Spiritual solutions to stress
Mark Swinney
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Our topic for today is “Spiritual solutions to stress,” and we’ll be talking about ways that prayer can help you find peace, even when you’re under pressure. Our guest is Mark Swinney, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mark is one of the most unstressful and unstressed people I’ve ever met. And so I’m really looking forward to hearing what he has to say.
Mark, do you have some comments you’d like to make to get us started?
Mark Swinney: First of all, I would love to say hello to everyone. I think it’s great that we have this means with which to meet—in a worldwide chat like this. I love it. And our subject is one that is definitely on the front burner for most people. I don’t know how many times you hear people say, “Oh, I’m really stressed out today.” You hear that all the time.
Earlier I was thinking about how we categorize everything that makes us feel tense and afraid as stress. But I think that pressure and stress are related. They’re not exactly the same thing, but we need to think about both of them. When you feel stressed, you feel pulled; maybe feel pulled in several directions. Pressure is when you feel pushed. If you were to put your hands in front of yourself and push your palms together, that would be pressure. If you were to link your fingers and pull, that would be stress.
We all have friends who handle stress and pressure wonderfully. There are people who it doesn’t seem that anything bothers them. That reminds me of an old saying: “A diamond is just a piece of coal that has made good under pressure.” And that’s what I think everybody really wants to do. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to escape situations that are filled with pressure or stress, but we want to make good at those times. And I think it’s possible that we can come out sometimes like a diamond.
Now the title is “Spiritual solutions to stress.” And those are the kinds of solutions that have really helped me deal with it. I think once in a while, a little bit of diamond appears. But it comes through spiritual solutions.
spirituality.com host: Would you like to start with the questions?
Mark: Let’s.
spirituality.com host: Okay. This individual hasn’t given us a name or location, but he or she says, “I’m trying to pray through being the sole provider for my family and worries of not meeting the demands and objectives of my job. I would love any insights on how to bring God into this situation.”
Mark: I love that person’s question. He or she wants to bring God into the situation, into the equation. And I think it’s important to consider the nature of God in order to get started on the right track in praying effectively.
When I was a little boy, I thought that God was just a very old, grandfather-type man with a long beard, who sat in a chair in the clouds; I guessed most of the time He ignored me, but once in a while He might punish me, or maybe help me, who knows?
But, essentially, with that model of God I was on my own most of the time. And that, by itself, brings stressful feelings. Feeling you’re on your own, having to fend for yourself—maybe you’ll make it, maybe you’ll fail, but God is out in the distance watching. That’s the model of God I grew up with early on.
Then I was introduced to God as I read the Bible. And in one place in the Bible, it says, “God is love.” I thought, well, divine Love, God—you can’t put a beard on divine Love. You can’t put divine Love on a chair in the clouds. Divine Love clearly would be everywhere, and that would mean that God is with me, no matter where I am, no matter how afraid I am, how concerned I am, how stressed out I might be, I still have God with me.
Well, all right, does that mean that instead of being in a cloud, God is next to you? That’s a better model, but there’s even better one than that. In the Bible, there’s a place where Jesus says, “I and my Father are one.” That shows the closeness of God and God’s creation.
If you think about God as the Creator, the ultimate cause, then you can consider yourself as the effect of that cause, the offspring, so to speak. Now when it’s God as cause and us as effect, there isn’t any space. It’s just the closeness of God and man—it’s really one.
It’s not like man is God. It’s not like that. There’s a distinction in quantity. But there’s a oneness in quality. What I mean by that is: every single thing about God, we have available to us as God’s offspring, as God’s effect. So if the Bible says that “God is love,” then we show, not so much our own human love, but when we’re really doing it right, we’re showing forth God’s love.
Once you start to study that Love, you see that it is infinite. And infinite means really what it says. It doesn’t mean that we’re scratching around trying to compete with each other for a little bit of good. No, there’s infinite Love.
Now the person who sent in that question, my heart goes out to them, because he may or she may be thinking about having to supply the good for his or her family. And I’ll tell you—in thinking about the oneness of God and God’s creation, it wouldn’t make sense that God would say, “Well I’ve taken care of the people in your family for eternity, but it’s 2006, and it’s now going to be your responsibility. You’re the shepherd now.” That would be a lot of stress—put a lot of pressure on someone. God would never set it up that one person is dependent on another. We each come with our own supply of good.
Now those are neat ideas that we’ve been thinking about. How do they become practical? I’ve found that my thought and what I experience are very closely related. In fact, most of the time, thought determines a person’s experience.
So if you were just to say to yourself over and over and over again, “I have what I need,” or try to convince yourself with your own thoughts that good is present or something like that—I don’t know if that would do much. But when your thought yields to how God sees you, something really wonderful happens. It brings the law, the power of God, to bear on your thought, and then that embraces everything in your experience. It’s an effective prayer that brings the power of God to your life.
spirituality.com host: That’s really helpful. And we’ve got lots of questions now. One that ties in with your answer is from Fred in New Hampshire. He says, “Stress is obviously self-inflicted. You choose to be affected by it. However, it can be very difficult to deny its impact. When all things are falling apart around you, how do you suggest would be the quickest way of defusing stress?”
