Anxiety is a big topic of conversation at the moment.
You'll find plenty of tools and techniques out there to help you work through it.
But I'd like to take a more macro view today.
I'd like to explore with you what anxiety is made of and why you don't need to worry about it.
First,
I want to call something out that I hear almost without exception when people are talking about feeling anxious.
We personalize anxiety.
We claim it as our own.
We call it my anxiety.
We make it more real by talking about it and acting as if it were an object that we could pick up and package.
Here you go sir,
Here's your anxiety.
Would you like it gift wrapped?
We act as if there's a thing called anxiety that exists in the world rather than just in thought.
And yes,
Those thoughts come with feelings attached.
That's what makes us think it's real and it's serious.
We focus on the feeling.
We label it anxiety.
We make it wrong and undesirable and we look for ways to get rid of it not realizing that we're feeding it the more we focus on it.
We are giving energy to the symptoms rather than understanding the cause.
And the cause is not what you might think it is.
Flying,
Public speaking,
Having to go to school tomorrow,
How to pay the bills next month.
The cause is thought,
Not the circumstances of your world.
Thought is the flavor of your life.
It's the paintbrush of your experience.
You don't get to experience anything without thought.
Call it consciousness,
Call it awareness.
All of those are synonymous in my understanding of life.
If you were thinking differently or the light of consciousness was shining on something different in your awareness different feelings would be arising.
That's how we work.
And that is so fundamentally important that understanding it can change your life.
When we don't understand how we work the way we feel stops us doing things we want to do because it seems as if it were a real block something dangerous rather than an illusion made of thought wispy bits of nothing that we could just walk straight through like a cloud.
And I get that it's uncomfortable and sometimes to the point of a panic attack but the strength of your feeling isn't a signal about the seriousness of the situation.
It's a signal about how far out of alignment your thinking is in the moment.
But the great thing is the more you question what it's telling you the more you'll interrupt the thought patterns that give rise to these feelings and the more free you'll feel just to carry on and do the things you want to do regardless of the feelings that are arising in any moment.
What we call anxiety is a completely natural and normal response to anxious flavoured thinking.
I'm not promising that you can live an anxiety free life.
That's not how humans work.
We are amazing creatures with the capacity to imagine the future and to either feel joy and wonder about what we've imagined or to get freaked out about what we've imagined.
And given our evolution and our inbuilt survival mechanisms we have a strong tendency to imagine the worst.
And I don't think that's going to change,
But that's okay.
Whatever you're imagining,
It's not real.
Your future is not going to look and feel like the one you've imagined.
I can guarantee that because you and I don't have a crystal ball.
So whatever you're imagining,
It's definitely an illusion.
And knowing that it's all made up has logical implications.
It makes it much more logical not to care so much about how you feel in any moment.
Not to worry about it,
Not to be scared of it.
You can experience your feelings without them overtaking you.
And when you stop being scared of how you feel or how you might feel in the future suddenly you're not so focused on it and it naturally loses a big chunk of its power.
There are two aspects to this.
Number one,
How you feel can't hurt you.
There's an analogy I heard of a little girl being asked to make something with Play-Doh that would fit inside a small pot.
She uses Play-Doh that's all red and her creation is spilling over the sides of the pot.
And when asked what it is,
The little girl says,
It's my anxiety,
It's spilling out everywhere,
It won't even stay in the pot.
And the teacher pauses and crouches down beside the little girl and says,
But how's the pot?
And the little girl's silent for a moment and she says,
The pot's fine.
It's fine.
It's me,
Isn't it?
I'm the pot.
Yes,
You're the pot.
The second aspect is an implication of the first.
When you know in your bones that you're okay no matter how you feel,
That is,
You're the pot,
Not the Play-Doh,
What does it matter how you feel?
You can just get on with your life knowing that the feeling will change when it changes,
When the light of consciousness shines in a different direction and that you can do the things you want to do regardless of when that change will happen.
I explore this more in my course on Insight Timer,
Secrets of Serenity,
But with what I've just shared here,
If you get a glimpse of it,
This can change your life.
Feel free to listen more than once.
Sometimes things land in new and fresh ways when we're least expecting it.
Take care and enjoy the rest of your day.
