Anxiety That Doesn’t Go Away: A Somatic Talk On Coexistence

You have done the work. You have done the therapy. You have done the breathing. You may even, at this point, know more about the vagus nerve than you ever expected to. And the anxiety is still there. This is not a failure. There is a kind of anxiety that does not leave, no matter how many protocols you try, and the wellness industry has been quietly selling you the lie that this is your fault. It is not. Some nervous systems run warmer, scan more vigilantly, and have their own weather. And the fight to evict that weather is often the heavier burden, not the weather itself. This long, unhurried somatic talk offers a reframe rather than another protocol. It explores what peaceful co-existence with chronic anxiety actually looks like, what it costs to stop fighting, and what becomes possible when you finally let the whole household come home. For the people who have done the work and are tired.

Transcript

So welcome everyone and thank you. Thank you for listening. So just settle. Wherever you happen to be. And let me say something honest right at the start. Because honesty is going to be the whole currency of this hour. Or these few minutes. I think a particular kind of person has pressed play on this. You have done the work. You have done possibly more of the work than is reasonable. You have read the books, You've done the breathing and you have at various points become rather good at breathing. You have probably had a therapist or two. Possibly a meditation app subscription you feel slightly guilty about and you may well in the last few years, Have learned more about the vagus nerve than you ever expected to know about a nerve. The anxiety hasn't gone away. It's quieter perhaps. You can manage it more days than you used to. You have tools and the tools work, Sometimes. But underneath all of that Underneath the breathing, And the books, And the breathwork, And the herbs, And the very expensive supplements that someone on Instagram said would change your life? There is still a home. A baseline. A weather system that is somehow part of you. That has not been evicted by any of the eviction notices you have served on it. You are now beginning to suspect that it has no plans to leave either. And on top of the anxiety itself, There is now a second more modern problem. You feel like a wellness failure. Because the entire industry has been telling you in increasingly confident voices that if you just did the right protocol, Cold plunge, Breath work, Magnesium, Journaling, Yoga, Somatic work, The right kind of yoga, The right, The kind that costs more, Then you would be one of those serene people. In the advertisements who appear to be lit from within. And who have apparently retired their nervous systems. But you are not one of those people. You are just tired. So this might be for you. And what I'm going to do is not give you another protocol. I am going to do something almost the opposite now. I am going to suggest very gently. That the proto-cause may not be the answer. Because the anxiety was never, In your case, The problem. The fight against the anxiety, The campaign, The war, The lifelong eviction effort. Has all along been the heavier thing. And I want to show you what it looks like to lay the campaign down. Nor does defeat. As the actual liberation. Because what is on the other side of war is not silence. What is on the other side of war is something far better than silence and almost nobody talks about it. Coexistence. Genuine, Settled, Even quietly affectionate co-existence with the thing you've been trying so hard for so long. To get rid of. Let me name the lie directly because we are going to need it out in the open before we can do anything useful with it. The lie is that anxiety is a malfunction and that with enough effort, Enough optimization, Enough Andrew Hubberman be removed. And the absence of anxiety is what mental health looks like. The wellness industry is built on this lie. It depends upon it. If anxiety is a malfunction, Then anxiety is a market. And there is always a new product, New protocol, New 5-step framework. That finally will fix you. Pick up your phone, Open any app and scroll. Every other piece of content is some version of the same promise. Just do this one more thing and then this feeling will leave. Here is what almost nobody will tell you because telling you might collapse the business model. For a very large number of people and I would gently suggest you may be one of them because I am. The anxiety is not going to leave him. It is not malfunctioning. It is in fact doing exactly what it was built to do. Your nervous system is not a kettle. Kettles have a switch. Your nervous system is a weather system. It has settings, Inherited patterns. Early conditioning. The entire genetic and developmental hand you had dealt. Some people, Through no fault of their own and no particular failure of effort, Have a nervous system that runs warmer, That scans more vigilantly, That registers a busier internal sky. And no amount of breathing. And I say this as someone who deeply sincerely loves breathing. And I have