STRESS
In daily life, we frequently face difficult situations that bring mental and emotional pressures. The body responds quickly, and inefficiently. Stress is anything that brings mental and emotional pressure that leads to fear, anxiety, worry, apprehension, anger, and even deprecation. According to medical professionals, 90-95% of diseases in the modern era can be attributed to psychological forces; 98% of headaches originate due to stress, and stress also manifests itself in many other physical ailments such as indigestion, heartburn, and death such as heart attacks.
Stress comes in all shapes and sizes, and it has become so pervasive that it seems to permeate everything and everyone. Stress and tension occur due to the uncontrolled flow of thoughts related to our future or past that keep our mind in constant turbulence. These thoughts divert us from staying in the present, which is reality. Usually these thoughts are related to our overthinking of the future and the past are what tire us and not hard work.
Stress causes “wear and tear” on our bodies as we adapt to our ever-changing environment, and therefore has numerous physical and emotional effects on us.
>> Change of facial expression and body postures.
>> Withdrawal from social relations.
>> Low performance of the task (sometimes its opposite is also manifested, that is, high productivity but it is very harmful to our physical and mental health
>> Speech impairment
>> Sighs and continuous restlessness
>> nervous laugh
>> Anxiety
>> Insomnia
>> Emotional disturbances
>> Aggression
>> Tension and worry
>> Phobic disorders, etc.
Medical science has nothing to offer to combat the terrible effects of stress, except tranquilizers, the habit of forming toxic drugs, etc. Each and every event we face can lead us to a challenging and threatening situation. Therefore, stress is an internal reaction rather than an external phenomenon. To be truly stress-free, we have to develop PERSONAL AWARENESS. The knowledge of ourselves: their likes and dislikes, their harmony and conflicts. The key to gaining self-awareness lies in a process of shifting focus from the external environment to the internal makeup, including the physical, emotional, and spiritual system.
Meditation is the best relaxation technique and the world’s accepted solution to effectively combat stress. Sahaja Yoga, a highly developed and unique meditation system, enables the person to reach a level of complete self-awareness.
Sahaja Yoga works on the awakening of the primordial energy within us called Kundalini. When the Kundalini rises and crosses the sixth energy center, it brings us into a mindless state of consciousness (no distracting thoughts of the future or the past bombard the mind). All the conflicts that reside in the mind that create stress evaporate. We enter a state of inner peace, remaining completely in the present and aware of everything around us.
Medical research conducted by the department of physiology at Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi, India and Sucheta Kripalani Hospital on various groups of individual Sahaja Yoga meditators has revealed that Sahaja Yoga practice is accompanied by a decrease in tension, stress, anxiety, depression and hypertension.
These studies were conducted in 10 people in the age group 35 to 50 years. They were from the Physiology department and had no prior training in any form of yoga or meditation. They received two days of training by a qualified Sahaja Yoga teacher in the physiology department. Later, they practiced it for 20 minutes a day, for a few weeks, under the watchful eye of the tutor.
At fixed intervals, the doctors studied the effect of Sahaja Yoga on the heart rate, blood pressure, lactic acid level in the blood, VMA in the urine, indicating the secretion of adrenaline by the body and the galvanic resistance of the skin (GSR), showing whether patients were tense or relaxed. All 10 were hypertensive patients; some of them were drugged. As the practice of Sahaja Yoga progressed, the medicines were reduced and finally stopped. At 12 weeks, diastolic blood pressure decreased from 100 to 80 and adrenaline flow decreased as well. The GSR in the group changed from 43.9 kohms to 164.7 kohms; The average level is 103.9 kohms.
Many people who practice Sahaja Yoga regularly had already reported empirically which has now been confirmed by medical research. Research results have shown that the practice of Sahaja yoga has had various healing effects on the mind and body leading to improvements in quality of life. Other benefits of Sahaja yoga are being investigated considerably in all living things, including plant growth, etc., all over the world.
Man is the culmination of the evolutionary process that has been at work for thousands of years, and has been granted extraordinary powers compared to other living organisms, to regulate and control the environment around him. But the last frontier, and which acts as the source and suffers as the receptor of stress, is the human mind. Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi has given humanity a unique gift in the form of her discovery of Sahaja Yoga, which the being should fully utilize to achieve peace and harmony in his daily life, without freeing himself from stress and tension.