Reflection 92

Welcome!


What Nerves?

When you attend to Who you really are, it can really help in situations that previously may have caused you stress. Here is Douglas Harding writing about this in Head Off Stress:

I have a clear memory of standing at the back of a large hall in Denver, Colorado, watching with more than usual interest the crowd as they came in to the meeting. I was mightily impressed. The men looked about three feet taller than me and twice as muscular, and full of bounce, moving and talking easily. Perhaps what struck me most was how self-assured they seemed and how little they were likely to get out of this occasion: a workshop about – well, not about stress as such, but about its real cause and cure. But what did I care? As the seats, around 3,000 of them, filled up, a friend came and talked with me about our first meeting. At once I forgot about all those people: he and the subject of our previous meeting occupied me to the exclusion of all else… Then the time came for me to walk down the centre aisle, mount the platform and talk and conduct experiments for three hours with those people, as coolly as I’d just been talking at the back of the hall to my friend. The reason for my lack of nerves was precisely that lack: nerves did not exist where I stood on that stage. What nerves? I was, for myself, absent in favour of that audience. As a child I had been free from nerves without realizing it; as a young man I had been false to myself, a bundle of nerves; much older, I was true to myself again. Absence, No-thing, Emptiness isn’t jittery. There really was nothing where I stood on that stage, nothing to suffer stage-fright, no face to be shame-faced.


Warm regards,
Richard


It all boils down to this simple thing. What am I in my own experience at this time? What am I looking out of, because that’s real, that’s my reality, as distinct from my appearance for you. (On Having No Head DVD, Douglas Harding)


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