Sorry But Stress Is Present In Life

Written By Don Shetterly

Sometimes I see things stated and my eyes bulge out of my poor little mind. I am amazed at how unconscious and aware we can be even by those who claim to be conscious.  I believe that the things we preach to the world especially when they are our beliefs have serious consequences, and we need to be far more aware than we are.

I saw a quote online that said, "there is no such thing as stress in the world.  It is all in our mind." 

I had to read the quote a few times to make sure I saw the statement that I did.  Yes, that is the statement that I read, and it boggles my mind.

I had to read it and do a double take to make sure I saw what I did.  Yes, that is the statement.

This statement could not be further from the truth.  In fact, it and truth are strangers in distant galaxies.

There is stress no matter where you look.  Some of it is positive stress which we need in our lives.  Some of it is toxic stress.  No matter what you think your thoughts can do, stress is present.

• If you walk outside in the hot sun, the stress of the heat makes your body work to cool and find equilibrium.  
• If you get in the car and drive down the street, there are cars not obeying the traffic laws and rules of driving so that they can present stress to you. 
• There is the boss that yells at an employee in front of a meeting for something beyond their control.  That is stress on your mind and body.  
• There is the demanding boss that wants you to follow their every whim and demand with no respect for you.  That is stress.
• There is the stress of the kids needing help with homework, or to take them to every activity meeting they have.  
• There is the stress of trying to get your family fed and answering emails and texts from the boss.
• There is even stress from moments gone by in how it impacts your current thought processes on a million different subjects and points.  
• There are the financial consequences of spending too much and dealing with your ever changing budget that creates stress.
• There is that rude person who tries to ruin your day or just get in your face for the stupidest thing that they can.  
• There is the stress of a significant other feeling left out or putting demands upon your time that causes stress.
• There is the stress of all those things you were taught and learned as a young child that now sometimes makes current moments not seem reasonable to you.  In the process of those connections that happen unconsciously every minute of their day, they create stress that we don't often see.
• Learning and growth are most likely stressful moments because it takes you out of your comfort zone and into something new.

There is hardly a day that goes by where we have no stress.  If we walk around not recognizing the stress in our lives, we're not as awake and aware and conscious as we think we are.  We may be able to talk the talk, but if we can't connect the talk with real life action or the places in our bodies that it resides, we're only fooling ourselves.

If you don't recognize stress in your life, you're only setting yourself up for a big fall later on in life.  At some point, it will build up to a breaking point, and it will get your attention.  You can mark my words on that.  I've lived it.

We can't go through life putting the happy smile on our face while we ignore stress and connections to the past.  If you try to do this, let me tell you from first-hand experience that the result will not be a good one.  I don't say this out of belief.  I say it from experience.

Learn to recognize stress for what it is.  It is present.  Instead of trying to act like it doesn't exist, go in and allow yourself to see it for what it is.  Allow yourself to find ways to acknowledge and let go of it. 

It is not just an exercise for the mind because stress finds a place within our body.  If we don't see its existence, it takes us permanent residency and then crowds out the joy and peace and love you so badly desire for life.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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How We Treat One Another

Some days I feel like I'm writing for the heck of it.  It is almost like my words mean nothing and fall on deaf ears.

I see the hatred shared online from people who despise the hatred.  I see people getting angry acting as if I should only post stuff that they like and God forbid we don't see things the same way.

How we treat one another these days is mind boggling.  How we censor others is mind boggling.  How we get up on our pedestals and somehow demand others treat us as if we have all the answers is mind boggling.

We have replaced love with hate.  We have replaced our religious beliefs with intolerance.  We have denigrated those that wish to speak up by making them out to be horrible people we make fun of and call names.

What gives here? 

Where is our humanness?

Where is the love we proclaim we have?

We can't walk down both sides of the fence at one time.  We can't proclaim we love others and we want tolerance if we throw mud at those who disagree with us.

Aren't we better than that?  Don't we realize that the more we do this online that we're just being anything but human?

Seems like I have more rhetorical questions than there are answers.  Maybe the answers are there, but no one wishes to see it or hear it.

Heck, I don't have all the answers either, but I at least try to not make fun of others.  I try to not degrade and mock other people.

Our social media accounts show our true nature I think.  If someone wrote a book about us based upon what we share and like online, I've got a feeling that many people would be doing damage control.

It is sad.  It angers me to see the way we treat each other, especially online.  It angers me to see people talk about love and respect and tolerance, but then they go and do the same thing they despise.

It almost, no it does, remind me of the house I grew up in with the church-going-family who hated everyone that didn't think like them.  Maybe that's why this bothers me so much.  I have already lived this once in my life.

Little did I know, I would have to relive it again.  Where's the spaceship - I want to find a new planet that has tolerance and love, not hatred disguised as love.

