Ending Stress - Jonathan Harrison

This highly practical guide shows you clearly and directly how to achieve effective stress relief and remove or eliminate stress, anger, fear and worry by becoming more realistic, using 2,500 year old meditation and therapy tools and inspired by masters of nondual and Buddhist wisdom traditions including Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Zen, Madhyamika, Advaita and Tao. Jonathan Harrison teaches nondual and Buddhist meditation and psychology.

The guide explains how mental stress is created and how to remove it from your life in all its forms including anger, anxiety, disappointment, discontent, dissatisfaction, dread, envy, fear, frustration, guilt, humiliation, impatience, insult, misery, mistrust, regret, tension and worry.

Jonathan Harrison shows how, in order to see how stress is created, you need to understand three things:

- The way you think about things:

You see the world as structured, split into separate parts which may be in conflict. Your particular mental structures consisting of your personal opinions and concepts is the result of many factors including your genetic makeup, parental upbringing, social and cultural environments and the way you have perceived, internalized and acted on your experiences. These mental structures develop and change throughout your life. The world as you see it is largely a reflection of your mental history. What you think is an original creation of your mind.

- The way things really are:

Reality, the world as it is, is neither inherently split (dualistic), nor unified, neither structured nor unstructured. It just is. This is so simple that most people do not understand it.

- Ending stress

It is enough to grasp deeply how things really work. The past has gone, is unalterable, the future is non-existent except as your present expectations, and “now” is already here. Within this realization, true rest occurs naturally. This is non-meditation, natural meditation or “resting in natural awareness” as Longchen Rabjam, the renowned Tibetan yogi and Dzogchen meditation master, put it.

By recognizing the nature of reality you are able to live, love and benefit yourself and others more easily, as you no longer experience the frustration of trying to grasp at imagined parts of your experience or trying to remove them.