The world is my family

Words WENDY ROSENFELDT

The festive season is a time to celebrate, enjoy time off and be with family and friends. It is a time to reconnect with loved ones, and although it is a happy occasion for many, for some it comes with stress and anxiety while for others it highlights their loneliness and lack of support.

While we may work at being more tolerant and accepting of difficult family members or challenging family situations, we can never fix up relationship problems purely on the level of trying. Trying to be nice can create a strain, and while you may leave the Christmas festivities pleased that there we no emotional fireworks, you may feel exhausted from maintaining a positive front.

How we feel inside determines how we act with other people. When we are tired and stressed, we are less tolerant and open. The more stressed we are, the more we look for negatives in the people around us. We expect to be let down or hurt and create situations where this is more likely to play out. For someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, their brain is wired up to be on high alert for danger, ever on the defensive and unintentionally looks for possible problems. A kind word can be taken as a sarcastic comment. Situations can get blown out of proportion or taken the wrong way.

To really change and heal the issue you have to go to the root of the problem. Transcendental meditation does this in two ways.

Through the practice of going beyond the awareness of everything, including thoughts, the mind has a rest from the constant stream of thoughts and emotions. We go beyond the boundaries of our hardwiring and experience a deep state of peace and fulfilment. This profound rest allows us to release the emotional charge of situations, and we come out feeling more at ease.

Quantum physics identifies that at the basis of life, there is a unified field of all the diverse laws of nature. A state where everything is just vibrations of the same stuff. At this level of life, we are all one. Transcending, experienced during transcendental meditation, is the practical technique to experience this in our own awareness.

When done on a regular basis, the individual begins to perceive more and more of this unified state when they come out of meditation. The more we experience this and live it in daily life, the less we have conflict or create problems because we are experiencing that everything is just a wave of the self.

You could no more harm anyone else or indeed the environment because you are experiencing that it is just a part of you. You feel as if the world is your family and a loving one at that.

www.tm.org.au