It is one thing to meditate when everything is flowing but another thing to be in the midst of chaos, in the marketplace. Will meditation, the act of relaxing your body and being detached from the situation, be possible to practice in such situations? That’s the challenge that life confronts everyone with. You think you’ve got everything under control. You think everything is okay, and all of a sudden everything changes. The nature of reality is impermanence. As soon as you think you have things flowing in one way, guess what. It won’t last. So what can you change?

Most people want to change the world outside of themselves, to control it. They even practice this control by thinking that they have to go meditate and relax now or that they have to go somewhere to get away from the stress. Of course, this won’t work because the stress is not just outside. The situation that creates your reaction in this way is within you.

Relaxation means being receptive. Receptivity isn’t just nurtured or practiced in the spiritual work, yet it isn’t part of everyday living either. You don’t practice being receptive to that which is beyond what you see, and when a situation arises that stresses you, you’re only getting caught by it and reacting to it because you can only see the surface of that situation.