Anxiety Happens, page 10
Leaves on a Stream
Center yourself on your breath as you’ve done before. Just notice the gentle rising and falling of your breath in your chest and belly. There’s no need to control your breathing––simply let the breath breathe itself. Allow your eyes to close gently.
Then, after a few moments, imagine that you’re sitting next to a small stream on a warm autumn day. As you watch the stream, you notice large leaves of all colors, shapes, and sizes drifting along, each at its own pace, one by one, in the slowly moving current. Allow yourself to simply be there for a moment, watching.
When you’re ready, bring your awareness to what’s going on inside you. As you do, gently notice and label each experience that shows up—thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and impulses. Perhaps one of those thoughts is “I don’t have time for this.”
Then, one by one, place each part of your experience on a large leaf passing by. Observe as each leaf comes closer to you. Then watch as it slowly moves away, drifting along as it carries the contents of your mind out of sight downstream. Return to gazing at the stream, waiting for the next leaf to float by. Continue placing each thought, feeling, memory, or impulse on its own large leaf. Watch each one as you let it just float away downstream.
When you’re ready, widen your attention to take in the sounds around you. Open your eyes and make the intention to bring gentle allowing and self-acceptance into the rest of your day.
Practice the Leaves on a Stream exercise as often as you can for a couple of weeks. As you get better at it, you can start practicing it during real-life experiences with your eyes open. You can also mix things up a bit by taking the perspective of the stream, just as you took the perspective of the chessboard in the To Play or Watch the Game? exercise in Chapter 26. Being the stream, you hold each of the leaves and notice the thought, feeling, sensation, desire, or impulse that each leaf carries as it floats by. Just let them go by and do what they do until they are eventually carried out of sight. And notice how you’re learning to be an observer of your experience.
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Take Good Care
Many of us have old wounds from losses, unfair treatment by others, and, for some, devastating abuse. When painful feelings, images, and memories come up, our first instinctual response often is to push them away. If you catch yourself doing that, please stop. This is a golden opportunity to embrace old hurts with compassion and acceptance.
Why should you do this? People who have been hurt continue to inflict pain on themselves and others because they haven’t allowed their wounds to heal. If you don’t take care of your wounds, you may pass your pain on to your children, spouse, friends, colleagues, and other people in your life. Hurt can be recycled many times.
To break free from this pattern, you’ll have to learn how to take good care of yourself. You do this in the same way you would if you were sick, physically ill, or injured. At those times, you’d probably stop what you were doing and attend to the injury in a kind way. You can do the same with your open anxiety wounds.
Embracing anxiety with compassion is the salve that will help you heal any old wounds that you carry around with you. Compassion teaches us to care for our mind and emotions in the same way as we care for our physical body—with kindness. That’s what embracing anxiety with compassion means. You learn to stop being so hard on yourself.
Next is a beautiful exercise that helps you practice self-compassion to take care of your anxieties and fears, or any other form of emotional upset.
Healing Hands
Think back to when you were a little child and to a time when you were really sick with a high fever, the flu, or cold symptoms. Notice how you felt really bad. Some adult in your life probably gave you some medicine, and that may have helped a bit. But it was nothing like having your mom or someone else who cared for you there. Reflect on what it felt like when this special person was at your side and put a hand on your forehead. That felt so good!
To you, that hand was like the hand of the divine. This person’s hand—or touch—radiated freshness, love, and compassion, and those healing qualities penetrated into your body, your very being. And, for a moment, you felt better. The hand of this special person from your past is still very much alive in your own hand. Let’s see what that may be like for you.
Right now, go ahead and close your eyes. Think of a special person or caregiver in your life. And then imagine this person’s hand touching you when you were young and sick. Now, touch your forehead or your chest with your hand and see that this caregiver’s loving touch is still there. Allow the energy of this special person’s loving and tender touch to radiate through your hand and into you. Bring that quality of tenderness to your entire experience.
You can do this exercise by bringing to mind anyone who left you feeling good, loved, and cared for. The kindness of this caring person’s hand is alive in yours. And you can give that kindness to yourself, right now and anytime, anywhere.
You can take care of yourself, your anxieties, and your wounds by giving yourself loving-kindness. You don’t need to rely on other people to do that for you.
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Reclaim Your Power
The word “forgiveness” often conjures up a good deal of misunderstanding and confusion. But its essence means nothing more than letting go of a painful past so that you can heal and move on! That’s it. And you forgive not to forget, condone, or ignore past wrongs. You forgive because not forgiving virtually guarantees that you’ll remain stuck, forever the victim, wanting and waiting for a resolution that may never come. Holding on to past hurts ultimately hurts you, you, you! This is why it needs to stop.
