Anxiety Happens, page 6
Next, bring your attention to the physical experience of the urge to act. Notice the wild energy there, as the pounding rain tries to wash away your resolve and all that you care about. Is there pressure, tightness, or tension? If so, where is it located? Does it have a shape? A color?
Now, choose to ride out the storm. Imagine opening up, arms wide open, and staying with the wild energy below the surface of your experience. If you can, go ahead and open your arms as wide as you can. Open up to your experience without trying to fix it, fight it, or suppress it, and without acting on it. Just stay there, your arms still wide open, bringing understanding and kindness to the energy and discomfort, as you would do for a dear friend or loved one who is in pain and needs your help.
Notice as the storm front within you eventually starts to move on. Notice as things begin to quiet down and become still. And, as you rest in that stillness, notice what’s new or different for you. See if you can connect with having done something good for yourself, for your life—even if you were scared, feeling the strong urge to run or lash out.
As this time for practice comes to an end, acknowledge and honor the step you took with this exercise, and commit to practicing riding out your difficult urges in the service of living the life you want.
This exercise teaches you that anxiety and fear come and go of their own accord. Often, there’s no healthy way to control your emotional weather. But you can always choose how you respond to it. Each storm is an opportunity to practice being open, mindful, and present with yourself just as you are. This will help you stay with yourself when anxiety and fear threaten to block your path. You can do it anytime you find yourself feeling unpleasant emotions.
23
Disarming Anxiety
Anxiety and fear draw power and energy from your active participation. When you feel stuck in fear or anxiety, it’s likely that the monster is serving up barriers in the form of thoughts, bodily sensations, images, or urges that you’d rather not experience. So you struggle. You avoid. You resist. You may even give up. But this way of relating with your emotional life is exactly what the anxiety needs from you to grow into a menacing monster.
In the next exercise, you’ll learn how to disarm the anxiety monster so that it’s no longer a barrier between you and the life you wish to lead. The practice is learning to be present, to open up, and to nurture qualities of kindness with yourself and your experience. This is not about killing the anxiety monster, because we know that’s impossible. It’s not about shutting your mind off from dishing out odd, scary, disturbing images and judgmental thoughts. The key is to acknowledge all of this without feeding it with your active resistance.
As with the other exercises, there’s no right or wrong way to do this exercise. Just follow along as best you can.
Taking It Apart, Piece by Piece
Get in a comfortable position in your chair. Allow your eyes to close gently. Take a couple of gentle breaths in…and out…in…and out.
Now see if for just a moment you can be present with the anxiety monster. Notice how the monster is made up of a number of pieces—thoughts, images, physical sensations in your body, and urges to fight and resist. Now let’s take it apart, piece by piece.
One by one, focus on each part, and see if you can allow that part of the monster, and other aspects of your experience, to just be. Open your heart to each one of them and as much as you can, welcome them as part of your experience. Is any piece of the anxiety monster really your enemy?
And as we get ready to close this exercise, gently ask yourself this: Am I willing to be gentle with my thoughts and feelings, and whatever my mind and body does, and accept them as part of myself? And are my life and my values important enough to me to be willing to do this now, and perhaps again and again?
Then, when you’re ready, gradually widen your attention to take in the sounds around you, then slowly open your eyes, with the intention to bring this awareness of just being as you are to the present moment and the rest of the day.
This exercise teaches us that anxiety is made up of many smaller parts. Looking at the parts, one by one, is a powerful way to deflate anxiety. Many of the parts that make up anxiety are familiar to you and not really worth fighting against. That so-called monster is made up of thoughts (images, memories, words), physical sensations, and behavioral urges and reactions. Are the ingredients in this mix really your enemy? Perhaps anxiety is really no monster at all.
24
Who Am I, Really?
Most people are bewildered if you ask them, “Who are you?” They might say, “My name is…” while pointing at their body. Often they may answer in terms of their roles in life, such as mother, coach, construction worker, lawyer, receptionist, artist. But is this who we really are? Our body? Our roles? Are you the same person now as you were when you were six years old? Do you call yourself a first grader?
If you persistently ask yourself “Who am I?” your mind will come up with self-descriptions such as “I am an anxious woman,” “I am a kind person,” “I am not good at math,” and so on. Sometimes the answers are not just one-line statements but include long stories about why you’ve become the person you are today.
There’s nothing wrong with telling stories, as long as you keep in mind that they’re still only stories. As plausible as they might seem, they’re still stories—words about you, your past, and your possible future—being created by your mind all the time. The stories may contain some dark events that you’ve lived through. We’re not telling you your past is unimportant. Rather, we’re encouraging you to take an honest look at the stories that your mind creates and ask, “Are these stories really helpful to me, right now?”
