15. Restoring Being At-Ease as Our Baseline Condition

Has it occurred, to you, to wonder why life seems so difficult, at times?  We all have a sense of what ease feels like, that it feels natural -- when we're not chasing after (or fighting) something.

Doesn't that seem odd that we feel we must struggle -- do something -- to change our situation, to experience ease, when ease is the absence of struggle?  Who wrote those rules?

I say that ease isn’t something to be accomplished and held onto by an effort to create a sense of ease. Using struggle to recover balance is itself what keeps us off balance.  In my experience, an indirect approach is necessary.

Every day, we face situations that trigger a loss of balance -- or reveal our existing imbalance.  Our ability to exist at rest is impaired -- temporarily, at the very least, and more often, for a lengthy period of time.

To recover a sense of ease in the midst of stress may seem complicated or unattainable. That's because we're looking in the wrong place, for it. 

Here's the key point:  It's generally true of human beings that we're loaded with stress patterns that live on in our subconscious and affect us, whatever else we're doing. Here's the right place:  our stress-patterns, themselves.  Disarm stress patterns, and everything else feels easier.  The key is to disarm stress, not to cultivate a sense of ease.  We rest from stress.

Make sense?

There is an indirect approach that, the more we use it, the more we release the unnecessary stress patterns we have learned in everyday situations, so that when difficult situations arise, we meet them from a more relaxed baseline condition. 

When we know how to release, rather than suppress, that's what we experience.  We discover that our stress and struggle are an inside job -- perpetuated by ourselves through habits developed over a lifetime, trained by authorities like parents, teachers, and bosses, and based on the idea that if we just got things right, we'd feel at ease.

Well, temporarily, at best, because conditions change, inevitably.

Balancing our intelligence is a way to release subconscious stress patterns, so that instead of fighting or struggling for a sense of relief, we relax into ease -- without giving in, without compromise, and without complication; without resisting a situation (or our own stress patterns) or changing the subject to get relief.

As we disarm our accumulated stress patterns, we ease as our baseline condition. We feel peaceful empowerment as our natural state.

Be well -- and eat your vegetables.

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