Anxiety – you need to be willing to feel it.
I know, right? You are probably thinking, “WHAT? Are you mad? I do not want to feel this!”
The reason why you are reading this is most likely because you are looking for a way not to feel anxiety, right? But look at that a little closer, is it that you don’t want to feel the anxiety inside you or is that you don’t want to suffer the anxiety?
Chances are that you have never even thought to ask yourself that question. I know I hadn’t when I first came across this approach.
My reaction to dealing with anxiety was exactly as I described it above. There was no way I wanted to feel it, and in fact I had spent about a decade trying to find ways to numb out or not feel or control or change the anxiety with psychotherapy, prescribed medications, yoga, traditional meditation and natural remedies. Eventually, despite all my attempts to avoid the feeling, my fear of it had me almost completely house bound and afraid of the most basic things like being a passenger in a car. It just kept getting worse. The anxiety I thought I was feeling had turned into phobias and terror and had me crippled.
Then I had a session with Matthew, the author of the Undo App. At one point in that session, he asked me,
“Have you done absolutely everything that you can possibly think of doing in order to fix this feeling?” and I said, “Yes”, to whichhe said, “Then I would like you to try to drop that and just feel what it is that you are feeling”. And my response was something like, “Are you mad?”. But even as I said it, my instincts were telling me that I had come across the answer.
My head didn’t want to let go of the control (even though it was obvious it wasn’t working) but deep down inside, I knew what this person was telling me was exactly what I needed to do.
And that it was a huge turning point in my life. It felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and he was suggesting that if I jumped, it would be okay.
So I did. And it was.
He showed me that if I could really feel the feelings instead of thinking about the feeling, then the reaction to what I didn’t want to feel would dissolve. My body responded immediately. After nearly 10 years, healing that had been trying to take place started, and I had no control over it.
I had tried other types of meditation to deal with anxiety but this was a whole other ball game.
Within a few hours, the panic and terror and anxiety were all gone and I mean ALL gone. Twenty plus years have now gone by and I have not had another anxiety attack.
That is not to say that I never feel anxious. Obviously, there are things in life that can bring on a feeling of anxiousness but I had made friends with it back then, I stopped pushing it away. And so now if a little anxiety comes on, I just see it almost as an old friend and say, “Ahhhhh I know how to greet you”.
But in actual fact the old friend is me! I am coming back to myself, my physical self. Letting myself feel just how I am.
That is the beauty of natural meditation.
By feeling the feeling wherever I am feeling it in my body, the thoughts calm down, and when the thoughts calm down, I can be with myself however I am.
Natural meditation doesn’t have to be done while you are sitting crossed legged in an ashram in a perfect state of Zen. You can do it anywhere, anytime.
In fact, the reason I am writing this blog piece right now is that there are things happening in my life this week that are very challenging, and it has brought back some difficult old feelings. It has reminded me that I know a way to respond to this that millions of other people haven’t had the opportunity to discover yet, and so I decided to write about it.
Right now as I am typing, I’m feeling the anxiety that life has put me in touch with today and with every word I express here on the page, I remind myself again how grounding just feeling it is. Because that is what I am doing – feeling as I’m typing. With each passing moment, I am quieter and calmer and clearer, my thoughts have stopped racing.
You can of course meditate this way when you are sitting crossed legged in the traditional way, and the Undo app has a specific meditation regarding anxiety that you can check out as well.
There are only two responses to any feeling.
They can either be just felt, as in only felt, or they can be thought about. And as you will have experienced with anxiety, the thinking quickly escalates. Thinking convinces you that a headache is a life-threatening brain tumour or someone coming home late becomes someone who has been murdered and thrown into a ditch. I’m sure you can relate to having your thinking get out of control like this and it is NOT MUCH FUN! You can become completely and utterly convinced by that thinking, as I had. The anxiety can turn into phobias which are, by definition, irrational fears. And we know it is irrational but thinking always says, “Yes I know…. BUT!”.
The paradox was that the anxiety was only terrifying because I wasn’t feeling it.
If you are still wondering, “But how do I do that? How do I feel it? Aren’t I already feeling it? Isn’t this feeeelling the whole problem?”
Maybe it will be helpful to backtrack a bit here. Let’s start at the beginning.
What exactly happened that started this feeling we are referring to as anxiety.
An event took place, right? And that event put you in touch with a feeling that was in your body.
Can you remember how you responded to that feeling? Did you stop and take an interest in it and be gentle with it like you would a helpless frightened child, or did you respond to it as though it was a frightening or crazy person and just run away from it or try to block it out?
Going back to the example of the frightened child, if a child came to you clearly in genuine distress. Not a tantrum but clearly something had just happened to them that needed responding to, how would you respond to that child? Wouldn’t you have deep concern and deep interest? Interest to know what the child was feeling? Would you be gentle or harsh? Would you ignore the child and hope they would go away? How would the child feel if we pushed them away?
Can you see my point here? I’m not meaning this is an airy fairy woo woo way of you responding to your inner child or suggesting that we are fragile like a child in any way, not at all. I am purely looking at cause and effect.
The effect we have on our anxiety by ignoring is exactly the effect it has on children who are afraid, they just get more distressed. I’m using the analogy in an attempt to help you respond to yourself in a different light because it can be easier to think about being kind to a child than to ourselves.
Dealing with anxiety in this way is so simple, effective and is available to you at any time of day or night, wherever you are, no matter what it is you are doing and whatever is going on around you.
I was lucky enough to have a private session with Matthew when I kicked this fear, and that was a huge bonus because I could sense from him the correctness of what he was saying to me and that gave me confidence to make the change. I hope some of that feeling has come through in this blog to give you the courage to try it out but even if you are only mildly curious. Give it a go. It might take you a little while to get the hang of not being drawn into the thinking but you have nothing to lose and a lifetime of freedom from anxiety to gain. It’s worth a shot wouldn’t you say?
You can download the app here or book a session online for a call with Matthew here.