Mark: That’s a pretty insightful question, because stress and pressure appear in our lives in a couple of different ways. Sometimes the stress and pressure appear because of things happening around you. You feel the stress of needing to make your house payment or your car payment. Or it might be that this stress and pressure come from other people around you.
Everybody’s had the experience of feeling fairly content, but then someone comes into the room who is just beside himself with some problem, whatever it is, and we get drawn into feeling the stress that person’s feeling. I think it’s very important to think for ourselves, and not make another person’s stress automatically become our stress, too. It doesn’t need to be that way.
So how do you do it, when things are just falling apart? What I like to do, first of all, is to try and learn from other people’s experiences. That’s what’s helped me the most.
The person who I’ve learned the most from, surprisingly, is someone I’ve never met, because he lived many, many years ago—and that’s Jesus. I love to read in the Bible the long sections about Jesus’ life, primarily so I can see what Jesus’ attitude was. I want to see different ways he handled things—how he responded to what was set before him.
Jesus had to handle a situation when things were falling apart. There was a time where he was with a group of people in a city, and sometimes Jesus’ purity would just inflame people, and they would become awfully angry, because I guess they would look at Jesus, and he was everything that they weren’t, and they would become awfully mad.
Well, one day, he was up on a kind of a high area in the city, and there was a cliff near there. These people were just so angry with Jesus, that they started to walk toward the cliff to throw him off.
Now as I describe that scene, you could feel the stress of the moment. Things definitely seemed to be falling apart, and Jesus didn’t bring any of it on himself. All he was trying was to do good to the world, and that was how they answered. Well, you know, it’s interesting, in the Bible, it just says something simple: He just passed right “through the midst of them.”
In reading it, I feel the calm of Jesus. Right in the midst of such intensity, he just passed through. There was just no stress in him that they could grab a hold of. He didn’t try to talk them out of anything. He just felt the peace of, who knows, maybe his oneness with God. But he walked right through.
I think calmness is one of the strongest examples of power. To be calm is such power. It’s not just to convince yourself to be calm just because it’s the thing to do. But you’re calm because you realize that the only power that exists is God.
And I love to think about how in every instance, I am alone with God. It’s not like there’s God, me, and some horrible problem. Really, when I start to pray, I become so calm, because I realize that all I have is the goodness and love of God.
There’s a place in a book I just love to read. It’s helped me to understand Jesus’ life and his example, probably better than any other book I’ve ever read. This book is calledScience and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and the author Mary Baker Eddy says, “Your true course is to destroy the foe, and leave the field to God, Life, Truth, and Love, remembering that God and His ideas alone are real and harmonious.”
She uses those words, Life, Truth, and Love, as synonyms, or names, for God that help us to understand God’s nature and God’s character. And if I realize and admit that God and His ideas alone are real and harmonious, then I’ve got a basis from which, first of all, to feel calm in the midst of everything when it seems to be falling apart; but also a means with which to make a difference—to heal, or help to redeem. I do it by turning to God, not by turning to the problem and trying to fight the problem. I want to start right with the nature of God.
spirituality.com host: Louisa in Houston is asking, “We seem to be living in really stressful times. Can you help with ways to pray for our own peace, and for the peace in the world?”
Mark: I know, early on, when people would say it was a good idea to pray for the world, to pray for peace, I wondered how in the world would one person be able to embrace the whole world in prayer and make a difference? Then I realized that our thought really embraces everything we experience.
When I was little, the Middle East seemed very far away, and I hardly ever thought about it. You know, there’s an old saying, “The stars, they seem so far away because we don’t include them in our thought.” Well, I remember reading that, and I thought, “I need to include more of the whole world in my thought.” And so I realized that I could embrace the whole world in my thought, but it was going to be my thought exclusively that I dealt with.
Instead of praying, and then thinking, well, I better watch the news and see if my prayers had an effect—I just prayed and I looked for the effect to be seen in my own thought. I know that God answers prayer, often, by just changing thought.
So as I would pray for the world, and as I still do it today, I look for the change first in my own thought. When my thought changes, and I can feel the oneness of God and His creation, then I feel that goodness and that basis embrace the whole world. You don’t have to leave the precinct of your own thought to pray about anything, anywhere. But it has an effect everywhere.
spirituality.com host: Kou in Columbus, Ohio, is asking, “Can you offer some ideas on how to listen to God’s voice in the face of stressful situations?” I can imagine a time when, if everyone is yelling at each other, it might not always be easy to withdraw and be quiet.
