Anyone who knows me well or has worked with me will know that I love the work of Richard Carlson.
(If quizzed about deceased people I’d dream about having dinner with, I’d agonise over whether it would be him or Sydney Banks, the enlightened Scottish welder. But then since Richard Carlson was a student of Syd Banks, I think I’d choose the former to get all the gossip on the latter! 😆)
Anyway, I love Richard Carlson's books so much that most years I have his page-a-day calendar sat on my desk, dishing out common sense wisdom across a variety of topics.
Some are a bit saccharine, others too pithy, and then occasionally one of them will be so on-the-nose that it'll feel like manna from heaven and I feel compelled to write about it. Which is exactly what happened with this one, all about stress: what it is and how it works.
- I ripped it off and decided it was a keeper.
- Then, over a few days, I kept looking at it.
- Then I found myself highlighting it.
- And here I am, writing about it. It's such a doozy.
It’s like a laser-beam of common sense comin’ atcha: BOOM 💥 in your face. Take that, idiot human! What on earth were you thinking?!
😆
Let’s have a look at it line by line, shall we, see what Richard’s telling us here?
“Stress is a distraction”
A distraction from what, you may ask?
From your divinity! From your very being. From God. From life energy. From Innate Health. From the tender, loving hands of grace.
→ Try not to get too distracted from that, peeps. It’s frickin’ awesome.
“It interferes with clear and logical thinking”
If you’re anything like me, you certainly won’t be able to tell the wood from the trees—i.e. see clearly—when you’re distracted by stress.
But what about logic? It's funny, we’ve somehow grown to associate the word ‘logic’ with analysis and left-brain computer-mind stuff, but the etymology of the word is actually from the Greek, ‘logos’, which means ‘the divine Word’.
Stress is like static. It’s white noise that obscures what life is telling you.
→ Don’t tune that stuff out, you plum, it’s what you’re here for!
“It makes wisdom, insights and creativity more difficult to bring forth”
What did I just say? It’s static on the line. Wisdom, insight and creativity are your birthright. You can’t ever be separate from them, but you sure as hell can get distracted from them. By stress. Why would you want to do that?
→ Don’t do that!
“Stress is also exhausting, robbing you of valuable and precious energy – both physical and emotional”
Had you noticed this?
It takes no energy to rest in presence (and when I say ‘rest’ I don’t mean literally lying down or sitting cross-legged in a dark room, I just mean being in life, not your head) and go with whatever’s happening, instead of fighting it.
And that doesn’t mean you can’t change stuff, it just means being OK with what is, as your starting point; being able to handle it, without freaking out.
Check in with your own experience, but for me it takes a lot of effort to keep returning to stressful thoughts in my head.
→ Really not advised.
“The more stressed-out you are, the more quick-tempered you become”
Hell yeah. I want to rage-smash things when I’m really invested in my stress.
I’m so focused on the needs of the Giles Ego Construct 📦 and how desperately important he, and all of his problems are, that everyone else is basically just getting in the way.
“Oh, I’d love to help/listen/be present/have fun/live my frickin’ life with you, but can’t you see I’m too busy being stressed right now?! Why can't you just leave me alone?!”
→ Stop it. Just stop it.
“You lose your ability to stay focused, and your listening skills are affected”
We’re back to that first sentence, here.
If you’re distracted by stressful thinking—that always starts with an innocent, ego-based thought and then gets blown out of all proportion by more thought, taking the first thought really seriously, as if it was true or something 🙄—you’re not in the reality of Now.
You’ve basically checked out of life, to go hang out inside your thought system, lid firmly on, where there’s completely bonkers stuff flying around, left, right and centre. Don’t do that - you’ll injure yourself!
And as Richard rightly points out, you can’t listen, either (stress-thought is noisy). What are you listening for? The aforementioned “Wisdom, insights and creativity,” of course.
→ Keep up!
“You lose your compassion and sense of humour”
Here we go, another two characteristics of divinity/being/god/life energy/grace.
Compassion
If we’re identifying with the ego contents of our stressed-out thought system, we’ve completely lost sight of how it all works, and of course we’ll lose our compassion.
Compassion's dependent upon our seeing that we’re all the same, and therefore understanding that everybody else is going through the exact same thing as us (i.e. being terrorised by thought that looks real).
Humour
And boy do we have a sense of humour failure, when stressed?! Me and my wife always try and identify when we’re both in a low mood because we know that we’re officially in THE DANGER ZONE and there's every chance we'll say something we really regret.
If we’re lucky, one of us will have the presence of mind to sing a line from the Kenny Loggins song—“I am in the danger zone, danger zone!”—which sometimes snaps one or other of us out of it and sometimes doesn’t.
→ Thank you Richard, for telling it like it is!
I love Richard Carlson because he comes across as all soft and fluffy and (in my words) “the gentlest introduction to the Innate Health understanding you could hope for” but really, when you read it properly, he’s just smashing you in the face with home truths like these.
💥🥊
Bravo, sir, bravo. I consider myself chastened.
👏🏻
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Switching stress off at its source