Why Anxiety Is Tricky to Overcome but Absolutely Possible

So with anxiety, this is us and we all know what that feeling of anxiety is like. It's a really really horrible feeling. Most of us have it in our stomach, some of us have it in our neck and our shoulders, but it's a pretty horrible feeling. Now what we'll notice is if you ask somebody who has anxiety, they're going to tell you, well where do we typically feel anxiety? We feel it in different types of social situations where we're about to go and give a big talk in front of many many people. All these people in a big auditorium, it could be really really intimidating. One of the biggest social phobias, but it doesn't really matter where it is, it can happen in all sorts of situations. Maybe this person is about to go here and give a talk. Now with anxiety we need to start figuring out how it actually operates. Because if we get an idea of how anxiety operates, then we'll have a chance to do something about it. And the first thing that's going to happen with anxiety is that anxiety is going to deposit a little thought in here. It could be something like, first thought will be, well I'm not good enough. Now that's the first thought that happens, but anxiety will not just leave you with one thought, and that is by design. If anxiety were to go away and leave you with that one thought, anxiety itself would start to get anxious. Because if you had enough time to be with that feeling, and you had enough focus on that one thought and that one feeling, and you had enough presence with it. Okay, so we're talking about time here is one of the factors. Draw a little egg cup and focus, right, giving our attention to it. If we gave anxiety all these things, you would notice that it goes away. Giving our focus and attention to that one initial thought, we would process the thought in other words. Anxiety will not allow us to do that. So anxiety comes back in very quickly before you have any time to process this thought or this feeling, and it's going to give you additional thoughts, secondary thoughts. Before you know what this is full of second thoughts, it could be something like, well what if I crumble in there? Or it could be something like, well what will I say? Now when we're trying to learn how to do this, we really need to slow everything down. We need to learn how to focus and bring presence to our feelings and our one primary thought. If you were to ask this person, what's bothering you? Tell me why you're not feeling good, why you're feeling anxious. Chances are they wouldn't be able to tell you because they're up in this fog in their mind. This is the fog of anxiety, not being able to clearly identify why you feel anxious because your focus is switching around thoughts. This is only three thoughts, there could be multiple thoughts here. So we need to really get to the root, and to do that we sit with the emotion. The emotion will tell us very clearly, this is the main issue I'm having right now. This is the really juicy thought that's causing a lot of the problems with the anxiety. The rest of these are kind of distracting us from the main issue. So what we have to do in other words is slow down. But anxiety is very clever, and it is going to make us look for the solution up here in our intellect. And this is something very important to know. When we're trying to solve the problem of anxiety from the intellect, I'm going to solve it down here. What will happen is you're going to come up with a whole bunch of secondary types of thoughts, intellectual answers for the anxiety. What they sound like are, well, don't be silly. Another favorite is, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Okay, these are intellectual answers to try and deal with this, and they are actually related to this guy. Anxiety is also causing these intellectual answers to the problem. We cannot solve the problem of anxiety intellectually, because you will notice about these, these thoughts that come in from the intellect, they're very impulsive. And another thing about them is there's no feeling. Okay, there's no feeling in these corrections. There's no feeling. So again, we need to slow down. So what do we do with this? Well, we need to go down to the solution, and we need to slow everything down with anxiety. We need to find a quiet place, maybe a chair somewhere, and we need to get into our center. Okay, we need to get into our center, and we need to sit down, find a place, and just sit down nice and calmly. And what we're going to do here, close our eyes, and we are going to start to bring attention to the feeling, the emotional anxiety that's right inside us. Bring all our attention, our time, focus, presence. We're going to shower this feeling with presence and love. And we will notice that when we do this, we can start to do some real work on this primary belief. So we can start to say, well, do inquiry. Is this true? Is it true? Is a question we can start to ask. Another one we can start to ask is, who owns this thought? Because none of these anxiety-ridden thoughts are ours. None of them are original, and none of them are creative. They're all universal thoughts. And above all, the last thing I'm going to say in this is we need to forgive ourselves. Forgive ourselves. Presence and love. No judgment about having the anxiety itself. When we do that, anxiety starts to fade away.