Do you wake up with a pit in your stomach? A gnawing sensation that you can’t identify? A creepy crawly feeling in your skin? Do you sometimes wake up at 3 a.m with that same sense of I-don’t-know-what but it sometimes takes your breath away it’s so powerful? It’s called anxiety. It happens--I wake up and feel nervous but I don’t know about what. In most cases, when we feel this way, our immediate reaction is to banish it, deny it, forget about it. We end up fighting ourselves which then creates MORE anxiety. And the energy that we use to deny it takes away from what we want to create or do or make or be. May I recommend a different approach? Anxiety is an unwanted guest, I understand. But what if we sat with it for a bit and asked it-- where do you come from? What are you about? Imagine sitting on a park bench with Anxiety right next to you. Put your arm around it and get to know it. When we sit with our anxiety, when we ACKNOWLEDGE this feeling that we wake up with, we take some of its power away. And over time, as we get to know it, we take even MORE of its power away. So, step one is acknowledge. Step Two takes us to what my friend Richard Ramirez writes about daily--giving it all to God, cultivating faith that God will take care of it. Step Three is to breathe and to focus your attention on that breath going in and coming out. You might imagine the anxiety riding the exhale out and away from you. These things free you to create the day you want to have. They free you to set intentions, to think clearly, to respond to what’s in front of you instead of the anxiety. A perfect solution? I don’t have one. But I DO know that the more you learn to let go of your need to control, and the better you become at giving it over to God, the less troubling anxiety is. Will you let me know how these things work for you? And if you come up with others, will you share them? Whatever you do, do it with joy! ©PaulaStrupeckGardner, 2013 youtu.be/nj0KIoLz7e0
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:06:52 +0000
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