How Yoga Makes Stress-free Living Possible

Sadhguru answers a question on stress relief and describes how yoga makes it possible to live a life free of stress. Banishing myths about stress relief and stress management, he explores how taking stress out of lives is entirely in our hands, if only we empower the body, mind and energy with the right kind of capability.

Full Transcript:

Questioner: Good afternoon Sir. Can you tell me that the work pressures are going on and because of that, stress is created? So that one is what do you do about the stress; second is how do you differentiate and leave the stress of that work pressure in the office and go back home and forget about it?

Sadhguru: (Laughs) Stress – you know a few years ago or many years ago when I first went to United States, wherever I went people were talking about ‘stress management’. I couldn’t understand this. Because in my understanding we manage things which are precious to us, which are valuable to us – you want to manage your family, your wealth, your business, your organizations – but why would anybody want to manage stress? This is something that I couldn’t understand. It took me a while to understand that these people have assumed that stress is a part of their life.

Stress is not a part of your life. Stress is not because of the work that you’re doing. Stress is just your inability to manage your body, your mind, your emotions and your energies. If your mind took instructions from you, would you keep it stressful or blissful? What’s your choice? What's your choice? If your mind took instructions from you, would you keep it stressful or blissful? Blissful. For yourself definitely it's blissfulness. What you want for your neighbor may be debatable but what you want for yourself is definitely highest level of pleasantness, isn't it?

So why is it when you are seeking pleasantness, your mind is creating unpleasantness? Stress means unpleasantness. Why is your mind creating unpleasantness for you? Your mind is supposed to be working for you not against you. So if it is working against you, we haven’t figured something about this mind, isn't it? Something very fundamental we have misunderstood about the nature of the mind,; how it functions and what we can do about it. So stress is not because of the nature of your work because you go and ask a chaprasi, he is stressful. You ask the Prime Minister, he is stressful, he looks stressful. In between everybody is stressful. So which job is not stressful? It is not the job which is stressful; it is you who is stressful. Job is never stressful, isn't it? It is just that your mind is not taking instructions from you.

So we need to read the instruction manual - we’ve done something fundamentally wrong as to how to handle this human mechanism, it’s a very complex technology. We need to address it with little more attention. (Applause)