Mark: Yes, there is a way. When everyone is excited, and everyone is hollering, it can be tempting to just go along and get caught up in it all. It is worth it to cultivate a stillness, a calmness, so that you can hear what God has to say to you at that moment. It doesn’t really take real hard work to become still and quiet. It just takes consent.
What I like to do is listen. And you know, all kinds of thoughts come to you. Sometimes I’ve heard people say how God talks out loud, like you can hear it with your ears. But for me, most of the time, it’s always within. I hear it in my heart.
Now when an idea comes to me, if it points me toward the goodness of God, then I know that’s one I should pay attention to. Whenever God is communicating to you, along with the message come some feelings. First of all, you’ll feel God’s love. There will be a love created in your heart, along with whatever the message is. Also, you might feel peace, or a feeling of happy surprise with whatever the message is. So whenever you’re praying and you hear God talk to you, you’ll feel that love and peace.
One time, I was on a commercial jet, and we were traveling from the East Coast to the central United States. They had had some problems before we took off, and I remember that they were trying to fix something with the landing gear or something like that. I’m not sure what it was. We finally taxied out on the runway and took off.
About three-quarters of the way to our destination, the plane began circling, and the pilot came on the loudspeaker and said, “We can’t get the landing gear down on this jet, and we’re going to continue and try to do this. Ultimately, we probably are going to have to dump all of our fuel, or just have it run out.” And since this was the middle of the United States, they couldn’t dump it. So we had to just circle.
I thought maybe there would be yelling, panic. No, the panic was kind of quiet. People were silent, but some were crying—it was interesting.
Now there was a person sitting next to me, who I could tell was looking for something better than just panic. As soon as I heard that announcement over the loudspeaker, I just didn’t go along with it.
I was thinking that an airplane’s landing gear can’t change me or God. As the offspring of God, I just can’t change. I have to stay what God has made me and that’s His loved creation. I’m the effect of this cause. And I could feel God there with me. As I had those thoughts, I could feel the love of God, and that’s how I knew that was God talking.
I remember looking at this person sitting next to me, and all I said was, “We’re going to be fine.” I didn’t just say that to be brave. I said it because I knew it. I felt it. I had felt the love of God in my prayer. I realized then that all the fear and stress on that plane had no ability to change God or God’s love for us or any of that kind of thing. I realized that, and it felt awfully good.
I remember as we got to the landing field, there were fire engines all up and down, and they had put foam on the runway. By then, we were low on fuel, so we were okay and ready to land. We circled around a few more times. Finally, the wheels were down, but they didn’t know if they’d stay down.
As we landed, the wheels stayed solid, and we stopped. We weren’t able to taxi to the terminal—we had to get off the plane out there on the runway. But it was a wonderful day, and it was great, because it was truly stress-free. I didn’t have the feeling of fear or that kind of thing. Instead, it was just the goodness of God. And that’s what I remember when I think back on that day.
spirituality.com host: The goodness of God is a tremendous help in stressful situations, isn’t it?
Mark: It’s everything.
spirituality.com host: Wendy in Park City, Utah, is asking a question that several of you have asked, just in different forms. So we’re going to do Wendy’s question, but I think it will respond to quite a few of you. “Sometimes I find stress related to having so many things to do, and then having them crash together in my mind, and prioritizing goes out the window. Sometimes this is related to having an artistic or creative mind. What’s the solution?”
Mark: Wendy, I relate to that very well, because sometimes we have a lot going on. It’s something that even little children experience. I remember when I was in first grade, how tough it was to get all my work done with all the different assignments and everything like that. And now, my work as a Christian Science practitioner I’m helping and praying with a lot of people.
So how do you prioritize that? Again, I think turning to God is key. Considering all of the directions and things that I could be doing at the moment, I like to look at them all, and then I ask God, which serves You the best? What can I do right now, that will serve You the best? That’s what I want to do.
It’s not just what’s going to make me happy, or what’s going to make me feel less stress, or something like that. I say, God, how can I be about your business first? What’s the first thing? And then there’ll be a direction in which, if I think about it, I’ll feel a little bit of that love and peace. That’s the one I do first.
And then I can go right down the list doing that. What happens is a feeling of grace and calmness happens as you go at life that way. And then the important things get done—things you didn’t know that were that important, but they were important to God. You do them, and you’re able to finish all your work, coming out refreshed.
spirituality.com host: Joy in Los Angeles is, again, looking out at the world, and she says, “How can I start to pray about stressful global situations in a local way? I often feel overwhelmed by world issues.”
Mark: That overwhelmed feeling is the primary thing to address. And it usually comes from being entranced by the problem. You can’t really move along into prayer too deeply when you start with the problem. I know that sounds funny, but it’s true. If I take my car to the auto mechanic, I might show him the problem, and he’ll address the problem, and we’ll go from there.
