By SADHGURU, Isha Foundation
WHEN I first came to the United States, wherever I went, I heard people talking about stress management. We manage our families, our money, our property, our businesses – we manage whatever is valuable to us. Why would anyone manage stress? It took me a while to understand that people have made a conclusion that stress is an inevitable part of life!
Stress is not a part of life. It is not your lifestyle, work, family or the situations in which you exist that cause stress to you. It is your inability to manage your system – your body, mind, emotions and energy. The cause is your lack of understanding of how this system functions, your inability to use the system the way it should be used. People can be stressful in any kind of situation. It is not about this job or that job, it is not about one kind of situation or the other. People are capable of being stressful for just about anything.
What can you do about it? You do not need to do anything about it. Stress is like friction in a machine. Friction occurs in a machine either because there is no proper movement of the parts or there is not enough lubrication. The less friction you have, the more efficient the machine becomes.
We need not look at how to manage stress or keep it under the surface. We need to look at how not to create it, because stress is your creation. If you start the simple process of yoga, you will find that the whole system begins to function at a certain ease. When the very nature of your existence has become ease, you are restful all the time. Then there is no such thing as stress. Restfulness is the basis of all activity. You can be most effective in your life only when everything is at complete ease within yourself. If your ability to act becomes effortless, then naturally there is no such thing as stress.
People practice yoga as just a physical or mental exercise. It is neither physical nor mental; it has something to do with the core of your life. If “all of you” is not involved in the yoga that you do, if it has not been transmitted to you, if it has just been taught to you as a bundle of instructions and not an initiation – if that is so, you are using yoga like a car instead of the airplane that it is.
Suppose I gave you an airplane and you did not know what it was, you knew only automobiles. There are these two ugly things that hit your buildings and lampposts, so you chop off the wings and drive around happily. Likewise, you are happy your backache is gone and thyroid problem is fixed but that is very limited, because a man who knows what it means to fly, when he sees an airplane with chopped off wings, he will cry.
Right now, when I see the yoga that is going on all over on a large scale, it is very tragic. Yoga is not a solution for your stress – there is no need for stress. Yoga is the removal of the problem. You do not create stress anymore, that’s all.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.