Settle in,
Let the body organize into a posture that allows you to be very awake,
But also relax.
Feel the ground beneath you,
The support of the ground beneath you.
Let the spine be straight,
The breath drop into the belly.
Stay with this for a moment,
Deep belly breathing.
There's a certain stillness,
Peace in the body that just is for no reason.
The body and expression of nature knows how to rest.
From this place of stillness,
Of rest,
Go back in your mind 10 years,
Call up where you were in life 10 years ago and recall what was a question,
Something you didn't know the answer to at the time that you really wanted to know the answer to,
Something in your life,
An uncertainty.
Go back to that time.
Where were you in the world?
Where did you live?
Who were you with?
How did you feel in the body at that time?
What were the feelings present in your heart,
The thoughts in your mind?
Life was rich then as it is now,
But I want you to focus on 10 years ago,
Anything that was making you anxious,
Something you didn't know about,
What was uncertain in your future at the time.
That's it.
Call it up in the body.
Remember what that felt like.
You don't have to interpret it,
You don't have to understand the sensation,
Just using your memory,
Your capacity to visualize,
Call up a flavor of that anxiety,
That uncertainty in the body as it lived in you 10 years ago.
Reacquaint yourself with that embodied experience.
Presumably,
10 years later,
Right now,
You know a little more about that question than you did 10 years ago.
Maybe not.
If not,
Stay with the uncertainty,
Stay with the anxiety,
The unknowing,
By all means.
But if you did live into the answer to that question,
Feel the way in this moment that that peace,
That knowing has already given rise to a new question,
A new inquiry,
A new source of uncertainty,
A seemingly new source of uncertainty.
In other words,
What is it now in your life,
Right now,
What don't you know that you would love to know,
And if you just knew it,
You'd tell yourself that you would finally stop being anxious and you could relax and you could make a few plans.
Pick one thing,
It might be many things,
Pick one.
Pick the one that makes you the most anxious in this moment.
You don't know,
But you tell yourself you need to know,
If only I knew.
And now,
I want you to drop the content,
Drop the story,
Quit pretending like this thing you don't know the answer to is actually the source of your anxiety.
Quit telling yourself that you're only anxious because of this one thing and just be anxious for no reason.
Anxious not in a pathological sense,
Anxious in the way of open,
Unknowing excitement.
Anxious in the sense that as we start to be more honest about how radically open reality is,
We realize we have no idea what's happening on so many levels,
And that freaks the mind out,
It freaks the personality out.
So we race to come up with plans,
Contingencies,
What can we control.
Don't do it,
Stay open,
Relax in the body and feel this aliveness,
Exposed to the radically open nature of reality.
Stay here,
Maybe even try doing it with a half smile,
Of course the mind is going to find problems,
But at the level of naked,
Raw sensation,
Is there any evidence of a problem in this moment?
Sure,
It would be nice to know when the pandemic is finally over.
Sure,
It would be nice to know if I should invest in real estate,
Or wait another couple years,
Or whatever else.
Sit as don't know,
Can't know,
And feel how stable you actually are here,
And the ground of being itself,
Whatever you actually need to know will be provided in the moment.
Any sense of anxiety,
Just evidence that you are alive,
And increasingly embracing of the open nature of reality.
