Hey,
Insight Timer Meditators,
This is David Gandelman.
I am here with my co-host,
Cody Edner,
And welcome to another episode of the Energy Matters Podcast.
Today,
We are going to be tackling letting go of stress and anxiety.
It's a big topic for most of us on some level or another.
Before we get into it,
If you want to hear all the episodes of the Energy Matters Podcast,
You can go to energymatterspodcast.
Com.
Because we have some episodes that are not meditation relevant,
So we don't post them here.
But for the rest that are,
You can find them on Insight Timer.
So let's jump into it,
Letting go of stress and anxiety.
Many of us come to meditation to release stress and anxiety.
In fact,
Over 40 million Americans suffer from some form of anxiety disorder.
I know that because I recently taught a workshop about it and I Googled it.
I was like,
How many people suffer from anxiety in America?
40 million.
40 million.
So Cody and I decided we wanted to do an episode on some strategies and some tools on dealing with stress and anxiety.
And there's a difference between the two.
We equate them.
But I don't know about you,
Cody,
But what I've noticed is too much stress over time can lead to anxiety,
This perpetual feeling of like there's some doom around every corner.
Often people will feel it,
I'll feel it like on the chest,
This vibration of,
Oh,
Something's quite not right.
If you put too much pressure on yourself or people are putting pressure on you over time,
That can lead to stress and or anxiety.
So we were scrolling through,
I just taught this course on insight,
Time,
And letting go of attachment.
Cody and I were scrolling through a lot of the questions and many of them were around,
How do I deal with looping thoughts?
How do I deal with looping thoughts that create stress and anxiety?
So we thought we would address it.
And when we sit down to meditate,
It's not usual.
Normally what happens is we close our eyes and it's not like just rainbows and flowers and bliss.
That would be wonderful.
But often we'll close our eyes and we'll feel frustration,
We'll feel resentment,
Maybe a little bit of stuckness,
Confusion,
Anxiety.
So how do we deal with those energies as we start to meditate?
I don't know about you,
Cody,
But for me,
One of the strategies is I'll just sit as I close my eyes and I recognize those energies,
I start to see how neutral am I to those energies or how much are those stories kind of taking me for a loop?
When we get these stories,
They come around almost like a carousel,
You jump on and then you just go around for a while.
One of the questions that we got or I got on this course was,
Well,
It was a comment first and the gentleman said,
I'm creating loops around how to try and stop creating mental loops and I think it was causing him some anxiety.
So first what I like to do is recognize,
Oh,
There's an energy here.
I'm experiencing it.
It's some form of anxiety or stress.
Great.
Where is it?
Oh,
It's in my chest.
It's in my stomach.
It's in my head.
And start to just get neutral and accept that you feel how you feel,
Right?
Can't get around how we feel.
I think a lot of people that start to meditate to try to get around how they feel,
Get over how they feel,
Get through how they feel,
Go under it.
But before you do any of that,
You have to just be with how you actually feel.
What about you,
Cody?
What's your strategy when you start with some of these energies?
It's very similar to that.
And I like that question and that comment that gentleman had where he's kind of creating loops around getting out of loops,
Which is kind of similar to when we think of stress and anxiety is sometimes I start to create anxiety about having anxiety or the idea that you know something in the future generates a little bit of anxiety and then I create more around that.
So how do I start to get out of that spiraling energy where the idea of stress creates stress or the idea of anxiety creates more anxiety?
And I do a similar thing.
It's starting to,
As you go inward to meditate,
Not having it be a goal-oriented meditation where I'm trying to push myself beyond that thing,
But a meditation of starting to realize that partly I'm in anxiety or stress because I am already subconsciously pushing myself beyond some limit.
And so I always approach a meditation as the time to step back and inward.
And that may be my first few minutes of meditation is really looking at what are those things that I have anxiety around and stepping back from them.
Not even trying to solve them or address them,
But in a way what I would call create inner space relative to them.
And so as a mental idea,
That's like stepping back from the problem,
Stepping back from the pressure,
Stepping back from the project.
And I could do that for quite a little time in meditation,
And that will start to relieve a certain degree of the pressure of it.
And once I get back beyond the pressure of it,
Like you were saying,
Then I can really check in and say,
Well,
What am I really feeling and where am I really feeling?
