Mike George - You Can Relax and Overcome Stress: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Mike George is a bestselling author of nine books, a management tutor and a spiritual coach. With a unique blend of insight, wisdom and humour, Mike brings together the three key strands of the 21st century self awareness, emotional/spiritual intelligence and continuous unlearning. A highly entertaining and relaxing speaker, he is known for his ability to unite head and heart. For the last 30 years, he has been guiding the executive development of leaders in companies and communities in over 30 countries. Whilst he coaches and mentors individuals towards their own vision of success, his corporate clients also include Mitsubishi, Siemens, Royal Bank of Scotland, Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola, American Express and British Telecom. He lives near Marlborough in the UK. He can be contacted at

By the same author:

The Immune System of the Soul

The 7 Myths About LoveActually!

Dont Get MAD Get Wise

The 7 AHA!s of Highly Enlightened Souls

In the Light of Meditation

1001 Ways to Relax

1001 Meditations

DEDICATION

To those for whom the speediness of this world is no longer a mark of progress and are on the edge of deciding to slow themselves down.

To those who have realized their busyness doesnt work and are on the edge of doing less and taking more care of themselves.

To those who have realized that a stressful life can never be a fulfilling life and are on the edge of finding a new meaning for success.

To those are tired of striving and struggling to survive and are on the edge of letting go.

To those who are ready to challenge many of the beliefs and values that they have inherited and are on the edge making up their own mind.

To those who understand that other people are never the problem and are on the edge of realizing its me, not them.

To those who know deep down in their hearts that nothing in the world itself is going to make a difference to the quality of their life, and are on the edge of rediscovering that the ability to relax anytime and anywhere is the foundation of both their health and their well-being!

Welcome to the edge.

May this book help to push you over!

O urs is a world of explosive change, the breeding ground for uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. While some believe that stress is necessary to reach peak performance, there are many more for whom stress is the cause of debilitating illness.

If we look back just over a hundred years, a heart attack (one of the more serious stress-related diseases) was a medical curiosity. Might this be because it was much easier to relax a century ago? This was a time when the quality of being was more important than the quantity of doing when people were more like human beings rather than human doings.

Although we cant go backward in time, we can learn to reconstruct a much healthier and more relaxed lifestyle for ourselves, and to find again some of that lost peace. The only condition is that we have to want to. In the early 1980s, I found myself suffering from enormous amounts of stress. At the time I didnt call it stress, I simply called it pain. I was working long hours, seven days a week, driven by deadline after deadline. My relationships were far from harmonious, I was not enjoying my job, life often seemed meaningless and there appeared to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

Taking some months to research my pain, both internally and externally, I tried to find solutions. I realized that the one thing no one teaches us is self-understanding, and if I dont understand myself, then how can I manage myself I cant manage my thoughts, feelings and attitudes. I knew that I had to change my lifestyle, and that I had to go back to school. Not for academic purposes, but to the real school in life, which is our own consciousness. It is within our own consciousness that we do all our learning and unlearning, create our vision and make our decisions. My research was thorough and intense, and it resulted in the discovery of the root causes of human distress at various intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels.

Thankfully, I also discovered that the greatest gift that we can give our self is the ability to reconnect with the state of inner peace that was present all along at the heart of our own being. I realized that it was possible to transform the quality of our relationships with others, but only when we draw from our deepest inner resource which we all know to be love. I quickly discovered that the process of decision-making, which is somewhat stressful for many, is enhanced when we draw on our own innate wisdom. It is a resource that everyone has but few learn to access.

I found that no book, seminar or guru could do this inner work for me although they have often served to remind me of the next step in my journey during the darker times of stress, as well as of the illusory notion that stress is both necessary and inevitable. As light dawned, change became possible through the practices of meditation and contemplation, combined with the power of personal action and the restoration of a more spiritual awareness.

This book serves as an anthology of some of my learning in those early years. Its aim is to pass on to you a selection of the most useful insights, as well as some practical exercises that you can experiment with, as you make your own way to a more relaxed and enlightened state. I hope that it will encourage and guide you, so that you too may understand and be reminded of the deep wisdom of relaxation. This wisdom does not lie out of reach, in a far away place, but is buried within each of us, simply waiting to be rediscovered.

W e all have a choice. We can live life in the fast lane, pushing ourselves hard from one experience to the next, until one day we can push ourselves no more; or we can turn off the superhighway to follow quieter, slower roads that encourage our driving skills, rather than our driving speed. Ultimately, we may reach the same destination. However, the different routes by which we travel there will determine the state of our mind and body on arrival.

Perhaps we have forgotten how to make such choices. Certainly, for many of us, the fastest route seems the obvious one. Yet we sacrifice so much in taking it. We miss the fascinating views of landmarks and scenery, as well as the sheer charm of following a quieter road. The routes to relaxation are winding, with many turnings. We may even lose our way from time to time, but that all adds to the fascination, the sense of adventure and surprise.

Leaving the superhighway can prove difficult. Even if we resolve to try one of the roads branching off to left or right, unless we dispel the deep-rooted thinking that made us want to take the fast lane in the first place, we shall soon find ourselves back there.

Relaxation cannot be hurried. We must have faith that our slow, circuitous journey will take us in the end to the land of calm perspectives the place we all dream of in our hearts.

S ome modern thinkers subscribe to the view that everything in the universe is connected by invisible threads of causality. Our mind is connected to our body, and our body to everything around us, from the vibrations of our footsteps as they pass into the earth to the sound waves that travel through the air each time we speak. This idea expands right out to the very edges of our world and, beyond that, to the heavens.

We have all heard the adage that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, there is a hurricane in New York. Everything is energized, and we cannot be insignificant because energy is never lost. Each expenditure of our energy has incalculable repercussions all around us. With this in mind, we can challenge the state of so-called esoteric stress, the deep unrelaxation triggered when we sense our meaninglessness in the universe.