A New Outlook

Some people think pressure and stress are inevitable parts of life that can and will affect everyone at every moment of every day. They are wrong; stress is a fundamental and seemingly overwhelming force that affects everyone, but there is a way of coping with it and becoming happy as well.People can and probably will feel overstressed by life’s expectations, and students at PEA are no exception. However, last Tuesday, a guest speaker named Shantum Seth, who has previously worked with PEA to lead faculty and student trips to India, spoke at Assembly and gave advice that should be followed by everyone who encounters stress in his or her daily life.The students at Assembly were taught meditation and philosophy. Meditation was taught first. Through controlled breathing and relaxation techniques, people calmed down, and for maybe a moment on campus, almost all of the students ceased to feel the pressure of the school’s workload bearing down. These meditation ideas may seem old-fashioned and resemble some sort of pseudoscience, but modern research supports the health benefits of meditation for people who are stressed or traumatized.That short session calmed and helped me a lot. All students are or should be stressed during the course of the school year, so this meditation is something that everyone should try to incorporate into the schedule of this year.Mr. Seth is an ordained teacher of Buddhist philosophies, and he explained in very basic terms the religion’s origins and major philosophies. One of these ideas is that the absence of one thing is the presence of another. A prime example of this was that the absence of sadness is happiness. Many people do not realize this and, by some methods of thinking, believe that the absence of one thing is just emptiness.Mr. Seth believed that in the absence of one thing there is another thing. This translates into the idea of just keeping negative emotions out of the mind so positive ones can remain. Although this may not work all of the time, it does a good job of eliminating superfluous and harmful negative emotions.In another part of Assembly, there was a discussion of being happy and the cause of problems. I was a bit skeptical about some parts of this lecture, but that is not to say it was false or anything of the sort. That is all dependent on personal interpretations of what was heard and understood.During the course of the meditation session, some students felt completely relaxed. I found myself, for maybe a fleeting moment, completely liberated and not worried about any work at all, and after it was over, I felt almost completely re-energized. Unfortunately, that feeling is very hard to recreate with the hustle and craziness of dorm life, homework, classes and maintaining social relationships at the same time. The serene atmosphere is very challenging to obtain under ordinary circumstances, much less under the time constraints that accompany being a student at PEA. Despite these drawbacks, this peaceful meditation is a relatively simple process with many benefits.Peace is often a state of mind that is hard to come by, but with simple instructions in breathing and focus it can be done in a quiet environment. There are moments in time when this can be achieved through meditation. The health benefits of this are definitely worthwhile for anyone who has maybe five to 10 spare minutes in a day. After hearing Mr. Seth, it is strange to wonder how someone could lose sight of happiness and what is important in life.This assembly gave a new outlook on the way I see things. The only thing I would have liked for him to improve on was to perhaps give practical ways to practice meditation, which has its limits depending on the state of the surrounding environment, with the common disruptions and distractions that are always around us.