Sometimes the feeling of anxiety or stress,
That's kind of the secondary thing behind that is something.
Sometimes it's a fear of failure,
Sometimes it's overwhelm,
Sometimes it's a judgment.
So there's always something behind that dread or that anxiety or that stress.
And in meditation is the place where we can get to that deeper sense of what is there so that we can actually address it.
Yeah.
So first there's recognizing the energy,
Then there's being able to understand what it is and letting it go.
Right.
And what I found is you can't force yourself to let something go.
It's not a doing,
It's almost like a stopping of doing with a level of acceptance.
So in traditional meditation styles,
And if you're listening to this,
You may have tried many different kinds of meditations.
In very traditional styles,
You would sit,
Close your eyes and just observe.
You observe your breath,
You observe your body,
You observe your thoughts,
You observe whatever else is going on in the room,
Even the space that you're taking up.
And so you just observe.
So if we just start to observe the quality of the stress or the anxiety first,
That'll really take us somewhere.
So you might go,
Oh,
It's coarse,
It's dense,
It's vibrating quickly.
I can really start to sense it.
The more you sense it,
The more you'll get insight into it.
It's like we look into it without getting lost to it.
You have to look into it without getting lost to it.
That's one of the keys.
And then you have to start to give yourself a little latitude around how you feel.
It's okay to feel stressed or anxious or any other feeling.
If you have this self-defeating,
Invalidating attitude,
Then you're not going to get very far because that's what it actually feeds off of.
Anxiety feeds off of fear,
Off of weakness,
Off of doubt.
Stress feeds off of this need to know what's going to happen in the future.
Our bodies maybe eat food,
Like matter,
But our loops tend to feed off of some negativity that we can generate by believing those loops.
So you have to stop believing them first,
See them as what they are,
Just energy,
Back up,
And then see what happens next.
Yeah,
And very often when we're caught in a loop and we're just in the place of feeling or experiencing the anxiety or experiencing the stress,
We're really being that thing.
And in meditation,
It's the place where we can start to bring awareness into what we're being.
And just the awareness,
The conscious awareness,
I mean,
I already feel it.
So it's not like I'm not aware.
There's a different kind of awareness that emerges in meditation that begins to create space from whatever it is that we're experiencing.
In that space is where you start to get those insights about what is the cause or what's behind that loop,
If it's a loop.
Sometimes it's a little subtler than that where it's not in a mental loop,
But it's just in some physical aspect of our feeling in our body,
And we can start to see what is behind it on that level as well.
But it is this thing of stepping back into a place of observing awareness versus battling with the experience as if it's something to get rid of,
Versus something to acknowledge and understand that if you're feeling stress or anxiety,
It's because there is something there.
There is something there.
It doesn't mean that that thing that's there is a truth.
I could be in a lie that I'm not good enough,
And so I start to work myself into anxiety.
But I have to find that thing that's there to release it then,
Or to process through it and kind of change it in some way.
Yeah.
I like to look at loops like a solar system of sorts,
Or maybe actually let's say it looks like an asteroid belt kind of orbiting a planet.
So what you're focusing on is all this debris,
Right?
That's all you can see because you're looking from the outside in.
There's this debris of invalidation of,
I don't have enough time,
Of I'm not good enough,
Of things aren't going to work out.
So there's all of these different asteroids,
Different densities and sizes.
Maybe that invalidation one is really big,
Or there's not enough time one.
There's maybe like a thousand little ones of those.
And so there's this thing.
What we don't realize is there's this thing in the middle that creates gravity.
So things that have a lot of mass create more gravity,
Right?
So planet Earth has a lot of gravity to it because it's big.
And so the bigger the problem is or issue,
Whatever you want to call it,
Challenge,
Or maybe it's a chunk of old pain,
It'll have more gravity to it and things just start to stick to it and orbit around it.
So for example,
If you had parents who were very stressed and anxious growing up as a child and that created some pain inside of you where you couldn't just be in the moment and enjoy life,
Then maybe now as an adult,
Whenever you come into those situations,
That kind of ball of pain is there.
And then the stress and the anxiety and all the other images and energies,
They start to circle around it.
And all you're experiencing are the thoughts that go with it.
