Are you feeling tense or anxious? Do you regularly worry? Are you ever nervous? Do you get easily hassled? Do you get stressed out? If you perceive yourself to be suffering from any of these afflictions, then you’re letting your mind play tricks on you. Your inner self cannot be anxious, nervous, stressed or uncertain. The real you is simply not capable of suffering from stress or worry. All these afflications are symptoms of your personality – when you feel that you’re suffering from them, it’s only your personality trying to trip you up.

What you must realize is that your personality – from the Latin persona, meaning a mask – is simply a mask that not only hides the real you from everyone else, it has fooled you into believing that it is, in fact, who you are. But, psychology tells us that your personality is an accumulation of snapshots of people and events that made an impression on you when you were a young child – what we normally call our formative years. You took snapshots of these things because they were big enough to make you feel good or bad about yourself at the time. Unfortunately, psychology also confirms that the normal mind is much more likely to dwell on the negative rather than the positive photographs.

Your subconscious mind is still obsessed with those photographs and it is this obsession that gives life to your personality. In essence, your personality is simply not real – it may have got you to where you are and you may really like it – but take care that you don’t fall in love with an illusion.

To rid yourself of the problems from which only your imaginary personality can suffer – worry, stress, anxiety, doubt, fear, frustration – you’re going to have to move beyond your personality, your perceived weaknesses and strengths. You’ve to go searching within for the real you because not only does it not know worry, stress, doubt, not only is the real you fearless, the real you is able to achieve effortless happiness and success. The great news is that you won’t have to look far to find the inner you – it is waiting to be uncovered. You’ll uncover the real you in the peace of a reflective moment, in the experience of one of those perfect “natural high” moments that we experience at some point in our lives – where peace and happiness reign.

However, you shouldn’t wait for the next peak moment to get over the illusions of worry, stress and all the rest. You can do that right now by indulging in some meditation. When you meditate you can begin to understand that stress, worry and fear are nothing more than toxic thoughts and that a clear and focused mind (the real you) simply will not have anything to do with that kind of nonsense – it has much more pressing things to do.