Having Stressors Doesn’t Mean You Must Be Stressed

One of the biggest things I’ve realized lately is that life’s events, challenges, and external stimuli never end. That sounds awful doesn’t it? I had someone tell me this a few months ago when I was incredibly ill from an infection and I thought it was really mean to be telling me in my worst times that it’s never going to end. You are drowning and someone is telling you the lifeboat is never coming. BUT what I know now is that there’s a difference here in saying life’s stressors will never end, and you feeling awful will never end.  

I used to think as soon as my training was done, that all external stressors would cease to exist. After all a significant portion of my overall exhaustion was coming from the gruelling hours and nature of my training environment. Now I finally get to set my hours, and decide how and where I want to work, and who I want to work with. It is a significant difference in autonomy. What I didn’t realize is that stressors actually don’t end though. Especially as Punjabis, we are interconnected to our extended families, and that is a gigantic group of people. The interconnectedness makes it so that if something is going on with flana (so-and-so), then I’m involved too because I’m part of the family. It’s not even possible for such a large group of people to not have constant crises. There is mutual support in the big group and dividing of dukh, and that reliance on each other helps us to get through. This connection is engrained into our survival evolutionarily. Yet I think there are bad things about taking on others’ problems and becoming entrenched into them. We should figure out how to support each other as a family and friends without absorbing all the problems into our psyche. 

Stressors are constantly being thrown our way from so many angles of life, but if we engrossed into them, there would be no space for joy. I just had someone say “you’ve had a lot going on this year, you sure deserve a break.” No, I think that narrative to me needs to change. Breaks are nice, but they don’t solve everything because things are constantly happening. I think the part that needs to change is the expectation that that it will go away, and the expectation that you can’t enjoy life while that exists. External stressors are the nature of the world, and if those let up, the 5 (kaam, krodh, lob, moh, hankar) start their own game internally. This is how the game of life was made and was true even for the Guru Jis with constant events happening from Guru Nanak Dev Ji having the rock rolled towards them from the top of the hill at Panja Sahib, to staying in Babar’s jail. The challenges will keep going, but it is the mindset that needs to change, and the story we tell ourselves around these challenges. 

I remember 4-5 years ago watching Sister Shivani from the Brahma Kumaris talk about how the mind should not be constantly under the stress of it’s external situations. Someone’s eating their chips loudly. You shouldn’t be trying to change them or their chips eating, your mind needs to be under control otherwise you have given away all of its power. (I laugh and think of this every time someone is chomping away at their chips). It is our own minds that need to learn to be living in a state of Anand. The hardest things are handled even better when our mind is balanced. Guru Ji tells us to live like a lotus flower for a reason. We cannot and should not be entrenching ourselves into worldly problems whether they are our own or especially not other people’s. I think there is a line to be drawn in playing our part, and doing what we can as our sewa, but we can’t be absorbed into the world’s problems.  

I am still working on this, and but even the realization has helped me to release a lot of what I was holding on and feeling like I was always dealing with something. It was getting overwhelming to keep track of all of the things that were happening all at once that I was having to handle. I think the idea of reminding myself I am the lotus, of reminding myself I don’t have to sink into these problems and hold them on my shoulders, and that Waheguru is everything and I, myself, me, doesn’t exist to do those things, is helping a lot.