a few very expensive certifications myself as a breathwork facilitator. No amount of breathing is going to turn off that weather system. Turn that weather system into a different weather system. You can soften it, Yes. You can work with it and you can learn its patterns. You cannot, However, Replace it with somebody else's nervous system. No matter how serene that person looks in the yard, They have their own weather. It is just possible you have not seen it. This is not me giving my personal opinions. Here's the clinical fact underneath. Because I will not leave you without data. Generalized anxiety disorder, Social anxiety, Chronic worry. The research on these does not actually support the wellness fantasy of a total remission. It supports something more honest, And I would argue much, Much more dignified. It supports a shift in your relationship to anxiety. So people do not generally get rid of it. People get better at being around it. The clinical literature, When you read it carefully, Has been quietly saying for decades, What the wellness internet refuses to. This thing is, For many of you, A long-term companion. So the question is not how to evict the companion. The question is how to live with a companion in a way that does not destroy the rest of your life. If there is one thing I want you to allow, Even tentatively. Before we go a step further it is this The fact that anxiety has not left is not evidence that you are doing something wrong. It is evidence that you are not, In fact, Broken. You've simply been working on the wrong problem. And relief comes from putting down the wrong problem. Even before you pick up the right one. Enormous relief. So we are going to put it down together today. Or at least try. Just for the next few minutes. And we'll just see what the air feels like then. So, There is an old story from the Buddhist tradition that I want to lay down here. Because once you understand it, You will start to see it everywhere in your own life. And seeing it is most of the work. The Buddha, Who I think was a rather good clinician about two and a half thousand years before clinical was a word said something like this He said, When an unpleasant feeling arises in a person. An ordinary person experiences two pains. The first is the ordinary pain itself. The feeling that arose. The second is the suffering they add to the first by their reaction to it. And he called these the two arrows. The first arrow is the thing that happened. The second arrow is what we do about the thing that happened. And the second arrow he said with a very very kind cheerful tone the second arrows we shoot at ourselves. Now hold that next to anxiety and see what happens. The first arrow, In your case, In our case, Is the anxiety itself. A hum in the chest. A tightness in the gut. A racing in the morning before your eyes are even open. It just comes out of nowhere. An animal alertness in a room that by all objective measurement contains no threats. That is the first arrow. Very uncomfortable. And it's real. And this is the part you've been refusing to believe. That on its own. It's survivable. People survive the first arrow all the time. You have survived it this morning probably, Without realizing you did. I realized it, I survived it before I started recording. The second arrow is everything you do about it. The fight, The resistance, The protocols, The panic that you are anxious, The meta-anxiety about being anxious, The running commentary that says, Oh no, Here it is again. Why is it still happening? What is wrong with me? I thought I was past this. I'm going backwards. I'm going to be like this forever. What does it mean about me as a person that I'm like this? That is the second arrow. And it does not just add to the first arrow, It multiplies it. So the math of suffering. Is not arithmetic, It's geometric. The first arrow is a feeling. The second arrow is a feeling about the feeling, Plus a story about the feeling, Plus an identity built around the feeling, Plus a future feared because of the feeling, And somewhere underneath that whole pile, The original feeling The original first attempt is doing what feelings naturally do, Always. Which is, Rise, Peak, And then pass. Rise, Peak and then start to pass. Except you can no longer feel it pass now because the second arrow is now an entire ecosystem in itself. Here is the bit I most want you to hear. Because I think, For a lot of you it lands almost as a relief. Most of what you've been calling your anxiety, Most of the suffering, Most of the exhaustion, Most of the felt sense that this is running your life is not the anxiety, It is the second arrow. It is the war you are conducting against the first arrow. And the war can be ended unilaterally today, By you. Without the first arrow having to change at all. So this is not a clever trick. This is a real specific observable thing. That when you stop adding the second arrow When the feeling arrives, You do not immediately become enraged at the feeling, Ashamed of the feeling, Terrified of the feeling. You do not begin the campaign against the feeling. You do not take out your CVT workbook and start