"The central thesis of my book, 'Creative Stress--A Path for Evolving Souls Living Through Personal and Planetary Upheaval', is that the energy of the universe is neutral. It's only in the last hundred years that the word "stress" has come to denote something negative. For the poet, stress is language, for the composer, stress is musical notes. So stress is a neutral concept. It's the pressuring of energy in a particular direction. The energy of the universe comes at us, comes at us and we filter it. We create a meaning process around it. If our meaning process around it pushes it aside, we should say that the physics of energy start to apply. That energy does not go away. It needs to be transformed. So it shows up in your blood pressure, your heart." Author James O'Dea, a former director of Amnesty International, shares more about his journey as a leading voice in the forgiveness, reconciliation and restorative justice movement and how his life seems to have been ordained by fate to take on a series of what some might call, 'stressful' roles.
