I would like to talk today about anxiety.
I feel like anxiety has become an issue for many of us that we talk about and that we wonder about and that we work hard to solve and I know that I've experienced anxiety in my life at different points and different times and so I thought it would be interesting to explore what are the spiritual principles that we could utilize if we start to feel anxious.
Let's talk briefly about where anxiety comes from first.
I think anxiety emerges from a number of places and in the time that we have I can only cover a few of those because one could argue that there are many many sources and places through which anxiety can emerge but the main ones that I am aware of today include our nervous system,
How we've lived our life and often gone through experiences that have created what we might call triggers,
Emotionally,
Physically,
Mental triggers,
Things that happened that we felt unsafe or we felt afraid or we felt traumatized by and when our nervous system contemplates those or experiences something similar we can experience anxiety from that.
We also can experience the anxiety of past experiences in our nervous system because it's always seeking to resolve itself and so in many respects there can be anxiety that is calling to us like hey are you ready to heal this now?
Are you ready to smooth this out?
Are you ready to solve this now?
And so it can come from the nervous system.
It can show up for us from the pressures that we feel.
We might feel overwhelmed by our life.
Many experiences in life can add to or create new anxiety,
Right?
We can feel anxious because of a health experience,
Anxious because we're a new parent or anxious because our kids or some family member is going through some challenge and we're walking with them and we're worried about that.
We can be anxious about money.
We can be anxious about what's going on in our life in work and stress related.
So our world of form and what's happening around us can promote us to look at it and say I don't know what I'm gonna do here.
I'm not sure how I'm gonna handle that.
I'm not sure how that's gonna work out and so we feel more anxious than usual possibly.
We can also experience what I would call internal energies.
There's some research that indicates that some of us have a genetic predisposition to certain mental health statuses where the way that our brain works or the way that things fire off in our chemistry is prone towards creating anxiety and we are not as we talk about spiritual solutions in any way shape or form wanting to be in denial of any of that.
And lastly I would say one spiritual reason that we might experience more anxiety is this whole oneness thing we talk about how we're all connected.
That's awesome isn't it?
It's a an amazing thing and it's very soft and sweet and we can hold hands and sing kumbaya.
However have you noticed that sometimes people we're one with all over the planet are struggling.
They're struggling to find homes or to eat or to care for their families.
They're experiencing war,
Genocides.
They're experiencing all sorts of things that when we hear about them in the news and even if we don't hear about them or know about them because of the oneness that we share we I think can sometimes just feel the angst of the human condition and at a time where we're watching another country in the midst of a change in leadership or if we're here in our country contemplating the leadership of our country in an election time I've noticed anxiety just goes up and up and up.
So these are just some of the causes that can happen and I think one of the first things we get to realize about this is that there are spiritual solutions that can come to bear that can support us in meeting our anxiety and learning to quell it.
It's not about learning to bury it.
It's not about learning to push it away or to make it wrong.
It's about using the energy as it rises up in us to support us.
So I would say and we talk about this a lot at Mile High Church that the first strategy for quelling our anxiety becomes honestly having a spiritual practice.
Now here's the deal.
It's about taking time every day to breathe and relax the physical body,
The body temple.
It's about noticing what's going on inside and even making note of it.
Writing it down or journaling about it even in the spiritual practice.
It's about connecting to a deeper aspect of us that is wiser and that can bring creative solutions and it's about doing it no matter what.
And here's the thing.
Doing it no matter what allows us to access that state of being when we need to.
I see this much like martial arts.
My husband Ken is a martial artist and I love shows about martial arts and have studied some of the martial artists in the world and and I'm a big fan of Cobra Kai which is the continuation of the Karate Kid show.
But here's what I notice about this.
Martial arts in its practice is often about doing things that don't seem to make a lot of sense.
Doing movements,
Doing repeated movements,
Doing forms,
Doing kicks where you're not touching anyone or doing anything,
Doing spiritual practice to strengthen the interior part of us.
And the theory behind that is that when you need to have those moves either to defend yourself or to deal with something that comes up,
You have them because you've practiced every day.
You've practiced when you don't want to.
You've practiced when it wasn't convenient.
You've practiced in a disciplined way and you know the way to the skills.
And sometimes I think the biggest challenge for those of us who experience anxiety is we let the anxiety take over and we feel because we haven't practiced calming ourselves.
We haven't practiced centered breathing.
We haven't practiced going into that inner state enough that it is someplace that we can access immediately.
And so we go there.
And I think another spiritual solution that we need to bring to bear is to allow ourselves to get help for our anxiety.
To let other people pray for us.
To have people we can talk to.
To have solutions depending on where that anxiety is emerging from.
All those places that I outlined to get a remedy or a pill or to seek out a therapeutic experience.
Sometimes we spiritual people are resistant to that stuff because we think that's giving up.
But here's the deal.
We believe in our teaching that everything is God.
And Ernest Holmes,
Our founder,
Said very clearly that we practice a prayer and a pill.
It's God-informed.
If you have some remedy or pill that you take that helps you manage your anxiety,
Every time you take it,
Do so reverently,
Clearly.
See it as a part of your practice that helps you be in a state of peace and well-being.
This is spiritual too.
In fact,
There's nothing,
No process,
No procedure,
No pill,
No thing that is not spiritual in nature.
And if your inner voice calls you to it,
By all means,
Utilize it.
