A Practice for Overcoming Stress

Greetings! This is the one you’ve known as Jesus the Christ. I’d like to give you a practice today that will help you cope with stressful situations and stressful thoughts. It’s a simple enough practice, but for it to be effective, you have to choose to do it when you need to. That is always the tricky part. Meditation, practices, and inquiries are all easy to do once you get over the ego’s resistance to doing them. So, let’s talk about that first for a moment.

The ego is not wise, but it is clever. To characterize it this way is not giving it too much credit. The ego is a self-maintaining mechanism. It is programming that is programmed to maintain itself, and it does this primarily through resistance to meditation, practices, inquiries, and anything else that will lead to the unraveling or weakening of this programming. In that way, you could say that the ego is smart. But it isn’t really.

The ego is not an entity with intelligence. Again, the best way to describe it and to understand it is to call it programming. This is something you’re all able to understand now that you have computers. To say that the ego is programming is not an analogy. It is not like programming; it is programming.

“Who put it there?” you say. That’s a great mystery, isn’t it? Let’s just say that this is the only way that God, the Source, is able to experience two-ness, since God is All That Is and at one with all. Without such programming, God could not experience itself as “other”; it could only experience itself. So, to enjoy two-ness, God had to devise a mechanism for experiencing two-ness, three-ness, and so-forth; and this mechanism is programming.

In other humanoid civilizations, the programming that is the ego is different from yours. So, by no means is every humanoid civilization like yours. Every humanoid civilization is unique, largely because it’s programmed to be unique, with different types of egos and in other ways.

I will have to admit that your egoic programming, here on earth, is particularly difficult, particularly negative and challenging to see beyond. Many, many so-called saviors or healers or teachers, if you will, like myself, have come to earth throughout its history, and especially today, to help people see beyond their egos, and some progress has been made in this regard. However, some people are younger souls or have more hardened egos than others and won’t see beyond their egos for many more lifetimes. Still, such interventions do uplift a great number of people, and so we are here to assist in that evolution of consciousness in the ways we are able to from this dimension.

I and others like myself, other Ascended Masters, are working from this dimension, and many other advanced souls are working in your dimension, disguised, you could say, as human beings. They are, of course, human beings, but they’re able to see beyond the ego more easily than most, and so they can help those who are capable of this but who haven’t quite mastered this.

So, here you are. Many of you are looking for guidance for exactly this, although you may say, “I’m tired of suffering,” or “I want to be happier,” or “I want to be a better human being,” or “I want to know God.” But no matter how you put it, what you want and what you need to do is to overcome your egoic programming.

The greatest power you have in overcoming this programming is knowing that this programming exists and seeing clearly that it’s working against you. Who is this you that can know this and see this? This is the real you. I’m speaking to the real you—your divine self. It’s right here listening to these words, and it is what’s capable of seeing the ego for what it is.

Once you know about this programming, you’re well on your way to becoming free of it. To overcome an adversary, you must know your adversary. Much of my teaching has been to help you understand what the ego is like and what it’s up to so that you realize that you are not the ego. Until you begin waking up from the programming, you believe you are what the voice in your head says you are, and you believe you are this self-centered, petty, unkind, and judgmental self. Once you begin to wake up from the programming, you see that you are what’s able to be aware of the ego and catch on to its tricks.

That’s a big difference! But moment to moment, you still have to become aware of the ego and catch it in its tricks. Practices, inquiries, and meditation are meant to help you with this. Becoming more aware of the ego and what it’s up to is a process; it takes time and practice to become good at this. The more you practice this through meditation, the better you get at it.

So, meditation will definitely speed up your progress and set you free sooner than if you don’t practice meditation daily. There’s no getting around the need to practice. Those who practice meditation a little wake up more slowly than those who practice meditation a lot. It still takes time, but your life will always be improved by meditation, so there’s no reason not to meditate. However, the ego has lots of reasons and excuses for not meditating, but that isn’t my focus today.

As promised, I’ll introduce a practice that will help you overcome stress, which nearly always stems from negative thoughts or simply too much thinking. Stress is essentially self-generated by your own ego and also by other egos who have authority over you. Whether the voice that causes stress comes from inside you or outside you, the result is the same, and there’s one remedy: Notice the stress in your body and then stop whatever you’re doing or thinking and do something different. Put your mind on something else or do something else or both.

Just as you drink water when you’re thirsty and eat food when you’re hungry, you can learn to stop and do something different when you feel stress. Stress is like hunger or thirst that way—there’s a remedy, and an easy one at that, easier sometimes than finding food or water when you need it. The remedy is simply to stop and change what you’re doing or thinking.

How hard is it to stop what you’re doing or thinking? Simple, right? You just have to do or think something else. So, why don’t you? Most likely it’s because you’re in the habit of pushing forward rather than stopping. What causes you to push forward? The voice in your head or perhaps the voice of some authority who isn’t sensitive to what you need in that moment. So, is anything real preventing you from stopping? No. The voice in your head isn’t real, and the voice in other people’s heads is no more real than your own. This voice isn’t based on truth or wisdom.

Let me repeat: The voice in your head isn’t real—it’s just thoughts. And yet, it so often determines people’s actions, and usually those actions lead to stress. Why? Because the voice in your head isn’t wise, and it doesn’t care whether you’re happy or not. It only cares that you do as your told and that you remain busy. Who is it that’s telling you to do something? What is this voice? Where does it come from? Why do you listen to it? Do you question it sometimes?

It’s a good idea to question it. This will certainly change your life. It’s time to question the voice in your head. You are not meant to be stressed or unhappy or unkind or judgmental or angry, and the voice in your head makes you all of these things. It’s time to question the programming.

And what would happen if everyone questioned the voice in their head? This would be a very different world. It’s like your world is being run by a cruel and thankless master, which is a good description of the ego. This highly negative and destructive ego—this programming—that you’ve been given is responsible for all the suffering and harm in the world. Nearly everyone is being run by it, and it’s time for many of you to see this and say “no more.” That’s the only way this cruelty and negativity will stop and the only way this world will be changed—by seeing the Truth, which is the truth about your ego. It is destructive programming and not your true voice or the voice of anything true or wise.

Once you really see this, you’ll have the strength to stop whenever you realize the ego has a hold on you. You won’t always catch the ego at its games, and you won’t always stop, but eventually the ego will lose its hold on you. It’ll become background noise that you’re able to shut out, and you’ll be able to carry on without it.

This is what meditation does for you. It turns down the volume of the voice in your head so that it no longer influences you. And when the volume is lowered, you’re better able to march to a different drummer—the drum beat of your soul or your Heart. Many of you are already doing this, and I thank you for that, the earth thanks you for that, and your loved ones and fellow human beings thank you for that.

So, here is the practice I have for you today: When you feel tense, stop and do something else: rest, breathe, notice the beauty around you, take a walk in nature, pray, list things you’re grateful, put on some music, play some music, send love to someone, express your love to someone, or just do something different—something that brings you joy. Let joy have its way with you.

You can do this now. This is how change happens, through such simple acts. Just stop and make another choice. Love yourself enough to not allow negativity and stress to be your experience. Thank you for being open to this message. I am with you always.