So this isn't specifically something from Buddhism,
But the way that I processed it and the insight that I had come from it was from my Buddhist meditation practice.
A couple of years ago when I had a horse,
Other people were really encouraging me to compete,
But I specifically didn't want to compete because I honestly just didn't want to be nervous.
I had been in competitive sports pretty much all of my adult life,
And I just didn't feel like going through that nervous feeling on the day of competition anymore.
Then somebody said to me I should reframe my nerves as excitement,
Which I thought was really great.
In the end,
I didn't compete with my horse because I decided to just enjoy him and our time together rather than worrying about being competitive.
Some days ago I had to do my first inside time alive.
Public speaking or anything of the sort has always been the one thing that makes me really nervous.
Meditation was only at 2pm,
But when I woke up in the day of the live event,
I felt a deep sense of nervousness right from when I opened my eyes.
The entire day I kept reminding myself to reframe my nerves as excitement,
And this did help a little bit.
Before the live event,
I decided to do a 40-minute meditation to try and calm my nerves and ground myself so that I could hold the space with a sense of steadiness and openness for others.
I was in a meditation where I was connected to my energy body and just spent the whole 40 minutes being with the surge of movement of the energy of nervousness.
It wasn't even that easy to sit with because it was quite uncomfortable with a lot of fear connected to it.
After a while things started to ease and I became vividly aware of how the energy of my nervousness felt within my body.
I then had a really profound realisation that the energy of nervousness is exactly the same feeling as the energy of excitement.
The only difference was that with the feeling of nervousness,
The energy seemed to be moving inwards,
Kind of closing in,
Especially towards my heart.
The energy of the feeling of excitement seemed to be moving outwards,
A kind of opening.
So what I then did was I allowed myself to really relax into it and be with this energy of nervousness,
But allowing a sense of spaciousness within,
So that this energy of the nervousness that seemed to be closing in then had space to move and to flow outwards.
And honestly this made a really big difference for me.
My nervousness then didn't seem so heavy and so overpowering.
So the next time you feel really nervous about something or really anxious,
It might help you to remind yourself that you can reframe your nerves as excitement.
Maybe the next time you feel nervous you can just take a moment to come back to yourself and really allow space within you so that you can allow this movement of energy to flow outwards instead of closing in.
I hope this little snippet of a realisation helps you as it has me.