Well, a lot of times in prayer, you have to start in a different way. Instead of praying at the problem, it’s better sometimes to start first with the nature of God, and how God knows things. I know that sounds funny, but it just works. Often if you start with the problem, it just builds it up, and then you end up overwhelmed.
I like to get right up on the mountaintop, and get a view that’s a lot bigger than down there with what’s threatening. So starting with God, I try to be as quiet and still as possible, and then be open to what God has to say at the moment. Then as I begin to embrace, to yield, to what God knows, what seems to threaten doesn’t feel so big. There’s that peace and calmness again.
I can think of an example in Jesus’ life that illustrates this. It was a time that I think anybody would have thought was as stressful as you could imagine. Toward the end of Jesus’ career, he was about to be crucified, and people had captured him. And they didn’t want just to crucify him on their own, they wanted, I guess, to make it legal.
So they brought Jesus to Pontius Pilate, a local kind of a governor in the area, and they wanted permission from this governor to crucify Jesus. When he interviewed Jesus, he first asked, “What do you have to say for yourself?” Now the response Jesus gave was surprising. He didn’t even answer.
Then Pilate asked him, “Jesus, don’t you understand? I have power over you. I can either let you go, or allow these people to crucify you.” Then Jesus did give an answer, and it’s one of the most telling answers. Jesus said, “You could have no power at all against me unless it were given thee from above.” In other words, “Mr. Pilate, your choices and decisions and your jurisdiction, so to speak, really is powerless. It would only have power if God’s going to give it power.” Now that shows again Jesus’ standpoint. He didn’t start with the threat. He knew deep down that the only power in his life was God. So that ultimately proved his freedom from death. He rose completely away from it.
So that gives you a good start. Whenever you have that overwhelmed feeling when you’re praying about the world, or something local, something in your own life even, don’t start with the problem, start with God. From that standpoint, you can deal with it effectively and prayerfully.
spirituality.com host: I’d like to ask a follow up on this one, because what you were saying about power is so interesting. A lot of stress comes from the fact that you feel powerless. You just feel that various things are all moving into your territory, and you’re powerless.
But the type of things you’ve been describing, for example, like asking God for guidance on what to do first, and so forth—and then what you just said now about recognizing that power is really in God’s hands and not in the stress-inducing thing’s hands—that really does shift the balance, doesn’t it?
Mark: Oh, yes. To just feel a little bit that you are alone with God and God truly is the only power—that’s everything. You won’t be the first person doing it. People have been doing that for centuries. And Jesus is a great example—seeing that there is only one power in this world.
I like not just to know it in words; I like to dive into feeling it deep—to feeling the truth. I think the words are one thing. We need to understand the words, so we know how things are set up. I mean, we need to know that God is ever present, that God is Love and good, and is the only power; and that we’re at one with God, as God’s offspring, as God’s effect.
We need to know those words, and then we need to make space in our lives to feel the truth behind those words; to feel deep down that there really is only one power that is affecting any situation. That’s, I think, a basis for effective prayer. You feel the power of God. I don’t know if I could feel the power of God and also feel stress at the same moment. It’s going to be one or the other.
spirituality.com host: Craig in Phoenix, Arizona, says, “Sometimes when I am feeling stress and am worried about things at work, and so forth, I have trouble falling asleep at night because I can’t seem to stop thinking about these things. Any suggestions?”
Mark: A lot of people probably nodded their heads when they heard that question. I made a promise to myself early on, that if I spend more than five or ten minutes in bed thinking the same thoughts in a stressful way, that I’m just going to get up, turn on the light, and do something about it. Because what happens is, you get into a computer loop, in a way. You keep thinking those same thoughts over and over. And a couple of hours into it, everything has been built up so much, you really don’t have any perspective. And so it’s important to do that.
Now in that book I mentioned, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, there’s an interesting point that Mary Baker Eddy makes. You know, she uses the name Mind for God. That’s one of the names, and this is to help us understand that God is not just a kind of philosophy, but that God truly is active and creative, and really, ever present. Divine Mind is a helpful way to think of God.
Well, in Science and Health, she says this: “When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the divine Mind, selfishness and sin, disease and death, will lose their foothold.” All right, so that “mechanism of the human mind” she speaks of, that’s the kind of loop you’re talking about, and that can keep you up and help you lose perspective.
She says, Let it give place to the divine Mind. So you’ve got to figure out a way to make space, then, for the intelligence of divine Mind to show in the space of your thought. How do you do that? I think it’s very important, again, to allow yourself to be quiet and still so that you can hear.
I used to live in California. There is a place called Mirror Lake. And it really was like a mirror early in the morning, because there wouldn’t be any wind at all, and if you sat on the edge of the lake in the morning, the tranquil surface acted like a mirror, and you could see the trees and mountains on the other side. Now as soon as the wind came up, then the image on the surface wasn’t so clear.
