Anxiety or Readiness—How Will You Live?

Is there really an alternative to anxiety? And isn’t this thought pattern / emotional reaction / body state an intelligent response to our fast-changing, uncertain times?

Anxiety here means:

• Relentless, continuous, worrisome thoughts about the future, i.e. inventing endless threatening “what if?” scenarios and imagining our response to them. These thoughts have superglue stickiness and rapid cycle times. They keep going and going, sometimes even in our sleep, and frequently forming the basis of our conversations with our family, loved ones and close colleagues. Sharing our anxiety frequently substitutes for genuine intimacy.
• Our bodies being in some state of fight or flight with the accompanying stress hormones—we feel jumpy, agitated, off-center. After a short period, we become used to this state and start to feel anxious when it’s not there. Our bodies readily respond with this experiential state to worrisome thoughts, and we then begin to be concerned about that state so more worrisome thoughts are generated. Around and around we go. When anxious we often don’t eat as well as necessary nor sleep as much as we need. Both contribute to our more easily feeling anxious.
• Our emotions keep bringing our attention back to phenomena that our nervous system has identified as potentially dangerous. Anxiety as described fits that criteria. Consequently, even though we don’t like it, or think it would be better to release it, our focus keeps coming back to anxiety.
• Besides what’s above, our nervous system concludes that there must be something wrong because we are feeling anxious. This has us redouble our efforts to scenario-plan our way out of it.

Sound/feel familiar?

When caught in the cycle we feel, in our body and emotions, that it’s very dangerous to let go of anxiety since something terrible might happen (the internal logic is that we must be anxious because something bad is about to happen) if we are not endlessly considering what might occur and preparing ourselves for it. Like I said, it feels intelligent to be anxious.

Worrying and planning only lead to more of the same.

Or you could take up this alternative. Prepare your mind, heart and body for what’s coming—inevitably coming.

For those of you who have done our Professional Coaching Course, you know this list well:

We are going to get old.

We are going to get sick.

We are going to die.

We are going to lose all of our relationships and all our possessions.

(And this is true for everyone we love)

And we know these truths deeply, even as we attempt to mitigate their importance or deny their reality.

We get anxious about smaller matters, being late for a meeting, running out of money, concluding that we are not doing so well compared to others and so on. I propose that these anxieties are subsets, shadow manifestations of the big four listed.

How, then, do we prepare?

We prepare by cultivating a body, mind and heart that can tolerate searing loss. We can intentionally build / generate a deep presence that can abide, can accompany us and others in the midst of these horrible events.

Shifting beliefs alone will not be sufficient for many of us. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, when in the midst of a world-collapsing loss (often the unexpected, out-of-sequence death of a beloved), some well-meaning person offers a bromide like, “It’s all happening for a reason” or “Something great is going to happen now.”

I am strongly recommending this decades-long path. Here are some of the steps.

First Aid

• Learn, through close observation followed by rigorous experimentation, how to disrupt your own patterns of anxiety.
• What are your patterns of anxiety? Around what relationships? What activities? What events in the world?
• What patterns of stress, neglect of self-care are the seedbeds of anxiety?
• Which somatic interventions disrupt / stop the anxiety in the moment? Slow, deep breathing? Sensing into your body? Focusing your attention closely on an object in your immediate environment? Gazing at the sky? Exercising (aerobically, energetically, stretching)? Getting a massage? Being with someone you love? Being with your pet dog or cat? What works for you?

In The Background

• Attend to your body, relationships, physical environment so that they are supportive.
• Begin keeping track of the difficult experiences that you have been in and deeply registering that you survived, are okay afterwards.
• Find people with whom you can have deep conversations—with whom you feel safe and articulate and from whom you are open to receiving guidance, support, feedback. Such people may already exist in your life; I urge you to take care of your relationship with them. If they don’t, please begin experimenting with the people you know in order to find the ones with whom you can have these types of conversations. Sometimes it will have to be a professional person, someone in your spiritual community, a therapist or coach.
• At a speed that suits your body–mind, be around people in the midst of painful loss—volunteer at a hospice, get trained to work at a suicide hotline, become skillful at working with people with trauma. If this list is too steep for you, find alternatives and slowly—never forcing yourself—discover your wherewithal to be present in difficult situations.

Ongoing

• Take up a spiritual practice that reveals your true nature. Practically, this means being a practitioner in the mystic side of spiritual lineages—the group of people who engage practices that give them the experience of the teaching well beyond doctrinal understanding.
• Grow deep roots—physically connect to nature, join a heartfelt group dedicated to others, experientially explore the depths of your own body-mind, notice and live in the reality that everyone and everything is co-creating each other.

What would you add?

Please do not neglect this in your own life, and please encourage others—family members, friends, colleagues and coaching clients—to take it up.

Take care of yourself.

Sending love,

James

Learn more about New Ventures West at the Free Integral Learning Lab on June 2, 2018 in San Francisco. (A livestream of the program will also be available for those who are not able to attend in-person)