Got Stress?

Often, I had asked myself why peace of mind seemed so elusive. There were times when life just seemed not that easy. Sometimes it felt like an interminable series of catastrophes. Sometimes the right answer appeared not just challenging, but impossible to find. There were days when every decision just seemed to be the wrong one. The act of living revealed itself as merely lurching from one self-inflicted wound to the next, like cascading challenges that never seemed to end. I sometimes wondered why I so frequently found myself in these mind-bending moments of penetrating stress. And then I had something of a revelation… although I’d say that the pace at which this revelation reached my head can only be described as leisurely. In other words, worry, fear, anxiety, that entire category of neuroses had a stranglehold on my existence for so long before I really understood that my life — any of our lives — did not need to be that way.

What I am describing as my revelation was more of a process, but it ultimately led to a flash of clarity. For all of us, there’s almost never an end to the daily challenges we face. It seems like there’s always something. Although the challenges vary — sometimes (okay, often) they are financial, sometimes (okay, often) they involve our kids, sometimes they involve work or the workplace, sometimes they are deeply personal, sometimes they are important, sometimes they are petty, and sometimes they are petty but in our minds we have turned them into something that matters. Regardless of the category into which our day to day struggles fall, we have to deal with them. But the obvious question is how do we deal with them in a way that produces a good result — and importantly — peace of mind at the end?

It is quite likely that we have all spent hours upon hours debating in our own minds the benefits and drawbacks of the various choices that we face when deciding something. And this is probably as it should be. We should be careful, thoughtful, engage complexity, assess potential outcomes as best we can, and then go forward. But the problems really arise when this otherwise useful and constructive process becomes engulfed in stress and anxiety, and if the decision we made somehow goes wrong, then that’s just rocket fuel for more stress.

Stress and anxiety can be all-consuming. These partners in crime can make bad situations worse. They affect our judgment and lead us to see things and think about things in ways that just are not productive. I wondered for some time how to make better decisions, because of course in some far-off imaginary world, perfection in our decision-making somehow seemed possible and achievable. I wondered if there was an approach to decision-making that was more likely to produce the good results I wanted. But the more I focused on this, the more I came to think that the very idea of trying to always get things right is a fool’s errand, an impossibility. You cannot ever really know for sure which bridge you should burn instead of traipsing right across it. Things will sometimes (or more than sometimes) not go the way you want them to. There will be missteps, miscalculations, misjudgments, and errors. These are inevitable. So then, resigned and disheartened, I thought maybe peace of mind is itself an impossibility. Thought turned to struggle and struggle turned to frustration.

But then something changed. Like a lot changed. In a moment of peak accumulated distress, I found my moment of enlightenment. While for so long, the chaos of the universe seemed to have found a comfortable home deep in the recesses of my head, it struck me hard that I had lost sight of the one and only path that could lead to the peace I was looking for: faith.

As a Hindu, I attend the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir. I have always understood my participation there to be a blessing. For decades I have attended weekly services at our mandir, which we refer to as Satsang. In its essence, Satsang means fellowship, connection, unity… and faith. But despite my physical presence at countless spiritual orations, delivered by the most learned of presenters, it was dawning on me that I may have absolutely, completely, totally, utterly, and entirely failed to grasp any of the meaning of what was being said. But, on one particular Sunday, in one particular instant, the words being read from one of our scriptures penetrated my heart. The reading came from a text known as “Swamini Vato,” which is a collection of discourses, a bounty of immeasurable wisdom imparted by Bhagwan Swaminarayan’s first spiritual successor, Gunatitanand Swami. In our Satsang, we believe in Bhagwan Swaminarayan as our deity, our God, and His spiritual successors as our Gurus. And the words they have spoken and written in their time on this earth are life changing, as long as we listen to them with an open mind and embrace them with an open heart.

The Sunday discourse began with a thoughtful contemplation of when and how to ask for God’s mercy. In the reading, Gunatitanand Swami said of a faithful devotee, “He believes God as the all-doer, and except God, nobody is able to do anything. Then, no wish will arise and patience will remain. And if one does not have this understanding, even small things will cause one to become upset and impatient. On this earth, even God suffered misery without any reason. This is the nature of this worldly life. That nature (that it is full of misery) should be known.”

From the second I heard and then read these words, they struck me with enormous power, strength, and divinity. I could see vividly why my way of understanding life’s challenges was especially misdirected. Gunatitanand Swami was guiding us to surrender ourselves to the belief that the course of events in our lives is not determined by us, that there is only one power in the universe, God, who will channel our direction. And he was asking us to keep faith in this belief. It is not to say that our efforts are not important or meaningful, or that we don’t have a duty and responsibility to conduct ourselves with competence and care. He was helping us to understand that we should not be discouraged or disheartened when things do not appear to go as we had hoped or intended. He was not at all saying that this belief means things would always be easy or that from time to time we will not encounter difficulties or challenges.

These words meant something to me. I felt my mind easing. I felt the tension lifting. But I was still left wondering whether, even with firmness in the belief that my path was determined by the God in whom I had unbounded, infinite faith, I would find the peace of mind I was in search of; or would the inevitable miseries of the world ultimately overcome the tranquility I gained from understanding that whatever was happening was according to the will of God. In other words, was it possible that even when God decides the outcome, that outcome can still make us unhappy? Gunatitanand Swami’s answer in a different discourse was clear and unequivocal: no, this is not possible. Swami steadfastly said, “God can never be the enemy of his devotees. Whatever he does will result in happiness for the devotees.” Throughout his discourses, Gunatitanand Swami counseled patience, guiding us to understand that in time, moments of difficulty will yield to moments of happiness and peace of mind, if we do not lose faith.

This was the healing I needed. Gunatitanand Swami had disentangled me from questions, worries, fears and anxieties that had inflicted despair and distress for as long as I can remember. Gunatitanand Swami’s wisdom had been with me my entire life, throughout my time in Satsang, but somehow, I just didn’t see and understand what his words really meant. I looked for answers in many other places and ended up missing the ones right in front of me.

Rakesh Patel, Washington, DC
Attorney