Dawn Groves, a minister, workshop leader, and author of three “Busy People” guides, including “Stress Reduction for Busy People,” knows firsthand what it’s like to deal with overload. She spoke to Beliefnet’s Wendy Schuman about spiritual ways of handling stress.

You just finished writing a book on stress reduction. Does that mean your life is under control?

That’s the greatest joke in the world, when we say, “I think I finally got it.” I should know better by now.

I had just taken on the book, and I thought I knew how to approach stress. Then my world kind of fell apart. My mother, who had been ill, suddenly dropped into a full-blown psychotic dementia. I have two young children. My husband’s job got very iffy because he was down in Seattle in the tech industry. We moved twice during this period, and my blood pressure just shot up. I started doing unwholesome behaviours like eating my stress away. I gained weight. All kinds of things that were just in opposition to anything that was helpful.

When I finally started looking at how I was coping with all this stuff, I realised that my body was going into serious overload, and if I didn’t stop something terrible was going to happen. So I put off writing the book for a few months just because I couldn’t deal with it. Finally I thought, I have to write this book, I have to do it to save me. And it became a very useful experience.

It’s like that joke, “How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.”

That’s right. The way I look at life is that everything is happening to assist me in my own awakening to my divine nature, but it’s hard to remember that when you’re in the middle of hell. — Beliefnet.com