Studies teach us that the willingness to forgive improves health—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Those who learn this important skill report less hurt, stress, anger, depression, and illness. And they get a boost to their energy, hope, optimism, compassion, love, and sense of well-being.
Beyond these benefits, letting go will give you the space to move forward with your life. No longer a prisoner of the injustices of your past, you can chart a new direction for yourself. From this point forward, you decide to let go of the old stories and attachments to the past and feelings of shame, anger, regret, and pain. You decide how you wish to move forward to create the life you want to have right now.
Forgive to LIVE
Take a moment to reflect on a past situation or event that continues to leave you feeling angry, hurt, resentful, bitter, and demanding justice. Then, when you’re ready, close your eyes and bring the event to mind. What happened? Who did the wrong—you or someone else? How were you or others hurt? What didn’t you get then that you are longing for now? Allow yourself several minutes with these questions.
Step 1: awareness. Become aware of the pain you feel about that past event. Allow yourself to experience it as it is. Where does it hurt now? See if you can face it squarely. What does it feel like? What does it look like? Notice your mind linking your pain with judgment, blame, and negative evaluations.
Step 2: separation. Use your observer self to separate the judgment from the pain you’re having now. Notice judgment as judgment, blame as blame, and bitterness as bitterness, without engagement. Simply watch and create space between what the mind tells you and your felt experience.
Step 3: compassionate witness. See if you can step back even further, as if you’re watching this event play out on a giant movie screen. Imagine being in the audience, simply watching, as though you’re someone seeing this drama unfold for the first time. See if you can open up your heart to be a compassionate witness to the actors in this scene. See who’s doing the hurting. See who’s receiving the hurt. See who’s responsible for doing the hurting. See the person responsible for the felt pain, then and now.
Step 4: letting go and moving on. Now kindly ask yourself this: Who’s in control over the resentment you feel now? Who’s getting hurt, right now, by your holding on to the memory of the past wrong? Who has the power to let go and move on? The answer is you. You can let go of holding on to the wish and hope for a resolution. You can take the energy and effort focused on resolving, fighting back, or getting even and put it to better use. You can bring kindness to your experience by facing your pain squarely for what it is. Own it because it is yours, and then choose to let it go.
If you’re willing to let the resentment and rage go, then do that. If you’re having trouble doing that, then think about who’s getting hurt when you hold on to it. Is it you, or the person who once wronged you? Imagine what you’d do with your mental time and energy if you were no longer consumed by resentment and recycled rage. What would you think about instead? What would you feel? What would you do? Take time with this.
Remember, this practice is for you, not for people or circumstances that once hurt you!
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The Gift of Gratitude
Imagine there was one simple quality you could use to cultivate inner peace and genuine happiness. Wouldn’t that be something? Well, there is one. It’s called gratitude.
Science teaches us that the practice of being grateful for what we have has enormous benefits. It improves health. Relationships. Well-being. Even sleep. It improves our emotions too, allowing us to feel more positive feelings and to bounce back from stress and difficulty. It can also give a powerful boost to self-esteem. So people who practice gratitude on a daily basis end up happier and healthier, and they live longer than those who focus on what they don’t have, or are missing.
But don’t expect to notice dramatic changes overnight. Cultivating gratitude is a skill and requires time and practice. To reap the full benefits of gratitude, it’s best to commit to it on a daily basis. The good news is, you have everything you need to start right now. In fact, we know from research that keeping a gratitude journal for just five minutes a day can boost your happiness by about 10 percent. A study in the journal Emotion also showed that this is about the same boost in happiness you’d get if your salary just doubled. That’s pretty impressive.
The next journaling exercise will help you build gratitude into your daily life.
Gratitude Journal
For the next two weeks, keep a gratitude journal. Before going to bed, take a moment to reflect on the day, and then write down up to five things for which you feel grateful. The physical record is important—don’t just do this exercise in your head. The things you list can seem relatively trivial (“The tasty sandwich I had for lunch today” or “Having toilet paper in the bathroom”) or quite significant (“My sister gave birth to a healthy baby boy” or “I was able to do something that’s important to me even when I felt anxious”).
The goal of the exercise is to recognize an event, experience, person, or thing in your life that you can be grateful for—then enjoy the good emotions that come with it. See the good things in your life as “gifts” rather than taking them for granted. Some of the things you realize you are grateful for may surprise you—savor these! Allow yourself ten to fifteen minutes to do this each day for at least two weeks.
There are only three guidelines to follow here.
Be specific. This is the key to fostering gratitude. Writing “I am grateful that my partner brought me soup when I was sick today” is better than “I am grateful for my husband.”
No duplication, at least for two weeks. Each day you must look for some new things to be grateful for. It can be as simple as being grateful for that cup of coffee at breakfast, having soap to wash with, or making time to meditate.
