Links to Kadampa Life’s articles on overcoming stress and anxiety, all in one place. Hopefully you’ll find something helpful in here, whatever your background.
Extract: It doesn’t matter whether fears or misfortunes are real or imagined, large or small — they all seem to consume us. With anxiety we can’t help overthinking, so there is no objective scale, you can’t number worries from 1 to 10 — worries never seem small because they each fill our mind.
Includes a 15-minute breathing meditation.
Extract: Breathing meditation is all the rage these days. But have you ever wondered why a simple meditation on our breath has the power to make us feel so much better? After all, we are breathing all the time…
Extract: How is it that some some people can cope with worry and stress and even thrive on it, whereas others get overwhelmed and even ill? Of course there are various factors at play, but there are also good methods for alleviating worry and stress that anyone can try.
How to get out of bed when you’re feeling hopeless
Extract:
Stay in the moment. Stay in today at least.
Today I can handle. Today I can transform. Tomorrow will take care of itself. And I really don’t need to be thinking about how this will impact me all next year, let alone the rest of my life … especially considering I may die today.
What to do when feeling despair
Extract: Whatever faith we are – Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic, etc. – we can all pray and receive powerful blessings for ourselves and others. This is because holy beings transcend our labels and help everyone who asks – that’s their job. If we are a living being, we have a divine spark in our heart (in Buddhism, we call it our Buddha nature) that will be ignited if we allow ourselves to believe in blessings.
Extract: When we do allow our mind to experience its natural inner peace by letting go and relaxing into our heart, we see for ourselves how space solves problems. Just putting space around our problems, getting them into perspective, helps hugely. We relax and we see more clearly a way forward. We stop panicking. A cloud surrounded by an infinite sky is no big deal.
How to avoid stress and burnout at work
Extract: We can also become a less nice person when we are burning out. Our tolerance and flexibility diminishes — we want everyone to do things our way because we think that’ll make our life more manageable.
Series of overcoming worry articles
How to stop worrying about anything, everything and nothing
Buddhist advice for worrywarts
Breathe your way to inner peace
This is wonderful for me. I love the idea of accepting or changing and Bring it on.
Yes, I would like this imprinted on my mind forever. “Don’t think” as Kathy said is brilliant, and so very hard for me who has a mind that never stops, but now that I am really getting into buddhism I am becoming more hopeful and more connected. Thank you all so much. Fae.
I was never much of a Dr. Seuss person but I must confess that I find the page above says it all. I used to spend large amounts of my life wishing I could change the past and worrying endlessly about the future. I have reached a point after 2 1/2 years of Buddhist study that I never think about changing the past, and worry about the future much less. I have a friend who says it all. “Don’t think”. If everyone lived in the now I wonder how much better the world would be.