I hope you enjoy reading my columns about identifying, reducing and eliminating stress. It fascinates me because it is the most important least understood topic in the world. It goes under the radar while it is our most destructive force we ever experience. It determines whether we feel good or bad, are healthy or sick, happy or sad. I refuse to put up with it anymore because I finally found a way to eliminate it.

What could be more important? We spend trillions of dollars every year in every way engaging in activities to help us feel better (mask stress). When you boil it down, the underlying motive for everything we do is what we perceive helps us feel better. If we are in pain, we look for relief. If we feel great, we create what gives us deep satisfaction. Now that I have found a way to help me reduce and eventually eliminate stress, it is my number one priority. I include it in all my daily activities. It hardly interferes with any of them. The strategy I have developed works effortlessly 24/7/365 much like breathing. It helps me focus and improves my poker and handball game and the quality of my life.

The medicines I took, or the activities I desperately engaged in over the years, only helped me feel better temporarily. They numbed and distracted me for a short time and the same stress always returned another day. No one ever told me what the real cause of my stress was or how to dismantle it and eliminate it from my life. I spent my life searching for ways to help me feel better. What I was searching for was right in front of my eyes, too close to see and too simple to pick up.

Our thoughts that are founded on any untrue core beliefs we live our lives by cause stress. False core beliefs are the underlying foundation of these thoughts. They need to be identified, understood and then convicted and executed as in a criminal proceeding. Once I realized those core beliefs I held that were false were making me miserable, I simply gave them up and the stress they caused went away. Why should I continue believing something once I realize it is has no basis in fact? It would make no sense. Being exposed for what they were, false, they went away and so did the thought and that particular form of stress it caused.

There is no one definition for stress. For some it might be guilt, others lust or anger, still others jealousy, doubts and fears, expectations, anguish or any of the other feelings we endure as realities of our daily lives. Most of us assume we are not able to do anything about stress except seek temporary relief anywhere we can. I never was told by anyone that there was anything I could do to free myself from stress and I put up with it as best I could. Many forms of stress made me feel ashamed and I tried to hide them. I thought there was something inadequate and wrong with me. I spent years searching to free myself from stress through psychiatry, medicine, religion, sports, achieving status, medals, titles, fame and fortune. No matter what I did it always came back. No one ever gave me any accurate understanding of it or any relatively simple way to free myself from it. At age 66 I developed a strategy that I can now say works for me. I cleared a path that is freeing me from each stressful feeling as I experience it. I never make any attempt to go back to, or remember or try to understand past experiences of stress, because they are realities that happened and can never be changed. The stressful feeling I experienced as a child is the same feeling that I am experiencing today.

When I identify and realize any core belief is false, the thought that is based on it that causes stress goes away. That type of stress never comes back. These steps are my best effort to give you a simple overview of how I reduce and eliminate stress.

Step #1. Embrace any stressful feeling when it appears. Don't run or hide from it anymore. It will not go away until you allow yourself to experience its wrath fully.

Step #2. Look for and identify the thought that appears related to that feeling. The feeling is caused by some thought that you are thinking. The job is to identify every detail of it.

Step #3. Behind that thought is your core belief system. Now you must become a criminal prosecutor. Will that belief you are holding that creates and supports that thought hold up in court? If during this trial the evidence is inadequate or has no ground to stand on, the case for maintaining your stressful feeling will be dismissed, that feeling will be diminished, and eventually will go away forever.

That early stressful feeling (same one) you have been a victim of ever since your childhood will also go away. It will not have a Metaphysical Poker & Life belief system to continue supporting the thought that causes that particular stressful feeling. Again, never go back to the past. Trying to understand what happened in the past only creates more stress. You cannot change the past. Always live in the present moment embracing every feeling affecting you. Unless the feeling of hate, for instance, is experienced in the present moment, you will not be able to get to the bottom of it. It will never get out of your system permanently.

The best news is that when any stressful feeling you are experiencing, like hate, is dismantled, discredited and eliminated from your mind, all hate regardless of when it was first created goes away. When the core beliefs supporting the thoughts that cause hate are discredited, you will not experience the stress it causes anymore.

How about chiming in through e-mail with any of your relevant insights on this subject. It would be helpful for all of us to share them. The more input I receive from you, the clearer we all can get about stress. My efforts are helping me experiencing a genuine freedom so I am sharing them with you. Stress tortures us through the mental and physical disease it causes, it limits us from experiencing our grandest hopes and dreams, and then it kills us. That, we all know.

In the meantime I will merrily go about my life doing everything I can to eliminate stress from it. Remember, when in pain you have two choices. One is healing. Any other choice, no matter what it is, leaves you in your pain. Reach Charlie- For Speaking Engagements & Live Play Internet Tournament Coaching 702 270-4877