It is impressive to watch a person, who is calm and centered through meditation, approach a chaotic situation. It's almost like watching a ship navigate through a troubled sea, unfazed and steady. The waves lash at its hull, but it moves on undisturbed.
That is the way I want to navigate life. I want to be able and ready to go through the storm steady and sure; letting the waves of chaos pound against me without deviating from my course. That is the "Shalom" that I talked about last month. That Shalom allows me to stay focused on the things that matter and let the other distractions slide by.
That Shalom will enable me to be thankful while people around me are complaining. That Shalom allows me to see the positive,while others around me see only the negative. That Shalom enables me to be positive and joyful no matter the circumstances I find myself in.
That Shalom also brings health and wellness to my body. Multiple research studies have shown how stress affects our bodies negatively. We are also learning that stress is more a matter of how we perceive an incident or conditions rather than what they are.
A person with a positive mindset can be placed into an environment with a negative person and experience much less stress than the negative person.
An article: Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733 found that there was a very different response to stress, depending on the mindset, which they quantified with a test given before the stress was introduced in the study.
I believe we can learn to calm ourselves amid chaos and reduce the effects of the stress that enters our lives. In doing that, I think we can experience a much-improved level of health and wellness. If we can achieve this calming through ‘calming harp’ music, meditation, and essential oils, instead of pharmaceuticals, that is even better! I believe that simple is better.