Create Habits to Match Your Desires (WD)

The key to balancing your desire to be at peace with your need to achieve, perform, and earn a living is in recognizing that there’s no such thing as stress; there are only people thinking stressful thoughts. It’s really as simple as that. When you change the way you process the world, the world you’re processing changes.

Stress is an inside job. You can’t fill a container with it because tension isn’t a physical item or object. There isn’t some thing that you can point to and say, There it is, that’s stress! It simply doesn’t exist in that form.

Yet 112 million people in America take medication for stress-related symptoms, which include fatigue, heart palpitations, indigestion, diarrhea, constipation, nervousness, excessive eating, rashes, nail biting, loss of appetite, insomnia, anxiety, irritability, panic, moodiness, memory lapses, the inability to concentrate, ulcers, obsessive-compulsive behavior, feeling upset . . . and on and on goes an almost inexhaustible list. And they’re all caused by something that doesn’t exist in the physical world.

Being out of balance on this stress measure results in being one of the millions of people requiring medication to manage the symptoms listed above. It means that you often feel exasperated because you never really enjoy the life you work so hard to achieve. You may frequently feel as if you’re spending your life running on an endless treadmill. All of the pressure of working and striving may have many worldly rewards, yet at the same time there’s a feeling of going absolutely nowhere.

If this sounds familiar, it’s a signal to begin reconsidering ways of processing thoughts about your life and work, and start pursuing freedom from the symptoms of stress by becoming more balanced. Getting into balance isn’t necessarily about changing your behavior. Certainly you can pursue stress-reducing activities such as meditation, exercise, walks along a beach, or whatever works for you. But, if you continue to align yourself with achieving more, defeating the other guy, winning at all costs, and going faster because you believe that’s how to keep up, then you’re guaranteed to attract the vibrational equivalent of this thinking into your life—even if you do yoga and stand on your head chanting mantras every day!

In order to restore a sense of balance between your desire for tranquility and your desire to meet the requirements of your life, you must practice becoming, and being the vibration that you desire.

Peace isn’t something that you ultimately receive when you slow down the pace of your life. Peace is what you’re capable of being and bringing to every encounter and event in the waking moments of your life. Most of us are waging a nonstop internal mental skirmish with everyone we encounter. Being peaceful is an inner attitude that you can enjoy when you’ve learned to silence your incessant inner dialogue. Being peaceful isn’t dependent on what your surroundings look like. It seldom has anything to do with what the people around you think, say, or do. A noiseless environment isn’t a requirement.

The secret of this principle for restoring balance to your life is: Be the peace and harmony you desire. You cannot get it from anything or anyone else.

Your work isn’t terribly important . . . your worldly duties aren’t terribly important. . . . Make your first and primary priority in your life being in balance with the Source of Creation. Become thoughtful in your slowed-down time, and invite the Divine to be known in your life. Being the peace you desire means becoming a relaxed person whose balance point doesn’t attract anxiety and stress symptoms.

Make deliberate, conscious efforts to slow yourself down by relaxing your mind. Take a little more time to enjoy your life here on this planet: Be more contemplative by noticing the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the animals, the rainstorms, and all of the natural world. And then extend the same slowed-down loving energy to all people. Begin with your family—take a few extra hours to romp with your children, to listen to their ideas, to read them a story.

— Dr. Wayne W. Dyer