to challenge the feeling. What is left? Is a fraction of what was there before. It's not gone. But it's reduced. The hum is still in the chest. But the catastrophe around Diham has been allowed to soften. And life suddenly has more room in it. Because you are no longer pouring most of your day's energy into the boy effort. Which brings us to the question that decides everything. How exactly does a person stop time? Firing the second arrow. Because we have all tried to stop it. And we have all noticed with some irritation. That trying to stop firing the second arrow turns out itself to be a third arrow. So the mind is rather slippery this way. So we need to be careful. We need a move that is not a move. So we need something which is not yet another technique of getting rid of the thing. And that is where we are going next. Almost everyone will tell you. The answer is acceptance. Accept your anxiety. Welcome it. Make friends with it. And on the surface, This is right. The trouble is that almost nobody who teaches acceptance, Teaches what acceptance actually is. And the version that gets sold is so wrong that it does not work. And then people blame themselves again for failing at one more thing. So, I want to be precise, Because difference between real acceptance and the popular wellness version of acceptance is fine, But it is the difference between liberation and one more cleverly disguised war. Here is the trick now. Most people. When they try to accept their anxiety or their unpleasant feelings, Secretly are still trying to make it leave. And check in with yourself and see if that's the case for you. Most people when they try to accept their anxiety are secretly still trying to make it leave. So they are accepting it as a strategy. They are saying with their words, I am welcoming this. And underneath in the engine room, They are running the calculation. Accept it and it will dissolve. Accept it and then the wellness book promised it would lose its power. Accept it and then I will be one of those serene people who I see in the ads. So the acceptance in this version is a very sophisticated removal technique. So it is the same eviction notice. But we have written it in a different font this time. And we are slipping it under the door with a smile. So. . . In very, Very simple terms. The anxiety, Which is not stupid, Your anxiety. I want to gently note has been with you for a very long time. And has in many ways paid attention so the anxiety knows. It feels this strategy, It feels this smile that is hiding under the eviction notice and so it stays. It stays because acceptance as a strategy is at the level of nervous system still rejection. There is still a self that wants the experience to be other than what actually is. And there is still a campaign. The campaign has simply gone undercover. So, Long story short, You can't fool your nervous system, You can't fool your subconscious mind, And you can't fool your body. Now Real Acceptance And now I want to be very careful here. Because this sentence is the entire center of gravity of this talk. And I would like to read it twice. Real Acceptance Is the moment you genuinely stop requiring the anxiety to leave? In order for your life to be livable. Once again real acceptance. Is the moment you genuinely stop requiring the anxiety to leave in order for your life to be livable. Not as a clever new way to make it leave. As a final, Total, Just relinquishing of the project of making it leave at all. You let it stay. Not because you like it. You can dislike it freely. You let it stay because you've realized finally. That the suffering was never in its day? The suffering was in your insisting that it must go. Here is what happens when that actually completes. And I will tell you honestly, It is not a one-off event. It is a turn you make again and again and again because the mind keeps trying to convert it back into a strategy. But when the turn completes, Even for a moment, Something very surprising occurs. The anxiety. No longer being fought. Does sometimes soften. Not always, Not on a schedule. And this is critical. Not because you were finally clever enough to find the secret button and it turned off. It softens because the war around it has stopped. And the war was at least half of what made it unbearable. So without the second arrow, Without the campaign, What is left is the sensation in your body. And sensations, Even uncomfortable ones, Can be lived with. You have lived with thousands of them already. You will live with thousands more. Your nervous system is far more capable of housing an uncomfortable sensation than it has been allowed to remember. Because you've spent 30 years insisting that uncomfortable sensations must not be housed at all. There is a poem you may know by Rumi. Who keeps finding his way into talks like this. Because frankly he was right about quite a lot of things. He compared the self to a guesthouse. And he said something like this Each morning, A new arrival A joy, A depression. A meanness, A moment of awareness. Welcome and entertain them all, He said. Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Treat each guest honourably. They may be clearing you out for some new delight. And I love that poem. And I want to give it one tiny kiss. Respectful adjustment. For the purpose of this talk. Because Rumi's poem is sometimes read as another removal technique. Let them in and watch them transform and depart. And I don't know Rumi personally, But I do not think Rumi meant it that way. But it is how the wellness internet has interpreted him. So let me put it more bluntly. Some of the guests are not passing through. Some of them have signed the lease. Welcome them anyway. Not because they will leave, Because they are part of the house now. And the house can still be a good house with them in it. But only if you stop standing at the front door, Arguing. So, I will say something brief and true. And then I will step back because this time belongs to you, Not me. I have a nervous system that runs warm. I always have. As a child, As a teenager, As an adult. There has been a hum, A background vigilance. A particular quality of being a bit on alert in a world that does not most days actually require me to be. And I spent a long stretch of my life And you will laugh because I do Believing that one day With enough effort I would arrive at a final, Settled, Anxiety-free version of myself. I even put that version of me on my vision board when I had it two decades ago, The retired version. The Man on the Yard And I had a sort of imaginary appointment in my diary. I was going to keep with this future, Finally relaxed Abby who was radiating white light. And he has not, As it turns out, Shown up. He has not shown up. And at some point I had to look at my actual life and notice that all the energy I was pouring into preparing for his arrival was ironically the single largest source of my suffering. The hum itself I could survive. The lifelong eviction effort. The rolling subscription of my own future improvement. That was the exhausting thing. When I very gradually gave up on his arrival. When I let the warm running nervous system be simply what mine is. Over time. There was a strange peace that arrived. But it was not the peace that I had been promised. Not silence. It was a different piece. A working piece. A piece that includes the hum. Rather than requiring its absence. And I'm not going to pretend that I've finished this process. I notice the old reflex reach for the eviction paperwork still. But what has changed is, I notice it sooner now. And the noticing is, As it turns out, Most of the work. And that is all I will say. Back to you now. Now I want to add a layer. For me, Completes this whole picture. And it is a layer that my work in family constellations has made impossible to leave out. So in constellations work developed by Bert Hellinger. There is one observation. That I think is the most quietly powerful things I've encountered. What is excluded from a system grows louder. And what is included settles. What is excluded from a system grows louder. And what is included settles. A family member denied. A feeling denied. A part of the self denied. Any of these exiled from the system will fight for recognition they were not given. So everything wants its place and everything wants to be seen. And here is what I have watched happen again and again and again in this work. A person comes in with anxiety and they've been at war with it for 20 years. And we do not in the constellation try to remove it. We do not even try to understand it. We do something far simpler and far more powerful. We gave it a place. We let it have a representative in the room. We let it stand and we let the person face it. And say out loud with a body that means it, I see you. You belong here. You've been part of me for a long time. And I will not pretend anymore that you do not exist. And the anxiety. 90% of the time settles. Now here's the difference. It settles, It doesn't vanish. The representative breathes out. The person breathes out. Something in the field that had been bracing against itself for two decades, In a single moment, Is no longer bracing. And what becomes visible almost always. Is that the anxiety was never the enemy. The person believed. It was very often an attempt at love. An ancestral pattern of vigilance carried forward to keep someone safe. In a world that in a previous generation was genuinely unsafe. A loyalty to a parent who lived in a state of fear. Just let that reframe land for anxiety. I loyalty to a parent who lived in a state of fear. A wakefulness inherited from a grandmother. Who will learn to sleep with one eye open. And once it is allowed to be seen. It tells you what it has been doing. And almost always it has been trying to protect you. So, I want you to just consider it. Don't believe me. Just consider. That your anxiety The one you've been fighting since you were old enough to know its name. Is not an enemy who got into the building. It's part of the system. It has a place. It has possibly a job. Even if the job description was written for a world that you no longer live in. And what it has been asking for. Is not to be defeated. But finally to belong. So there is something that both traditions east and