How stressed are you?

Urban life is full of stress and tension and most people do not even know that they are affected by it. Here is a 5 minute exercise that will help you diagnose your situation and help you understand what you need to do.
Sit in a comfortable position and take a couple of deep breaths. Close your eyes and try to think about nothing. Try to keep your mind blank and discard any thought that comes up. Breathe normally and start counting your breaths till you reach 100. Try this once before you read further to help gauge yourself. Within a few seconds you will start remembering your pending errands. You have a meeting with such and such person, you need to prepare something, you need to pick up or drop off something, you need to buy something, you need to tell somebody something and thoughts like these start pestering your mind. This is natural and a result of tension. Try not to follow the chain of thoughts and keep focusing on completing the count. Most of the people who do not meditate will have one of the following experiences.
1. You will be drifting back and forth between thoughts and finally manage to complete the count. You may not be so sure about your count though.
2. You will drift away half way in between and do not remember what happened.
3. You will become restless and feel that you are wasting your time when you have so many things to do. You actually discard the practice and try to do something to complete the tasks ahead of you.
Here is how to interpret your experience. If your experience matches case 3, it means that you are extremely stressed out and need to make changes to your lifestyle immediately. You may need to take a step back and relax, take a vacation, resort to yoga or any other therapy. Your mind and body can not take this kind of abuse for long and it is important that you take a remedial step. If not then the stress that is accumulated will come back as a mental break down or some sort of a disease, a cancer that will mar the rest of your existence. If your experience matches case 2, then it still means that you are stressed out and are taking more than what you can handle at this point. Though you do not need to get admitted right away, you need to slow down or increase your internal capacity somehow. Do not expect that you will deteriorate into case 3 before something bad happens. You can breakdown all of a sudden if you are in this stage for long. On the other hand if you are a case 1, then you have some stress in your life. A little bit of stress is required in everybody’s life to make you progress. If this absconds then you will not make any progress in your life. You will be a satisfied and contended being. Earth is one planet where you can not be satisfied. Everybody is working to better their position either materially or spiritually. The scriptures say that there are other beings like the angels, presiding deity, Gandharvas who exist in other planes who are completely contended in their duty and do not evolve any further. Humans on the other hand are gifted with this discontentment that makes them progress and eventually evolve their consciousness to reach the state of the supreme. But if you are drifting away too often, you are taking too much tension from your work load. A little bit of yoga and relaxation techniques will surely help you improve your productivity and quality of life.
Now if you are a meditator, your experience may match one of the following.
1. You are able to complete the count without any interruption and able to keep your full attention on your breath.
2. You loose track of the count and drift into a sort of semi-consciousness. It seems that you fell asleep but it is not actually a sleep. You wake up fresh and sometimes exactly after the duration of time that you intended to sit in this practice. Sometimes the count may be progressing sub-consciously
3. You actually fall asleep, start dreaming, your poster collapses.
If you fall asleep, then it means that you are physically too tired. Or may be you are just learning how to sit in meditation. You have a long way to go. You need to learn more techniques and need lots of practice. If your experience matches case 1, then it means you have mastered concentration (dharana) which is the sixth of the eight steps of Patanjali. You are able to control your mind to some degree and are productive in your work. Ordinary people will have a dispersed mind and will not be able to concentrate on their work completely. Their mind will be recalling some event in the past or planning for some event in the future rather than focusing their complete attention on the task at hand. So their productivity is not at the best possible level and there is scope for betterment. But if your experience matches case 2, then you are reaching a state called laya. Opinion is divided among the spiritual community about this. One school of thought that Shankaracharya, Patanajali and others subscribe to say that this has to be avoided at all cost. Though there will be a spiritual communion with the supreme you will not be aware of it and will have no control over it. So they categorize this state equal to sleep. Now Astavakra and others feel that this practice is the highest yoga. In this state of ignorance, the individual consciousness will wake up one fine day and will be able to tap into the supreme. When one reaches this state, he is said to be realized.
If you are stressed, then you need to inculcate some type of stress relief exercise into your routine. You can walk for a while, play some music, do some gardening or something that works for you based on your temperament. My favorite technique is to perform a yoga nidra. When Swami Satyananda was teaching this in the western world somebody asked if everybody in India practices this. He quickly replied, Indian population is primarily rural. People may practice some yoga for their spiritual progress. They may be poor but their lives are well balanced. They do not need to practice any stress relief. You need to. That was in the 1980’s. Now the western lifestyle has spread to the entire urban world.