If you really believe these stories and do as they say, they can turn from mind traps into utterly self-defeating life traps—keeping you literally stuck right where you are. So if you tell yourself in the morning that you’ve always been an anxious person, along with ten reasons why you’ve become such a person, and then end up staying at home because you felt anxious after waking up, now is the time to pause and take stock. Are these stories life expanding or life constricting? Are they helpful in moving you toward the life you wish to lead?
At this point, you may wonder, “Well, if I’m not my body, or what I think, feel, do, or what others say about me, then who the heck am I?”
Who Am I?
Take a look at the following list of statements. Notice what happens inside of you when you read the first four statements. Then move on to complete the last four statements with troubling descriptions that your mind offers up to you regularly.
I am an anxious person.
I am too shy.
I am not good enough.
I am never going to make it.
I am .
I am .
I am not .
I am not .
Did you notice how your mind almost immediately started working on these statements, perhaps agreeing or disagreeing with them, rephrasing or qualifying them, making them stronger, toning them down, and so on? Your mind has learned to respond to “I am” with a thought or an elaborate narrative. The mind’s job is to come up with an answer when you ask it a question like “Who am I?” or “Why can’t I do what I’d like to do?” This is important to understand. Your mind’s answers are not you. They are simply more thinking, more thoughts.
Answering the question “Who am I, really?” with a simple, disarming “I am” allows you to drop all those unhelpful answers your mind constantly dishes out to you. It’s the simplest and easiest way to let go of self-limiting thoughts—once and for all, any time. No more arguments, explanations, justifications, or the like. “I am!” In Chapter 27 we will introduce you to a simple, powerful meditation technique what will help you make experiencing “I am” a daily reality.
25
The Expansive Self
There’s an important distinction between you and the stuff you’ve been struggling with. You are the one who can notice and observe the stuff going on in your mind, body, and world. But the stuff you think, feel, and experience is not you. You have thoughts, feelings, and experiences, but they are not you. Likewise, anxiety is not you! You may have anxiety, but it is not you!
There would be no way to observe a thought or feeling if you were it. But you can observe your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations just as you do objects and experiences in the world around you. Like clouds in the sky, thoughts and feelings come and go by themselves. You can’t make them go away. You can’t hold on to them either. But you can learn to observe them without becoming them.
Although we sense experiences around us all the time, we are not those things we see, taste, smell, touch, and hear. We are just observing them. But we’re not used to looking at our thoughts and emotional life from this perspective. And so we get trapped into thinking that we really are what we think and feel. This is a great setup for suffering.
To help us get a feel for the observer self, our Australian colleague Russ Harris came up with a simple weather metaphor.
The Spacious Blue Sky
Your observer self is like the sky. Your thoughts and feelings are like the weather. The weather changes all the time, but no matter how bad it gets, the weather cannot harm the sky. Not even the worst thunderstorm, wildest cyclone, or coldest snowstorm can hurt the sky. And no matter how bad the weather may get, the sky has sufficient space for it all. And if we’re willing to stick around, sooner or later we’ll witness the weather getting better. Sometimes we forget that the sky is there, because we can’t see it through all those dark clouds. But if we go high enough, even the darkest, heaviest rain clouds cannot prevent us from eventually reaching the clear sky. That open sky space extends in all directions, without borders, and is without beginning or end.
Your true self is the sky, not the weather. Like the sky, it is expansive. Meditation is probably the most effective and easiest way to contact this sense of self as an open, safe space right inside of you. But you can also develop the skill by consciously choosing to shift your perspective.
When you find yourself hardening or getting caught up in difficult thoughts and feelings, consciously become aware that you are the sky, step back from the difficulty as you might step back to look at a car you’re thinking about buying, and look at the thoughts and feelings from the safe refuge of your observer self. From there you can watch what’s going on and make space for even the most difficult thoughts and feelings—so ultimately they can no longer touch or hurt you. Thus you can gain great strength and freedom from cultivating the observer perspective.
26
Let It Be
A great source of suffering is getting attached to wanting more of something and less of something else. This condition is easy to spot when you feel anxious or afraid: you want less anxiety and more peace and joy. If you’re bored, you want more excitement. If you’re unhappy, you want more happiness.
“Want” literally means a lack or deficiency. So when you want your thoughts and feelings to be different, your mind is essentially telling you that you are lacking or deficient. Not only does that hurt, but it’s also a great setup for struggle.
This is when nurturing your observer self can be very useful. As an observer, you watch what’s going on and learn to allow your experience to be just as it is without wanting it to be different.
Let’s see what a fictitious game of chess can teach us about looking at your experience from an impartial observer perspective, without wanting to pick sides, or doing so.
To Play or Watch the Game?
Imagine you’re part of a chess game. The dark pieces represent your anxieties and fears and everything that might trigger them. The light pieces represent your typical counterstrikes, each and every coping strategy you use to deal with anxiety and fear.
