Present Moment Awareness by Shannon Duncan

Author:Shannon Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608680009
Publisher: New World Library

When we can reduce or eliminate our belief-driven emotional turmoil, we eliminate much of our stressful and needless anxiety and begin to gain a real sense of inner peace. This anxiety-born discontent is generated through our tendency to live life according to the principle of clinging and aversion.

CLINGING AND AVERSION

I hope for nothing.

I fear nothing.

I am free.

— Nikos Kazantzakis

Many of us live in an almost constant state of anxiety, yet we are scarcely aware of it. We are clinging when we fear that we will not get what we want or that we’ll lose what we already have. It is aversion when we fear either receiving, or not getting rid of, what we do not want to have. This fear lives in the background of our lives and shows itself in our discontent, stress, hypertension, frustration, anxiety, and depression. What we cling to or avoid is all based on our beliefs. When what is happening is contrary to those limiting beliefs, our bodies create an emotional response.

Clinging and aversion generates a constant stream of emotional reactions that can hold incredible power over our lives and keep us locked into our dramas. When we believe that we are a certain kind of person and that life is a certain way for us, we can filter out everything that does not fit within those beliefs. In a way, we become magnetized by our beliefs. We are pulled toward the same kinds of people and we gravitate toward the same kinds of entertainment and distractions. We encounter the same kinds of problems and tend to end up in the same kinds of relationships over and over again. We are pushed and pulled by our emotions toward what we believe will make us happy and away from what we believe will not.

Consider the numerous suicides that occurred after the stock market crash in the late 1920s. Those individuals — most of them formerly wealthy investment bankers, stockbrokers, and corporate executives — simply could not envision a life without wealth or power. So powerful was their aversion to poverty, they saw no option other than death. They had clung to wealth and their ability to earn it because they believed that it defined their self-worth. When the bottom dropped out, they thought that their lives were over.

When we are not maintaining our dramas, anxiety can creep in, creating a helpless and overwhelming feeling, literally making us want to crawl right out of our own skin. Most of us avoid this anxiety by forcefully altering our moods. The vast majority of us employ some method of mood altering to change how we feel — to gain a sense of comfort when we are feeling emotionally uncomfortable. It is a way of hiding. For as long as we continue to avoid a given feeling, we cannot recognize its root cause and free ourselves from it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.