May we all try a little harder to share a little less online and love a little more.  That's my hope!

Maybe we could work to be a little bit more conscious and aware.  After all, those things are not evident because of words, but because of the actions we portray.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Being Authentic When I Don't Know Who I Am

I remember back to the early days of beginning healing as a male child abuse survivor.  For me, my entire life was turned upside down as the result of being paralyzed from a Conversion Disorder.  Now, Conversion Disorder has been renamed to Functional Neurological Disorder.

Back to the topic though...

At the time, I thought I had life figured out.  I thought I knew what my career path was.  Each year, I listed my top goals for the next year, two years, five years, 20 years, and so on and so forth.  I had my job that took me from early morning to late at night almost 7 days a week.

All of this was who I thought I was.  It was my identity and I thought I was being authentic.  Yet, when you're losing control of every physical part of your body and you start seeing that final white light as you're body is leaving this world, it tends to slap you pretty hard, waking you up to see more than you see in that moment.

I had buried so much...

This moment brought me front and center to all that I didn't know about myself but I thought I knew.  I had so buried all of the stuff that happened to me because it was horrible.  It was too horrible to see or even think about or even allow myself the remotest of connections.

As I began to heal, I began to see more of the true side of myself, the authentic side.  It was parts that I didn't even realize existed, but they were there.  It was parts that quite surprised me.

Even as I began to heal and start to discover what being authentic meant for my life, I realized that I had just reached the tip of the iceberg.  There was so much more for me to discover.  There was so much more that I had no way to see.  It all seemed like a fog and a mystery, but beyond that point, it was who I was.

I've gone through some tremendous healing work connecting not just my mind in healing, but the physical body as well.  What I have found is that as much as I thought I healed and discovered, there was much more than I could even see.

What we cannot see in this moment...

Being authentic is in my mind about learning to let go and become aware of that which we cannot see in this moment.  It is allowing myself to go further, grow in awareness and consciousness so that I can know myself from deep within.  It is about learning to connect to the deepest parts of my body, including the pain so that I can regain all those parts and discover more of myself.

As I continue to progress in my healing, I'm learning that the more I discover, the more I realize that further possibility exists.  What I know today about being authentic is no where near what I will probably know tomorrow or the next day.

There is so much out there that I have found.  There is much more to myself that I never realized.  Along with all the pains and experiences in life, I'm learning how to become more authentic.  For as I am becoming authentic, it is then that I truly discover what authenticity means.

We have to reach further for who we are, past all the horrible stuff that happened.  We don't need to ignore, neglect, or numb to all these things, but we need to squeeze them so hard that they have no life left in them.  It is then that we reclaim the power from them enabling us to being more authentic in our own life.

I realize that this may sound like new age philosophy or mumble jumble, but I can tell you from healing in my own life, this is at the heart of what propelled me forward.  It took me out of the depths of despair and into moments that I never could imagine existed.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Let Us Be More

Every day we wake up, there are possibilities before us and choices to make.  No matter what, it is up to each one of us what we do with the seconds, minutes, and hours we have in a day.  My hope is that we will be more than we were yesterday.

No matter what situation you may be facing or what your life has looked like up to this point, you still have the choice what you do with this day.  Sure, your choices may be influenced by events of yesterday, but you still have the option to be more and do more than you could yesterday.

Sometimes those small little choices we make get us from one moment to the next, no matter how small and insignificant they are.  Our thoughts and awareness and consciousness should be that we are more today than yesterday and not as much as we can be tomorrow.

Always possibilities in life...

There are always possibilities in life.  It is what we do with our current moment that either brings them into view, or takes us into hibernation.  I am not just writing pretty words here.  I've lived both sides of what I am saying.  Sometimes I wither down into my cave, but if I'm lucky I will choose something that lifts me higher.

Let our actions and words show that we are making the right choices.  Let our words to others be out of kindness and love.  Let our life show that we are conscious and aware, not that we need to prove to others that we are.  Through all of this, we will help elevate ourselves to be more and hopefully those around us.

Conscious of the choices we make...

There are far too many activities that we partake in each day where we don't make good choices for our lives, our body, and our minds.  In fact, we are generally not aware and conscious of what we do, but we continue to do it anyway.  It is up to us to make the choice to see our life in a way that we have not seen it up until this point.

We need to challenge ourselves to be more and by doing so, we automatically challenge other people to be more.  We need to not accept where we are, but not stop searching for what we need until we find it.  We need to embrace more in our life and raise our own standards of what we expect from the possibilities around us.