Pause and reflect. Before you wrap up your daily entry, pause and reflect on what you’ve just written down. See if you can connect with your heart and with a deeper sense of appreciation for what you have.
You can certainly keep journaling well beyond two weeks if you’d like to. But eventually you’ll want to consciously practice appreciation and gratitude in the moment, wherever you find yourself during your day. As you do, be specific about what you have to be grateful for in your life. Sink into the sweetness of that.
The ultimate purpose of the journaling is to heighten your conscious awareness of what you have to be grateful for. If you start paying attention to all these glimpses of gratitude that your heart shows you, you’ll notice them more often and more clearly.
Gratitude is also closely related to happiness. If you experience, and sometimes also express, your gratitude, you will feel happier. More gratitude equals more happiness, and here we mean more than happiness “the feeling.” We’re talking about a deeper and more lasting sense of contentment and joy. So if you want to experience greater genuine happiness in your life, then becoming more grateful for what you have is an easy and effective way to start.
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Paying It Forward
Every time you perform a kind act for others, you stand to get a boost yourself. Studies are clear on this point. People who get into the habit of performing kind actions, large and small, are happier and healthier. And it’s not that they’re happier people to begin with, which might explain why they’re so giving. It turns out that the very act of performing an act of kindness leaves us feeling good. When we give, we get a sense of satisfaction and pleasure. You’ve probably heard it said, “If you want to be happy, make other people happy.” Kindness and compassion not only produce greater happiness, but they also loop back to give us a sense of deeper purpose and connection to others.
Kindness has many other benefits. When you are feeling disempowered, even trapped in anxiety and fear, the very act of doing something kind for others can leave you feeling empowered. In times of weakness, acts of kindness are really acts of strength.
But don’t be kind just to get something from someone else in return. This is not about getting accolades, appreciation, or gushing thanks from other people. You do a kindness “just because”—say, because it’s good for you to do it, or it’s something only you can do. But when you give kindness expecting to get something in return, you will often end up disappointed.
When you practice kindness “just because,” you break free from expectation and can sink into the goodness of what you and you alone can do. This, in turn, can often create a ripple effect. When you act kindly toward others, including yourself, the act pays itself forward: other people are more likely to act in kind ways too.
Practicing kindness toward others, let alone toward ourselves, does not come easily for many. Doing so may even feel contrived at first. But don’t let that stop you. The next exercise will help you to build this life-affirming practice into your daily life.
Practice Acts of Kindness
Start by making an intention to act kindly toward yourself and toward others. You don’t need to wait to feel peaceful and loving before you decide to act in a kind and loving way. You can just do it regardless of what and how you feel. Here are some ways to get started.
Practice saying “Please,” “Thank you,” and “You’re welcome” more often. You might open a door for someone, offer a helping hand, extend a smile to a stranger, or let a driver merge into traffic. Give a hug or a kiss to a loved one. Show understanding, compassion, and forgiveness when you feel hurt and get the urge to strike back.
Look for moments when you can share what you have—talents, interests, time, resources, a meal.
Watch for times when you can show care and moments when you can offer gratitude or extend warmth.
Look for times when you can offer hope, love, or a helping hand. Do this when you’d rather shut down, tune out, or explode.
With practice, acts of kindness will become automatic and leave you with a deepening sense of peace, love, and trust. Regardless of the target or the outcome, kindness is fundamentally about you! Nurture it. Develop it. Make it the core of your being and how you choose to live. Pay kindness forward, and it will loop back to you in positive ways.
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Taking the Reins
We are each the master of our own destiny. Nobody else can create your life for you. Blaming others or your anxiety for keeping you stuck won’t help you either. You have to decide that enough is enough. There is no undoing your past or making it go away. So ask yourself how you want to live your life from this moment forward. To be successful, you’ll need to be clear about where you have a voice and a choice.
Life is about choices—and you have full responsibility for the choices you make. Coming to terms with this can feel both sobering and liberating. However, deep down you know that you cannot choose whether or not to feel panic, anxiety, or worry. If anxiety were a choice, then nobody would choose to feel it.
With LIVE the choice is to practice a more inviting and welcoming relationship with your anxiety. Instead of choosing to treat it as an enemy, you can learn to treat it as a friend. This doesn’t mean that you like everything about anxiety, any more than you like everything about a friend, partner, or family member. But you have a good deal of say in how you choose to respond to your emotional upset and pain when you feel it—and what you do with it.
Making Different Choices
Let’s take a look at some specific situations in which you have the power to choose what you do when your anxieties and fears show up:
I can observe what my mind says without further action, rather than doing what my mind says.
I can meet my anxieties with compassion and allow them to be there, rather than struggling with them or trying to make them go away.
I can observe what my body does, rather than listening to what my mind tells me about what my body does.
