The 5 Fold Path To Bliss: Going Beyond Stress to Renewal

Stress threatens your health and well being. I’ve read that 70% of North Americans suffer with stress related disorders. My patients tell me they think it’s more like 100%. Unrelenting stress wears down every system, organ, gland and tissue in your body. Your heart and blood vessels, your GI tract, your joints, your immune system, your hormones, and your head just don’t like it.

Like many people, I’ve had significant stress. I grew up in an alcoholic family and was sad most of my life. At 24 years old, I was thrown through a windshield smashing my spine. When I woke up some days later, I was paralyzed from the waist down. My dream life as a modern dancer and choreographer with The American Dance Asylum was ended in an instant.

Through my life experience, education, clinical practice, and Eastern transformational techniques I’ve reversed that lifetime of sadness to now enjoy a present with glimmers of bliss. This article reveals an outline of my path to bliss that came to me one night as I sat writing on my bedside.

It’s a simple path that can help anyone achieve moments of connection to the divine. That’s always good for your health and well being … and for your happiness!

1. Eliminate Irritants: Irritants come in many forms: chemical, emotional, physical, sexual, environmental, mental, and spiritual. Irritants jeopardize your health and well being. To achieve bliss states, it’s essential to identify what’s irritating you and eliminate it. Sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes you need to accept what is and come to peace with its presence in your life to feel peace.

2. Nourish Yourself: What’s nourishing to one person may irritate another. Nourishment comes to you on many levels. Food, drink, art, beauty, and nature, are all forms of nourishment. The company that you keep can benefit you or can drag you down. The way that you feed your senses, your spirit, and your mind also contribute to or detract from owning ecstasy.

3. Get Comfortable in Your Body: Growing up Catholic, I read about the lives of saints. Some suffered great pain yet still experienced religious ecstasy. Not many reach their level. To get comfortable in your body, you need to do more than get out of pain though. Society is jammed with messages that you’re not OK unless you look a certain way. Getting comfortable in your body means feeling you’re OK however you are.

4. Use Your Natural Resources: There are three power-generating plants in your body: your heart, your smile, and your sexuality. Remember how you feel when something makes you happy. Aren’t you charged up when you feel love? Throughout the ages religions have tried to control sexual expression in their followers because of its power. Yet systems of enlightenment use the power of sexuality to grow the spiritual self.

5. Love, Admire, and Respect Yourself and Others: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you is the Golden Rule. But what about all the times you’ve done good but didn’t recognize your success? You deserve admiration for all you’ve overcome and accomplished. Would you continue to act the way you do towards yourself if you treated yourself with respect? Give love, admiration, and respect to yourself and others to expand into moments of bliss – to expand your happiness.

You don’t have to do all 5 steps at once to make bliss happen. Life continues to offer opportunities to make choices -- that lead in different directions and to different states of being. When something happens how will you react? That determines the state of your physiology, your emotions, and your peace of mind.

What would happen if you … stopped eating food that you know isn’t good for you? … sat down every day for 30 minutes and listened to music you enjoyed, or made a point to spend time outdoors in a beautiful place, or ate a delicious meal with loved ones? … decided to smile and say hello first when you met the eyes of a stranger? … congratulated yourself every time you finished a required task? How would those choices affect your life? How much better would your life be?

My guess and my personal experience, as well as what’s been reported to me by my patients, is that you’ll feel more relaxed. You’ll breathe easier. You’ll smile more. You’ll sleep more deeply. You’ll have more energy to work and to play. And you’ll have a positive effect on those around you.

By giving a little energy to any or all of the above 5 steps you’ll magnify your opportunities to live a more joyful life. Then bliss will become a new habit that can easily repeat itself.