By Tim Gallwey, Edd Hanzelik, and John Horton

This is the time and this is a place to allow our own wisdom to prevail over stress.

We would like to invite you into a personal conversation about stress, how it gets in the way of our enjoyment of life as well as our performance in life. We would like to share with you, and ask you to share with us, practical wisdom about how you by pass the being a victim of the stress system in our lives while gaining greater access to our potential to enjoy the full range of what it means to be human.

Our starting place is that chronic stress – the stress that lasts over a long period of time is not good for us. It opens the door to disease on the physical level, and stands in the way of accessing our most human qualities. It really prevents us from knowing, being, and expressing who we truly are. Besides it doesn’t feel good at all. Not recognizing an alternative, we hide ourselves from the discomfort of our own stress by distracting ourselves into more work, escaping into tv land, or even worse, developing dependencies on mood altering substances. All of this deprives us of connection with our true selves, the feelings of our own hearts, and the wisdom that lies therein to know and act from what is truly important to us.

Having recognized the cost of stress in our lives, to our lives, the next step is to see there is a choice. We don’t have to be the victims of our own stress. This step may take realizing the extent to which we create our own stress and keep the stress habit going. But the good news is that we ourselves have the wisdom to avoid stress, to let go of worry about those things we don’t control and to control those things that we do have control over. It’s a choice to take a new step of responsibility, meaning the ability to respond to our better selves. It’s a way to build the kind of inner stability that is no longer vulnerable to the suffering of stress.

Please join us in participating in this effort to reduce negative consequences of stress world wide, starting with ourselves.