west have always understood about this but they just use different languages The deepest spiritual maturity is never the absence of difficult feelings. The mystics, When you read them carefully, Do not stop feeling fear or grief or longing. What changes is their company with those feelings. They stop ranking these feelings into acceptable and unacceptable. They stop running an internal customs office that lets some experiences through and refuses the other's entry. The Bhakti poets called this kind of presence Beloved. Not because their lives became smooth. But because they stopped requiring smoothness as a condition of being at peace. They sang from the middle of grief. They sang from the middle of fear. The song was the company. The company was the practice. And the practice was the whole thing. So. . . You do not have to become a mystic. I am not asking that. And frankly, The world has enough people doing that badly. Really badly. I'm asking something far more modest. I am asking you to consider that your anxiety belongs to you. The way your hands belong to you. The way your voice belongs to you. Not as an enemy to be conquered? Not as a flaw to be hidden, And not as a guest who is overstaying its welcome, But as a part of a household, A part you may not love, A part you sometimes find really annoying, But it's still a part. Yours. Like every other part of you. Being included rather than exiled. Because what is included settles. And what is settled, Even when it is still there, Is no longer running the show. The intensity goes away. It softens. Let us do the practice now. Because everything I've said becomes air if it does not land in the body. Just a few minutes and I'm giving you a heads up. It will not get rid of your anxiety. And I want to say that straight out, Because if any part of you is still hoping this is the secret practice, That is part of the second arrow. And we are about to gently set it down. This practice is not a removal. It is a meeting. We are going to sit in a room with the thing we have spent a lifetime trying to get out of the room. That is the practice. And it is quietly more powerful than anything. I have ever experienced. So wherever you are, Whatever you're doing, If you want to close your eyes you can. If you cannot, That's perfectly fine. Just listen. The words will work either way. Let your body arrive on whatever is holding it. The chair the floor. The bed. Just feel the support underneath you. Present Unconditional Asking nothing. And take a slow breath now. Just a little longer on the exit than on the entry. And another. And we are not breathing in order to fix anything. We are breathing because breathing is what bodies do. And we are just going to let it be that simple for a minute. There's no protocol, There's no goal, There's no technique. There is a body breathing in a room. And now gently. Only as much as is true today. I want you to notice what you've been calling anxiety. The sensation. The Hum. The tightness. Wherever it is in your body right now. The throat, The chest, The stomach, The shoulders. Just locate it. Do not try to change it. Do not try to soothe it. He has his looking at it. With eyes that have nothing planned for it. And as you notice it. See if you can feel the second arrow. The old reflex that says There it is again. Make it stop. Get rid of it. This should not be here. It may also be saying do this and it'll go away. Watch those words. Watch those thoughts. But don't engage. Just for now. Just for this practice. I'm not asking you. To give up the fight permanently. I'm asking you to take a small break from it. Do not try to get rid of this feeling. Do not believe the commentary around it. And do not try to make the practice work. Just sit in the room with what's there. Watch everything. Let yourself feel perhaps how tired the fight has made you. How long it has been running. And now. . . With the anxiety still in the room, Still humming, Still in the chest, Still doing whatever it's doing. I want you to receive these sentences from me. And if you want you can also Repeat them to yourself. Whatever feels right for you today. Let them be honest, Change the words, Do not perform anything. I see you. I see you. You've been here a long time. I have spent a very long time trying to get you to leave. I am tired of trying. And I do not think trying was ever going to work. So today just for this moment. I am going to stop trying. You are allowed to stay. I am going to stop drawing. You are allowed to stay. If there is a particular area in your body where you feel the activation, The hum, The anxiety, You're welcome to put one or both your hands there. And then the words again, I am going to stop trying. You are allowed to stay. You do not have to soften. In order for me to stop fighting you. You can be here. I will be here too. You can be here. I will be here too. And now notice. Just notice. What happens in the body when those sentences land? There may be a softening, There may not. You don't require one now. The whole point of this practice is that you stop requiring softening. The softening comes as a side effect of coexistence. It's