I learned from that. I thought, I should allow myself to be still and quiet. And that’s not just some sort of self-hypnotism or something like that. I’m just being still and open, quiet, so that the image of how God knows me can be clear in my thought. That’s all it is. It’s just a way to be better at listening.
So if you find yourself tossing and turning for 15 minutes, or something like that, thinking that same thought over and over, and you never really even finish the thought, then get up. Let yourself be still and receptive—open to the intelligence of God. Let God tell you something. And you’ll know that it’s God talking, because along with whatever God says, you’ll feel love.
And who knows what God’s going to tell you? But then you’ve got an opportunity to release what you were thinking about so mechanically, and embrace what God has to tell you, what God has said. As you do so, and you really love God enough to believe Him, then your life and experience will change dramatically.
spirituality.com host: That ties in with what you were saying earlier, when you were talking about giving consent, isn’t it? That idea of being willing to listen to God and to consent to letting go of that little racetrack that’s going around inside your head.
Mark: That word consent is related closely to willingness. Being willing, oh, brother, that is so important. I think that the willingness is what brings prayer into action. Let’s say I’m praying about something—well, here’s a good example. When I was having the experience on that plane, I was quiet. I heard God tell me that there was no event that could ever change God or me.
Then, the next part was the important part. I had to be willing to let my thought and perspective be changed. I think that’s a key thing. Just hearing something good from God—that’s the starting point. Then, once you’ve heard God’s message, you have the choice, you have the opportunity, really, to abandon what you used to think and embrace what God has told you.
I found out about prayer and Christian Science and about God when I was little. In all the years I’ve thought about it, if there’s one thing I really like about God and prayer, it’s this: I love to listen for God’s messages to me. I also enjoy so much abandoning what I used to think, and then embracing this new idea that God has told me—embracing it not just part way, but all the way.
In the Bible it says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” It doesn’t say, Trust in the Lord with half thine heart. It’s all thine heart. And that’s what I like. I want to give my consent. I want to be willing and really love God enough to accept what God has said.
spirituality.com host: That’s really helpful. Jill in Chicago is writing, “I am in the middle of an attack of fear. I’ve been struggling with attacks of fear almost daily since early June. They incapacitate me, make me suffer, not eat, pace. The fear can make me not want to stay with this body. I need a healing now.”
Mark: Bless your heart. Well just because it’s been going on since June, doesn’t mean that this is going to be something tough for you to overcome. I can tell you’re really ready for it to stop. That’s obvious. But just because it’s been going on for a few weeks doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.
If you faced away from the sun for several hours and walked the opposite direction of the sun, as soon as you turned and looked at the sun, the light would hit your face. You’d feel the warmth of the sun. As soon as you feel the love of God, then that fear melts.
The fact that you say that it’s something that just makes you pace shows it’s related to the last thing we talked about—that “mechanism of the human mind.”
And your friends, you know, they mean well, they tell you all kinds of things, but they can’t really talk you out of those fears. If somebody is afraid of heights, you can’t take them to the top of a building, stand them on the ledge, and say, “See, you’re safe.” That doesn’t work. People, I’m sure, have tried to talk you out of feeling afraid like that. And it’s great that they care about you, but it is only the power of God that will help you.
And it’s important to make just a little space in your thought for the love and goodness of God. Just start with a small space. If today you felt the goodness and love of God, just 5 percent more than you did yesterday—just 5 percent, that’s not very much—then you will find yourself on your way. Just 5 percent more. In a week of 5 percent more feeling God’s love that way, you won’t be the same person. But you have to start somewhere. And it’s okay if it’s only 5 percent. That’s a start.
Pretty soon after being willing to feel yourself at one with God, then you will find the balance shift, so that most of your day is feeling the goodness of God, and less of the day is fear. And at that point you’ve overcome it. It’s impossible to feel fear and God’s love at the same time. If you feel yourself, first of all, at one with God, basking in God’s love, just a little bit, that’s the start. Then you’re bringing the power of God, not just people’s words, to bear on your thought. And that’s what heals.
spirituality.com host: And one thing that’s sometimes a useful exercise to help you get to the starting point, so to speak, is gratitude. For example, you don’t have to be grateful for big things, you can be grateful for small things. Like the fact that you have a nice cushion in your house, or you have decent clothing, or there’s a tree outside where you live that has beautiful leaves, or flowers, or a bird, or anything that will turn your thoughts toward good.
One of the things that fear tries to do is to exclude the presence of good. It says, “Well, see, there are all these horrible things.” And to whatever extent you can focus on good, even tiny good—that you have water in your apartment, for example, that you don’t have to go out to a well and bring it in. Anything, any small thing—that you have bread in the refrigerator. It doesn’t matter. But just figure on being grateful for as many things as you can, and make a habit of it; maybe even make a list. There is tremendous healing power in gratitude.
Mark: You make such an important point there. And that gratitude—it’s more than just filling your head with pleasant thoughts. It actually has the power of God behind it to do so.
