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Top Stress, Disease and Meditation Resources
by Joe Gattis

Millions of people suffer from stress related diseases each year. A recent search of the internet turned up over 4 million items containing the phrase "stress and disease." Stress never seems to end in modern society as we encounter situations at work, in driving, in our relationships and more.

Medical research has found a steroid produced by the body to deal with stressful situations. But this steroid has a secondary effect that shuts down the body's immune system to concentrate the body's resources on survival. Stressful situations trigger a "fight or flight" response, either of which require large amounts of energy. Stress in more primitive times demanded the need for that response. For example, if you met a hungry lion you could be eaten. This stressful situation produced the steroid and your body would have the energy to get away. After escaping, the body would stop producing the steroid and the immune system would return to normal.

Today's society seldom demands that response. Not meeting a deadline will cause stress, but there is little immediate danger of being eaten by your boss! But the body doesn't realize that and responds to the stressful situation by pumping out the stress steroid.

The result is the immune system never returns to its full functionality. This causes deterioration in the general ability of the immune system and diseases can get a foothold and prosper.

Knowing all this doesn't help get rid of the stress. To get rid of the stress we must get rid of the true source of the stress. Stress comes from upset in our life. Why do we get upset? Because some expectation we had did not get fulfilled. These broken expectations lead to our upset.

We expect ourselves to be able to do something, and when we can't, for whatever reason, we get angry at the person we think is at fault, never actually blaming ourselves for having broken expectations. When several similar events, such as failure to accomplish something, set up a pattern in our life we begin to expect, consciously or unconsciously, for that pattern to repeat itself. when a similar situation comes along we act in the same manner that we did before and, doing the same thing over again, we fail, get angry, and wind up with more stress than we had to start with.

To get rid of stress we must get rid of those expectations. Those expectations are attached to our images of the past events in our lives. All of these expectations and images constitute a kind of "mind" with a life of its own that controls our daily life.

In Maum Meditation this mind is called the "False Mind" because it is not the real true individual's mind. It is just a framework of expectations, judgments, images, attachments, and so on that we have accumulated in our life. The "True Mind" is the real individual. This True Mind is the original mind that we are given before we are born. From our birth we begin accumulating images and the False Mind starts growing.

Look at the average two year old. He has very little False Mind in relation to his True Mind because he has not lived long enough to have stored up much. He accepts things as they are. Every day is a new beginning. If he is hungry, he eats. If he is sleepy, he sleeps. He doesn't worry about whether or not it's time for supper, or bedtime; he just does as he wants to.

According to psychologists by the time he is three his personality traits will be formed. what happens in that single year? He begins to push the limits of his world. His life experiences increase and he ceases to be able to do as he wants. He learns right and wrong. He has failed expectations and attaches to the things that make him happy. The False Mind begins gaining strength. Little by little this False Mind takes control, dulling the True Mind with the promise of "this is how we did it before, this is how we should do it now."

Soon the True Mind begins to give in until the False Mind is completely in charge. When that happens stress and the diseases that come from stress can start.

Now we know the true source of our stress. What can we do about it? Everything in nature follows the simple laws of nature that we often overlook in favor of a more complicated solution. That search for more complex is our False Mind's method of trying to explain things. There is a simple solution to the problem of the False Mind and the stress it causes.

The simplest solution of all is to just get rid of our False Mind, but how do we do that? We get rid of the judgments, experiences, images, and attachments to these things.

Woo Myung, founder of Maum Meditation, found that when we get rid of attachments to those images we actually are getting rid of the False Mind. When all the attachments are gone then there is nothing to cause the stress that is responsible for the diseases.

If we close our eyes many people can see the events that happened in the past as a series of images. Day to day things such as eating and brushing your teeth are not remembered, but the events that have an impact on us are actually retained as images. Those images are not the memory itself, but only a record of the event stored by the False Mind. The true memory resides in our True Mind and even when the False Mind is gone these memories remain.

Through the simple process of eliminating these images an amazing thing happens.We still retain the memories, but without the emotions tied to the image of the event. When those emotional attachments are gone, the stress disappears. With the stress gone the immune system can rapidly heal the body in most instances.