do with obligations and responsibility. For example, taking long walks in the park with your camera on a crisp fall morning might fall into the category of a non-contractual, non-obligatory responsibility, unless you take a long walk in the park, but talk on the phone about business while you are walking. If that is the case, your “free time” has just become a responsibility…and it needs to be removed. Now let’s see how many squares of paper are left. Many of you might be surprised to find there is nothing left on the table! If so, we have some work to do! If there are one or more pieces of paper left on the table, it indicates an attempt to schedule-in personal time. Unless there are significant squares left on the table, however, you are probably recognizing that things are going to have to change if you want to eliminate stress.
The purpose of this exercise is two-fold. First, you have just laid out your life in black and white. Second, you can see just where improvements need to be made. We will revisit this exercise later, and you should be pleasantly surprised at how many more squares of paper are left on the table as you work toward achieving your goals.
CHAPTER ONE SATORI EXERCISE
If you haven’t already done so, it is time to download your Satori Music
