Here’s a question I got from a coaching client recently:
“I’ve been offered a high-pressure, high-stress, high-reward job. Just thinking about the level of responsibility keeps me up at night. In the past, I’ve been successful at jobs like this, but it takes a huge toll on my mental (and physical) health. As soon as I commit, I throw myself into it and am determined to be successful no matter what. To make matters worse, my investments aren’t doing great right now and if it keeps going this way, I’ll need to come out of early retirement and take up some kind of paid role.”
My Perspective:
What if you could do the high-reward job, without any pressure or stress?
What if there was literally zero toll on your mental and physical health? Would you want to take the job then?
I totally understand that if it was a choice between stress-and-money or no-stress and no-money, it would be a tough choice and sooner or later you might have to go for the stress-and-money option.
But, I have a better, more rewarding option for you, that will increase your consciousness while increasing your abundance.
Are you ready?
Make the primary purpose of your life, spiritual awakening.
In other words, fully accept that you either live a life of suffering and stress (as you experienced the last time you did a job like this), or you spiritually awaken.
You might wonder what I mean by ‘spiritually awaken’.
It sounds very grand but it’s quite simple really. It means to devote yourself to being as present as possible as often as possible. To literally make that your purpose in life. Whatever you do on the outside (high-stakes job or sitting on park bench), your primary goal is to bring as much presence as possible to it.
Believe it or not, when you make this your primary focus, you soon find that you can be calm, collected, totally focused and free from unnecessary thinking, while doing your job.
You can focus on one task at time – the one that’s in front of you right now and give it your full attention and presence.
And when the inevitable feelings of stress or frustration or anxiety come up, instead of running away from them or distracting yourself from them, you can use them to deepen your awakening.
How? By doing the Inner Salam Method.
Channel the full power of your presence into the sensation of the feeling in your body.
This only takes a few seconds or minutes… and it will have a dramatic impact on the rest of your day. Why? Because you’re no longer running away into a stream of (non-present) thinking in order to avoid the negative feeling.
By being present as often as possible, and facing your feelings directly, something wonderful happens:
You get to have your cake and eat it.
In this case, you get to do a high-demand job, without losing any sleep over it or getting stressed and frustrated.
When those feelings arise, you simply let them go and carry on with your work.
Your job then becomes a personal spiritual practice that deepens your connection with Allah and increases your consciousness.
This doesn’t take long. In fact, the few minutes you spend doing the Inner Salam Method usually saves you many hours of over-thinking and zapping your own bandwidth and energy levels with stress. And being present literally takes no time at all. But the benefits are astounding.
Presence dissolves the inner stress almost-instantly and you’re left being able to do the job like a Zen Master. And sleeping at night like a baby.
The truth is, if you don’t embrace spiritual awakening as your primary purpose, then even if you stay retired, your negative feelings will still get the better of you sooner or later. Your ego will find another thing to stress out about or get frustrated with. It could be family or the stock market or whatever.
Take the job. Or leave it.
At most, that will inform how you spend your time and what activities you do.
What determines the quality of your life is not your actions, but the intensity of presence you bring to your actions.
If you’d like more advice on how to use Prophetic Presence and other tools to master your nafs, check this out:
