Meditation can relieve stress.

Stress less, smile more

It’s no secret that humanity has been living through some difficult times and a lot of people have been struggling to stay afloat. In fact, many people who were relatively carefree have been experiencing levels of stress they didn’t expect or have never experienced before.

Few things can be more debilitating than ongoing stress and we all know what a toll it can take. So in order to stay strong, peaceful and inwardly protected in the face of life’s challenges, we can learn techniques to reduce stress and its underlying causes.

The good news is that there are many tried and tested methods that work. These methods address the core of the issue because most of us tend to think that situations or people in our life are the causes of our stress or unhappiness. We then spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix those situations or people, which often adds to our stress. This can cause a lot of anxiety as often we have little or no influence on these situations.

Much of the stress and tension we normally experience comes from our mind and many of the problems we experience, including ill health, can be caused or aggravated by this stress. This is something we can influence and change.

Cork-based meditation teacher Kelsang Drolma explains that we can gradually remove these inner causes of stress through doing meditation regularly, patiently and gently and as a result, come to experience a lucid and spacious mind.

She said our thoughts and feelings often seem overwhelming but if we learn to create some inner space through meditation practice, we will have the mental space to choose how to respond peacefully to difficult situations. In this way, we will truly be able to reduce our stress levels.

Kelsang Drolma will be teaching many different methods to help us smile more in her meditation course on 2 April in the Western Gateway Building on Western Road.

For more, visit meditateinireland.com/cork, or call 087-3881069. Check out MeditateinCork on Facebook.