(click image to read)

Grab all of life with gusto.  Go for every moment where you can rise above and find all that you need for your day.  Become something more than you are at this very moment.  It is a process, not an endpoint.  It is a journey, not just one moment of consciousness and awareness.  Find it and embrace it so you can become more today than what you were yesterday.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Cow In The Road

Did you ever hear that story?  The one that gets shared about the cow in the road?  If not, let me refresh your memory so we can all be on the same page.

There is a person driving through the country enjoying the nighttime peacefulness.  The road is winding and narrow.  All of the sudden, he sees this car coming towards him barreling at a fast speed.  It is honking its horn frantically and flashing its lights.  The driver of that car is hanging out the window hollering "cow" at the top of their lungs.

Of course, this person wonders what kind of a crazy fool is that, hollering and honking their horn.  They must be crazy as they were driving erratically and screaming.  The person thinks how rude and horrible this person driver is.

However, as the person rounds the corner of the curved road, he sees the cow in the middle of the road.  The crazy oncoming driver was trying to warn him before it was too late. 

We are just like that person driving that fails to see what is before us. We think we have it all together and so we portray that to the world.  Yet, we don't see the parts before us.  We act as if everything is okay and that if you get the alerts, you disregard them.

Our society is like that.  Alerts are there and the behavior that others are doing to one another is there.  Yet, we fail to see them.  We think everything is fine.  We think it is the other guy that has the problem but not us.

We can keep going through life oblivious to what is right before us, thinking that we have it all under control.  If we keep doing that, we will be like the driver rounding the curve in the road not even aware of what lies ahead.

It is our choice what we do, but our actions have serious impacts on the road ahead.  We can either be aware and see them or we can continue to hide our head in the sand.  Which will you do?

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Blog Post And Images (c) 12/24/15 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Center Of Consciousness

From The Book

Title:  Untethered Soul
Author:  Michael Singer

 - From Page 30 -

Now you are in your center of consciousness. You are behind everything, just watching. That is your true home. Take everything else away and you’re still there, aware that everything is gone. But take the center of awareness away, and there is nothing. That center is the seat of Self. From that seat, you are aware that there are thoughts, emotions, and a world coming in through your senses. But now you are aware that you’re aware.

The Big Picture

I am disheartened when I see people operating from a very narrow focus and view point in life.  It seems to be so easy these days to miss the big picture while hiding in a world of fantasy.  When we focus on the small and insignificant battles of our day, we easily lose site of the big picture.

The big picture is more about humanity and how we can help one another achieve more.  In achieving more, we have the opportunity to help push this world and the inhabitants within to be more than they ever thought they could.

Holding on to paradigms of old, just because they are safe and familiar to us, will only hold us back from the big picture.  Questioning these things from an objective view point through the eyes of the observer, is the way to really see how strong of foundation our paradigms have.

In many ways, if you are not evolving your ideas and beliefs, then you are stagnant in the growth of human consciousness.  There is no way that you will know today, what it is that tomorrow holds, unless you set sail in the sea of possibility and knowledge.

Stop And Find The Answers Within You

We all have our go-to people that we listen to in life.  In fact, many are out seeking and asking for others to help answer questions they struggle with each day.  While each person may not realize just how much they are looking for answers, it is happening right before our eyes.

I constantly see on Facebook and Twitter, the sharing and spreading of feel good posts.  While there is nothing wrong with that, it often seems or appears fake in many ways.  It seems overdone and run into the ground.  In many ways, it is like this is all that matters - that we just want to see pretty little pictures and happy thoughts spread from one person to another.

Now don't get me wrong because seeing these things can be uplifting in our day help us to pull ourselves up through the difficult moments we face.  The problem I have with it is that instead of going within and seeking the answers from our higher self, we begin looking to everyone else to fulfill that need.  We lose site of becoming more aware in our life and more conscious, in lieu of seeking advice and answers from everyone else out there.

Today Is Election Day

I'm haunted by what I see reported in the media and through social media each day.  Today is election day in the US, but from the looks of the last year or more, it has been anything but civil.  In fact, it is almost hard to comprehend that this process brings out the humanness of our civilization.  I am saddened by the display of hatred, rhetoric, and disrespect throughout this entire political campaign.  I say this towards all voters and all political parties, because no one is innocent in this process.

Why is it that we feel we must tear each other down in our country, rather than building each other up?  Why is it that we feel that the only thing that matters in our day is how much we shower our hatred and anger upon our political opponent?  We do not even attempt to listen to one another or try to understand where the other person is coming from in this political debate.  All we seem to care about is going to our respective corner and hurling insults and accusations until our voice is so hoarse that we can no longer scream.

Embrace Fear

So often, we run from fear and in so doing this, we drain our power.  It is when we embrace our fears, that we take the power back from them.  We do not get lost in the fear, but we use the fear to become more aware and conscious of who we are. - Don Shetterly