Gratitude is more than just saying thank you, it’s feeling thank you. You feel that gratitude for the simplest things. There’s a saying that “hard work is love made evident.” If I look at, well, a loaf of bread in the refrigerator. If I think about all of the hard work it took for someone to make that loaf of bread possible for me—it took a lot. There were a lot of people involved with that, right from planting the grain to delivering it to the store. Lots of work went into it.
And if you just look at a loaf of bread and admit that, and be grateful for what it took, and then feel it—you’re feeling not just the hard work, you’re feeling the love that it took to make it, whatever that was. And that, again, is a way to crack open the door, and get the power of God into the room.
spirituality.com host: Sandy from Orange County, California, is asking, “How about the stress and, perhaps, fear associated with being a caregiver, especially when dealing with someone close to you?” That’s a difficult question.
Mark: Yeah. I know that there are times when I’ve had to provide care, and one thing I know: God will never ask any of us to be shepherds. In the Bible, the word Shepherd is often used as a term for God. The shepherd’s responsibility is to provide food, water, care, and protection for the sheep.
Now if we all think of God in those terms, as our Shepherd, it’s clear that He will never ask one sheep to be shepherd to another. We can express the shepherding qualities of God, but we won’t carry the responsibility of providing, protecting, loving—all of those things. That’s the Shepherd’s responsibility.
So as you go through your day, don’t think of yourself as alone with the person you’re caring for. Actually both you and that other person are just sheep that day, every day, and are cared for by our Shepherd, who is constantly with us.
Watch for that caring, watch for the love of God to appear in different parts of the day. I just love how that works. You can feel very refreshed and loved as you’re caring for others, because you’re always being cared for by the Shepherd.
spirituality.com host: Mark, this one is from Jane in London, and she says, “You must be pretty busy as a practitioner and teacher. Do you ever feel overwhelmed if there are a lot of people needing your help? How do you deal with this? I have often felt stress in getting involved in church work. There is always so much to do, but never enough time to do it. How would you address this?”
Mark: I mentioned earlier that it’s important to start your day by really getting up on the mountaintop. I like to spend some time alone with God, and let God feed me with new ideas and new views. I want to feel great inspiration as I am working through the day.
Now here’s a very important point. Jesus said to enter into your closet, and there you’ll pray. And that’s what I’m talking about. What God tells me, personally, that’s for me only. I never tell other people about things that God tells me personally. What I try to do instead is to bring those ideas that God talks to me about into my own life. But I don’t talk about them.
You know, sometimes you’ll pray, and you’ll get some new idea, and it’s so inspiring, you just love it, and then you want to tell everybody about it. By the end of the day, it’s not even yours anymore, and it really doesn’t mean much. No, keep those for yourself. God will tell you all kinds of other things for the other people, or things that you’re praying about in your day. But what God tells you is for you.
Then, be open to all the other things God will tell you for people you’re praying with, or if you’re involved in your church. In prayer, let God tell you about how to address those things. But you’ll go on the strength of the inspiration you felt in the morning. And at the end of the day, you’ll have heard lots of messages from God. Not just the one that was for you in the morning. And that really gives you strength.
I’ve been doing this now since the ’80s—a long time. And every single day that I’ve done it, every day I’ve prayed for people as a Christian Science practitioner, it’s only just fed me; because I’m really not in the “fixing it” business—all I do is listen to what God has to say, and then I yield to what God has said; I embrace what God has said.
So by the end of the day, let’s say I’ve done that many, many times, well, I can’t help but feel great. It feels really good, and it’s that way day after day after day. As you go at it that way—looking to God as the strength and the source of how you pray and what you do in the world, you’ll find that your church work gets done much more efficiently, and you’re able to help more people. And best of all, you will feel refreshed and inspired when you’re done at the end of the day.
spirituality.com host: That’s great. And this question ties in with what you were talking about, in relation to the practice. It’s from Gramma J in Clearlake, California, who says, “Would be interested to know how you worked things out and were able to go into the practice of Christian Science.”
Mark: I think people believe generally that if you’re in service to God you must take a vow of poverty. And you know what, in the back of my head, I had accepted that thought. So I would feel the pressure of having to come up with a source of money that was going to pay for everything my family and I needed.
I remember the day I realized it was that old way of thinking about things—that to serve to God, you’ve got to take a vow of poverty, and somehow that’s the noble thing to do. I couldn’t let myself believe that. Instead I thought, I’m just going to work with my standard of thinking, and I knew that my standard of thinking was going to determine my standard of living. So I let my standard of thinking reflect the goodness of God—again, quietly being still and letting God tell me of the presence of His goodness.