So when the dark knight attacks (for example, “I’m about to lose it”), you get on the back of the white knight, ride into battle armed with your coping strategies, and try to use them to knock the dark knight out: breathe…distract…think positive thoughts…procrastinate…leave the situation…give up…and on and on.
But this is not your typical chess game. In this game, we don’t have two different players, each taking sides. Instead, the two opposing teams are really one team: you! The thoughts, feelings, and actions on both sides of the board are your thoughts, feelings, and actions. They all belong to you.
In this way, the game is rigged. Both sides will always know the other’s moves. Worse, no matter which side wins now and then, one part of you will always be a loser. There’s really no way to come out a winner when your own thoughts and feelings compete against each other.
Let’s step back for a moment. What if those chess pieces aren’t you, anyway? Can you imagine what a great relief it would be if you didn’t need to be a player with a stake in the outcome? Can you see who else you might be?
Let’s suppose you’re the board. As the board, your job is to hold all the pieces. The board doesn’t care about winners or losers. The board does not take sides or get involved in the battle. It just provides space for the game and allows it to happen.
As the board, you can choose to be an impartial observer of your experiences.
Thinking of yourself as a chessboard may seem odd, at least at first. But over time, taking the perspective of the board will become easier and it will provide tremendous relief. This relief is based on a deeper experience and understanding of who you really are.
As the board, you’ll see that your thoughts and feelings are always coming and going, morphing and changing from one moment to the next. They’re a part of you only for a while, and then they leave. But the board—that observer you—is and always has been there, unchanged by anything that goes on around it. It provides space to choose what to engage in, what to let go, and what to do with your time and energy. Learning to take the perspective of the board will give you both freedom from fear and greater peace of mind!
27
Drop the Stories
The mind is a highly evolved storytelling machine. Some of it may be useful, entertaining even. But the stories can also be confining, adding to your sense of stuckness and suffering.
One way to move past self-limiting thoughts and stories is to first let go of the idea that you are what you think and feel. This is where the observer self and mindfulness and self-compassion can help. You must also be willing to drop the rest of the story and labels that follow “I am,” as you did in Chapter 24.
So, instead of “I am anxious,” you notice that you are having a thought, and you ask yourself if that thought is really helpful as far as your life is concerned. If the answer is no, then you pause and bring your awareness back to that observer you, or “I am.” Period. What follows “I am” are words—your mind at work creating the rest of the story.
But to really contact your essence, your true abiding sense of self, you’ll need to dive below the words and the stories. Just below the surface, you’ll find your observer self—the self that was and is always with you. It was there before you even had words to describe yourself. It was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow. It’s your steadfast safe refuge.
There is this space right inside of you—a stillness that is deep within you and is waiting for you to contact it. Thousands of years of wisdom—and now, scientific research—support meditation practice as a powerful way to experience this safe, whole, and pristine aspect of you. Here, we’d like to introduce you to a very old form of meditation that will bring you into contact with your observer self and help you drop the story lines that often follow your unhelpful “I am this or that” narratives.
The next exercise, the I Am Mantra Meditation, asks you to repeat a simple phrase or mantra—“I am.” This practice quite literally makes you drop the story lines that typically used to follow your unhelpful “I am this or that” descriptions. As you silently repeat the “I am” mantra, your mind will settle deeply inward—in a natural, effortless way—below its bubbling surface to a place of pure consciousness and stillness. It will move you beyond your mind’s endless chatter and give you the experience of silence and pure awareness—your true self.
At first, you’ll get only brief glimpses of this experience, but over time simply closing your eyes and gently thinking the mantra will settle your mind. With regular practice this simple meditation will become a very powerful and transformational habit.
Read the instructions carefully, at least twice, before you start. As you do, pay attention to the few basic rules and directions. Then close your eyes and begin the meditation. In the beginning, do the meditation for at least ten minutes. If you like, you can slowly extend your meditation time up to twenty minutes.
I Am Mantra Meditation
Get in a comfortable position in your chair. Sit upright with your hands resting in your lap. Your legs can either be uncrossed or crossed. Allow your eyes to close gently.
Simply let your breath flow naturally without attempting to influence it.
Wait for twenty to thirty seconds, then start thinking the mantra “I am” very gently and without any effort or strain. Repeat the mantra silently to yourself without worrying about its tempo, rhythm, or sound.
After a while you’ll notice thoughts or images or perhaps some bodily sensations. If a thought, image, or sensation comes, don’t try to push it out. Instead, just allow it to be there. When you become aware that you’re not thinking the mantra, quietly and gently come back to thinking the mantra, softly, faintly: “I am… I am…” So whenever you return to the mantra, do so ever so gently, in a faint and subtle way.