So you come to a meditation app,
You come to listen to one of our podcasts and you go,
This thing is leaping around and it has to do with my job.
And I have this project next week or this relationship that hasn't been working.
But what I would say is looking deeper,
Maybe it has to do with that on the outside,
But there's some kind of pattern,
Maybe some pain,
Some thing that's creating the gravity deeper than what those pictures are,
Deeper than what the story is.
And you have to get to that to be able to truly release yourself from that loop.
If you don't get to that,
You'll just keep creating more loops.
You ever,
Cody,
Have any of those friends who always come to you with a new problem and no matter how much you try to help them or solve it,
They'll just bring the next one and the next and the next,
Right?
Because it's just,
They're not really getting to the core of what's creating those loops.
So that was a very long form of way of saying,
You might have an asteroid belt around you.
Yeah,
And in that loop,
There is a pattern and we have to see that pattern because oftentimes the,
It's like a little movie or a play,
The characters can be interchangeable,
But the structure is what creates the anxiety.
So maybe there's a pattern around anxiety about the future and it doesn't matter whether it's job or relationship,
It's when you start to look at the future,
There's a series of considerations or fears that start to run about that future.
And so you solve,
If that's the loop and you solve,
So I solve my job thing and now I'm stable,
But now the relationship is creating anxiety.
And I solve that,
But now my health is creating anxiety.
Well,
That's because it's not that thing that you're focused on that's actually creating the anxiety.
It's this mental pattern that you're running,
This loop that generates anxiety about anything you look at that's out in your future.
So how do we get to those deeper patterns and you can call it deprogram them or repattern that mental pathway and meditation I think is the best way to do that in my estimation.
And the deeper the energy,
The more you're going to have to meditate,
Right?
Sometimes,
Maybe,
Maybe not,
But I would say a general rule would be if you're going for something deep in there,
You're not going to get to it in five minutes by just maybe watching your breath,
Right?
Just like if we want to master anything in life,
We have to put in the time and energy,
Whether you want to be a concert pianist or a painter or you want to be a politician or a business person or a great mother or father,
It doesn't matter.
You have to put time and energy into it.
The same goes for mastering yourself.
So if you feel like you have some of those deeper patterns,
Some issues you haven't fully resolved that's affecting your behavior and the way you think,
You might have to go inwards for a long time and really work through it.
And not to say that meditation is the only solution or even the best solution,
And there are many,
But it's the one Cody and I focus on and teach.
So yeah,
If you're going for those deeper layers of gravitational pull inside of you that create the loops,
Try sitting a little bit longer,
Maybe even twice as long,
And just observing how you feel and start peeling some of those layers and just asking that simple question of what's really underneath this loop?
It's not the story.
It's not what I think it is.
What's the energy behind the story?
Is it invalidation?
Is it feeling like I'm not getting enough love?
Is it a feeling of despondency that there's no purpose?
Go deeper,
See what it's really about.
And when you get to that place and you're able to forgive yourself for it,
Overcome it,
Heal it,
Then it'll start to open and that loop will naturally dissolve on its own.
So don't turn the loop that's about a problem into another problem.
Turn it into an opportunity to explore what's going on inside you.
That's good.
Well,
On that note,
We're actually out of time for today.
We're going to do a shorter episode and just wanted to give you guys a little bit of an inoculation of inspiration around being able to get through this because so many folks have asked about it and it's such a common issue.
And we're going to finish with a really funny joke.
As I was reading through the comments of my Insight Timer course,
I didn't even realize and I was reading it out loud to Cody and one of them said,
Have you ever had an ex,
An ex partner seem so intertwined in your life that you open your favorite meditation app and see their face?
I thought,
Oh,
What a weird question.
And then I realized I was an ex partner of mine.
Just to mess with me,
We're on very good terms and she doesn't like to listen to some of the meditations.
But I saw that and I was reading it and I was like,
Oh,
What is happening right now?
On that note,
We hope you guys enjoy yourselves.
Keep meditating and we'll see you next time.
Again,
Energymatterspodcast.
Com.
All the episodes are there.
Be well.
Hopefully you can release some anxiety and stress,
Enjoy yourself and really enjoy life because that's why we're here.
Take care.
Bye everybody.