My thinking was transformed from feeling the stress of a vow of poverty—to actually rejoicing in the abundance of God’s goodness. I embraced this goodness, and I never looked back. I was even more useful, I think, to God after that. I didn’t have to be concerned about the stresses of being a source of supply or a shepherd for my family. I could serve God, and enjoy the abundance of good. And that’s normal for a Christian Science practitioner, or anyone who’s praying and working to bring more of the power of God to light in this world.
spirituality.com host: Mark, Betty in California is asking a question that’s a little bit out of our line, but I think we can respond to it: “Does stress cause illness?”
Mark: Oh, I was hoping someone would ask that question. A lot of times we’re expected to accept a cause-and-effect relationship—behavior and illness, that kind of thing.
Earlier on, at the very beginning, I was talking about how God, divine Love, is truly the ultimate and the only cause. The real, true cause, the only Creator, is God. And that the only effect is that which the cause brings about.
All right, let’s think about this stress-and-our-health-type thing. I remember the first time I think I ever heard about stress and health, I was little, and I’d hear people say, Well, if somebody worries, they’ll get an ulcer. Then, later, it was personality types. If you have some personality type, you’ll have this disease. If you have another personality type, it’ll be another disease. Then you hear people say, “I have a cold because I’m just so stressed out.”
I guess it’s tempting to believe that kind of cause-and-effect relationship. But when you step back and think about how God is the only cause, it becomes hard to believe.
I know that Jesus lived a long time ago, but if I were to talk to him and say, “I have a cold because I’m feeling stressed out,” he’d love me, and he certainly wouldn’t believe that. And we aren’t required to believe it either because God truly is the only power. There is one power, one cause. That’s why it’s important to start with God.
Often people will start with the condition. They’ll feel the symptoms of illness, and then they’ll say, “Okay, well, from those symptoms, that’s an effect. Let me reason back and figure out the cause.” And they may say, “Well, it’s stress.” That just gives us a reason to keep our problem.
Instead of starting with those symptoms, start with God as cause. Then reason forward from there. If God is Love, and is the only cause, the only power, then the only option we have is to feel the goodness of God. When you realize that, even just a little, it heals—because there’s the power of God, the law of God behind that fact. And when you accept it, it embraces your whole experience.
So if somebody tells you, “Stress caused my illness,” step back and begin to be more grateful for the fact that there’s only one cause; and there’s only one effect from that cause, and that effect is good. Accepting that, that’s effective prayer. That’s the prayer that heals and really relieves the whole cause and effect relationship.
spirituality.com host: That’s very good and very helpful. We have one from Chet that is sort of related. He’s saying, “Is stress contagious? If my fellows think they are stressed, does that affect the way I view myself?”
Mark: When everyone around us is stressed out, does that necessarily mean that we’ll “catch” it? Is it contagious? Here in the southwestern part of the United States lots of people have horses. A herd of horses in a field often will walk along slowly grazing, and even be facing in the same direction. Then, for some reason, one might take off running. And as he bolts, the other horses in the herd take off and run together.
Well, sometimes in situations with other people, we’re tempted to follow along with that herd thinking. One person in our herd, so to speak, bolts, gets excited. Sometimes what the person is afraid of doesn’t even exist. Are we required to run with the herd and get just as stressed out about it? No. In fact, it’s helpful for us to stop, be still, think for ourselves, and go to God for what we should be thinking in that moment.
You have such authority when you do that. And actually it helps everyone in the room. Everybody is in the herd is helped, because it’s not just that you’re a good example, it’s that you’ve brought the power of God to bear on your thought. And that embraces everything and everyone in your experience. I love to do that. I think it’s because if I see stress, I don’t necessarily jump in with it. I want to step back and make some space in the situation for God to speak to me.
spirituality.com host: That’s great. Chrissie in Stephens City, Virginia, says, “How do we best keep daily stress from interfering with us, praying ‘without ceasing’? Often I start the day very prayerfully and focused, but then at work or at home, so much is going on that I feel I don’t have much opportunity to focus on prayer.” I think a lot of us have been there.
Mark: Yes. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s important to get on the mountaintop, to get in a good place, so to speak. But the day is busy, and it is tough. And you know what, you can go hours without even thinking about the inspiration that you loved so much in the morning. And then you get feeling more and more guilty, and at the end of the day, you feel frazzled.
Here is what I try to do. I really watch, not for what I do wrong during the day, how I think incorrectly or fearfully or something like that. Instead, I really watch for what I do right. I try even if it’s just for a moment, to embrace or at least remember or feel the inspiration that touched me so much earlier in the day.
Try this, because if you know that at the end of the day you’re going to look back and watch for all the things you do right, it’ll make you bring that attitude more consistently through your day. Keep track of what you do right throughout the day—how you think right, how you feel right, how you express the ultimate cause, God, and how you show as the effect of God, the character of God in your day.
At the end of the day, or when you may be feeling frazzled, at that point, try to weave in just a few moments of that good inspiration that you felt in the morning, and then acknowledge it. Say, “I did that one right.” Once you get the momentum in that direction, you’ll be surprised how well that works. I started doing that a few years ago. It made all the difference for me.
spirituality.com host: Thanks, Mark. I’m going to try for two more questions. One is from Mabel in Far Hills, New Jersey, who’s asking, “How can I deal with the stress caused by guilt?”