not the goal. And if there is no softening. If the anxiety is exactly as loud as it was three minutes ago, I want you to notice something else. You are still here. The anxiety did not destroy you. You are present, You are breathing, You are in the room with it. And the world has not ended. That right there is the discovery. The discovery is that you can be in a room with it and still be a person, Still be life, Still be here. So another few seconds. In the simple presence of co-existence. All of it is allowed. You, Your anxiety, The chair, The breath, If there are any sounds outside the room, All of it is allowed. Nothing been argued with. Now when you're ready, With no rush. Let movement return to your hands, To your feet. Come back. But come back having tasted, Even briefly. What is it to be in a room with a thing without fighting it? That taste is the new possibility. As we come to an end. I want to be practical and I want to be honest about what changes and what does not. Because this talk would be a lie if I did not draw the line clearly. What does not change is the weather. You may still wake up some mornings with the familiar hum already running before your feet are on the floor. You may still feel the surge before the meeting, The tightening in the chest. At the unexpected text message. The weather is yours and it's possibly going to be yours for a long time. What changes and this is where the entire transformation lives. Is your company with the weather. The Hum arrives. And you no longer have to be instantly enraged at it. The surge happens. And you no longer have to mount a campaign against it. The thought spirals. And you no longer have to take the spiral as evidence that you're failing as a person. The first arrow lands. And the second arrow slowly over time with much practice stops being fired. And the difference between a life which the first arrow lands alone, And a life in which the first and the second arrow land together, Is genuinely the difference between an inconvenience and an unbearable existence. A few honest plain things for the road. Expect to forget all of this regularly. The mind will with great enthusiasm convert what we have done into another technique and then it will run the technique and then it will be disappointed when the technique does not produce silence. This is so predictable that I would put money on it. When it happens, You do not have to despair. You simply notice. Here is the campaign again. Dressed up in tonight's vocabulary and you just put it down once more. The forgetting and the remembering. The picking up and putting down is not failure. That is the whole practice. Lower your bar dramatically. A good day is not a day with no anxiety. A good day for you is a day in which the anxiety arrived and was not turned into a second arrow catastrophe. A day in which you were anxious and you lived your life anyway. A day in which the hum was present and you went to the meeting, Took the call, Made the dinner. And you were more or less yourself. That is a really successful day. Mark it as such. The absence of anxiety was never the right metric in the first place. Let yourself get very curious about the anxiety. Once you're not at war with it. You might begin to notice. Sometimes it has useful information. It may be alerting you to something worth attending to. An exhausted body. A relationship where you need to be honest. Over commitment. A quiet sadness which you've been carrying for a while. Anxiety that is at war with you has nothing to teach you. And anxiety that is sitting at the table with you. Sometimes turns out to be the most observant member of the household. Sometimes it is just doing its old static thing for no good reason. But sometimes when you stop screaming at it, It might say something worth hearing. Here is where I will leave you. The promise of the wellness industry was that one day, With enough effort, You will be free of this thing. That promise was a lie. There is a better, Truer, Older promise on offer. And the old traditions and your honest grandmothers have always known it. You do not need to be free of it to be free. The freedom is not on the other side of anxiety. The freedom is in the relationship. You can have anxiety and have a beautiful life. You can have the surge and have love. You can have the weather and still somehow be peaceful. Not because the weather changed. Because you stopped requiring it to change in order for peace to be possible. You do not have to wait for the hum to leave to begin your life. The hum is part of your life. Think about the word coexistence. Begin anyway. Begin now. Begin in good company with yourself. So, Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for listening, If you're still here. And until next time. . . Namaste.

Reviews

A truly enlightening talk and meditation.
You are a master of communicating the intricacies of the human condition - realistic, with common sense, so helpful, Authentic, so much wisdom. I see things differently now ☺️
🙏🙏🙏

This is one of my favorite talks on insight timer. I keep it bookmarked so I can find it again and again. Thank you for sharing the truth.