For the thousandth time, the rubber meets the road here: IF you meditate and control your breathing, you go to a calm, centered place. If you then remember to breathe during the day, eventually you will check your breathing during a stressful experience, shift it, and find out that the stress diminishes. If you sophisticate the breathing, deepen your ability to breathe calmly under stress, you will be able to handle higher and higher levels of stress without it becoming strain.

If you also create goals in all three arenas of life, admitting that you want love, financial success and bountiful health, and striving to achieve them, you will be exposed to considerable stress. If you continue on, while preventing the stress from becoming strain, the only way the organism can respond is by positive adaptation—you become stronger. You also make deeper contact with your true Self—the invisible space within the triangle created by your goals.

One of the signs of this is the ability to achieve high excellence in all three arenas without specific goals: you are simply “Zen-ing along.” I am honored to know a few people like this. Most of us aren’t in that category.

As CST is designed to make us healthy, instinctive athletes, Lifewriting and Threshold Training ("The Path") are designed to make us instinctive peak performers. You wake up in the morning, life your life, go to sleep at night eager to rest, eager for the new day. And then look back over a year and realize that you have deepened your practice of life itself. An extraordinary feeling.

And what is at the end of that road? A return to the ocean of living energy from which we all spring. Sorry, no egos allowed. Hopes of “individual survival” are dependent upon the illusion that we are individuals. We are so much more than that. Releasing the illusion of duality is one of the hallmarks of spiritual maturity.

That concept is useful because we can work backwards from there, find the pertinent attitudes and teachings in the religious disciplines we were raised in, unite with those of like mind from other traditions. We can go backwards from there to our philosophical concepts of life, our reality maps, and work to make them accurate and useful. And we balance our emotional lives, intellectual lives, physical lives, again searching to resolve the dualities at every turn.

And we ultimately ground it all in the physical reality of our existence, one breath at a time. And there it is: we start with a breath, work our way up to spiritual awakening, and then work back down through the chakras to align every aspect of ourselves with that primal state.

Life is so complex. And so simple. And so beautiful.

As are we all.

-Steve Barnes, http://darkush.blogspot.com/2007/08/cst-and-stuff.html