Shifting Anxiety

This short meditation helps you shift perspective on stressful thoughts, memories, or challenging situations. You’ll imagine placing your stressful moment on a stage while you sit anywhere in the audience—observing how your view, thoughts, and physical responses change as your perspective changes. Thoughts, emotions, and memories don’t control the scene—you do. Use this meditation to calm the nervous system, reduce anxiety, and reconnect with your inner sense of control and clarity.

Transcript

This meditation is to help you work with changing your perspective in relationship to memories or challenges or even thoughts and emotions. So I invite you to think of something that's mildly upsetting. For example, It could be like doing your taxes or maybe you got cut off while driving today. And just bringing that to mind and imagining it. And as you imagine it, Just notice what you notice in your body. Is there a tension in your shoulders? How's your gut feel? How does your body react? When you think of this situation. And as you imagine it, Notice the image. Is the image like a narrow focus? Often, We have a narrow focus. Not looking at the purple. So we're going to do something called the stage. I invite you to imagine that this image is a scene. In a play on a stage. And you're in the audience. And as you're in the audience, Notice what row you might want to sit, The front, The middle, Or the back. And imagine yourself sitting there. And what changes in the image? Do you tend to take in more of the stage, More of the scenery? And how does your body respond? So if you haven't already, I invite you to go sit in the back row. So imagining you're getting up and just going to the back row of the audience. And then just watching the scene. Noticing your body, Your thoughts. Noticing its attention changed at all or lessened. And then you're gonna get up and go into somewhere in the middle row. And you're going to sit down, Imagining then that you're continuing to watch this scene of the play. And notice as you got closer to this stressful scene, How does your body respond now? What thoughts and emotions do you feel? And then you're going to get up again and you're going to go right back to the back row. And again, You're just gonna take a moment to notice what, If anything, Changes. Often people feel a little better when they're farther away from the stressful scene in the back of the room. And they notice that tension might decrease and thoughts and emotions might lessen. Or not be as reactive. Notice if that is for you. And if not, That's okay too. And we're just coming at this with the idea of we're just playing with curiosity. Like, Huh. I wonder what will happen depending on where I sit. And if you'd like, Pick. Anywhere in that audience that you'd like to sit. And just notice how your body and your mind respond. Notice that no matter where you sit, There's a different perspective. The back row, You're farther away. The front and middle row, You're even closer. Great. The back row, You may not even be able to see that scene as much, Right? Because it's farther away. You might even be blocked from your view a little. Or it might seem smaller. Because it's farther away. And the closer you get. You might notice more. The whole point of this is noticing that. No, Your perspective can change. You're in control of how you perceive a situation, Of your thoughts about a situation, Your emotions about a situation. Depending on where you sit in the audience. You can perceive that stressful scene differently. That stressful memory or that experience. And you can even imagine it as a thought that you're perceiving on the stage. It's all about playing and just noticing what you really are is not just an audience member, But you're the stage director. You can do whatever you want with that scene. You can draw the curtain if you want. You can dim the lights if you want. There doesn't need to be dialogue. You can change that scene however you want. And you can sit wherever you want, Whatever row you want. And. . . As a stage director, You're in control. Thoughts don't have control of you. The memory doesn't have control of you. The the challenging situation doesn't have control of you or your emotions. You're in control because you're the stage director. So I hope this helps and next time just practice playing with this. Coming at it with curiosity and play, Like, Huh, I wonder how my perspective will change, And where do I want to sit in the audience? Or how do I want to change the scene? And if you feel like you're getting flooded with thoughts and emotions, Remember in a play, You just have one scene at a time. So just take a scene from that memory or take a scene from that thought. In other words, Just one thought. You don't have to combine all the themes at once. All the memories at once. Just take what feels good for you and works for you and helps you feel and realize that you truly are in control of how you respond and react.