Hi,
This is Brooks.
Thanks for joining me.
Today we're going to talk about letting go of stress.
Stress is our body hanging on.
It's hanging on to all the activities.
All the things that we're doing,
All the things that are going on around us,
All the stuff in our mind,
All our worries and fears,
Exhaustion.
Rather than passing through,
Like if you had a rock in a stream and water was passing over the rock,
Rather than passing through,
Passing over,
All those things I mentioned,
They're all glommed on.
They're all adhering to us,
So they're sticky.
That's stress.
And it weighs us down.
It's very heavy.
It's like trying to walk around all day with a suit that weighs 200 pounds.
What helps is to imagine the things that happen to us during the day,
The things we think about,
The things we feel,
Our worries,
Our fears.
The accumulation of all these things are like water.
Imagine them passing through or passing over.
They don't stick or stay.
They pass by.
You experience things and then they're gone.
And then there's the next thing you experience,
And then it's gone.
You have a thought that's a fear thought.
You experience it and it's gone.
You have worry,
A thought that's a worry.
You experience it and then it's gone.
You can really say that based on experience.
Your life has been a series of multitudes of experiences coming and going,
Coming and going.
You're like that rock in the stream.
Water has passed over you continuously.
The flow has been constant passing over you.
Here you are.
And all those things have passed.
That's our true nature.
Things come and then they go.
We're not meant to hold on to stuff.
People come and go.
The things we do come and go.
But here we are.
So that gives us permission to let go of the things that we might be holding on to.
The stresses,
The fears,
The exhaustion.
Maybe even things like things that happened that we didn't like that we still have memories of.
Those things go.
And here we are.
They pass through and they pass over.
Again,
We've had a lifetime of things coming and going.
It's the nature of life.
Things come and they go.
And here you are.
Things even come and go on our bodies.
We used to be really tiny.
And we got bigger over time.
We got bigger.
And we stopped growing.
And then our body changes.
As things come in and go.
And yet here we are.
Not holding on to anything.
Except that we're here.