Mark: That relates very much to what I just said.
spirituality.com host: That’s what I thought.
Mark: Guilt … no one has ever said to me, “Mark, once I really started feeling guilty, then I got better. Then my life became very happy.” There is a point to it, there’s a usefulness for guilt, but you’ve got to see what that really is. Usefulness for guilt is where, if you’ve made a misstep or a mistake, you acknowledge that, and learn from it. Well, that’s as far as guilt really would be useful. You learn from all your experiences. And that’s perfectly fine.
But sometimes, there’s that tendency just to carry guilt. It can come from all kinds of things. It might be some past event, something you’ve said to someone or did to someone. Or maybe it’s just a lifestyle. There are people I know—they just feel guilty all the time. It’s just a very familiar feeling. And they might not even know why they’re guilty today. But they’re feeling guilty. Again, that’s similar to that “mechanism of the human mind” that I talked about earlier.
When we get into that loop where you have a lifestyle of feeling a certain way, guilt included, there needs to be a change. Now, it’s hard to change the direction of a big ship like the Queen Mary, because it’s got momentum in one direction. But it still can be changed.
Our lives are a lot easier to change than the Queen Mary. We can do that first of all, by admitting that guilt is nothing God has given us. Guilt is not something God wants you to feel. It’s not that you’re a better person if you feel guilty. It’s not that you’re going to be more pure if you feel guilty, if you just carry guilt with you. No. The Bible says that God gives us the spirit of truth and love. Truth and love.
What if you exchange, just for a day, the guilt for the feeling of truth and love? God’s truth, God’s love, is much more substantial and progressive than guilt could even fraudulently propose itself to be. Just try for a day to embrace truth and love in exchange for guilt.
If you don’t like it, you can go back to guilt. But I don’t think you will. Stay right with the goodness and love of God. That’s the natural, normal way. After a few weeks of doing that, you’ll be going in a very different direction. And even the people around you will be affected positively by it.
spirituality.com host: Thanks. Now this is our last one, and it’s from James in Los Angeles: “If we are trusting God to overcome a serious human condition, how should we handle the stress that may try to take us away from that trust?”
Mark: Good question. His phrasing is important. He said “the stress that would try to take us away.” When we’ve been thinking about God truly as the only power, like you said, for some reason that really helps put us on the right track. Anything that isn’t of God honestly doesn’t have power. In fact, it doesn’t even have existence.
When you realize that there is only one power, one God, you could erase the word stressfrom your vocabulary, because there is no such thing as stress. As soon as you realize you’re alone with God, there is no stress—there’s no need for the word.
Stress itself, that’s something that has really just been created by people. Stress, even if people believe in it, still isn’t a thing. It’s not a power beside God. So you could think of it as just a zero, just a nothing. All you have is God. You don’t have God and stress. You just have God. There isn’t room for God and the idea of this power called stress.
Once you realize that, you know that stress can’t do things. It can’t try things. It can’t affect you. How can a zero have an effect? If evil—that’s really what it comes down to—if evil were a power, it would do things to us, but it can’t do that. God is all there is. And the proof of that really shows.
When Jesus was in Jerusalem and he was standing on the top of the temple, the temptation came to him to jump, to destroy himself. Now I know that if evil, including stress, were a power, at that one point in history, it certainly would have showed itself. There wouldn’t have been temptation to jump; it would have just pushed Jesus off.
But it’s just a zero. All we have is God. If you realize just a little, feel just a little that you’re embraced in the goodness and power of God, stress evaporates. Pressure melts, because you’re here, you’re free, expressing God as God’s perfect effect. That is natural and normal. It’s not something we have to earn. It’s just how it’s set up. You get the goodness of God expressed in your life. That’s all that there is.
spirituality.com host: I was thinking as you were talking, Mark, that James is referring to a serious human condition, and I think we can also say that not only is the stress not a power, but the human condition is also not a power within his experience, or whoever he’s taking care of’s experience.
Mark: Like you, I’m so grateful that’s true. So James, I want you to know that even when we’re done here on this chat event, I’m going to take some time, along with probably lots of listeners, to be so grateful that God truly is the only power, the only force. Divine Love is it. I’m already starting to feel it even more, and I can’t wait to make some space here in my day to feel gratitude for it.
spirituality.com host: Mark, do you have any summary comments that you’d like to make before we close?
Mark: Well, I know this: So many people around the world have been listening to this chat, and they will continue to listen to it, because it has been recorded. I can tell there’s been a great love for these ideas, and we’ve felt the love of God. I don’t think the world is the same, just because of the efforts we’ve done here today. And that is something that just does my heart good.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
King James Bible